HOW AGES VOTED
18-24: 75% Remain
25-49: 56% Remain
50-64: 44% Remain
65 plus: 39% Remain
(YouGov poll)
So most of those closer to retirement and death are the ones who’ve have determined the future of the next generations. Unsurprisingly a lot of young people are very angry. Here’s what a friend of mine said: “My daughters, just under the age they can vote, say that older voters have hobbled the future of the ambitious young.”
But that’s only partly true … these girls who are exceedingly bright will seek and discover a glorious future elsewhere, possibly in Europe. In fact the most damaging result of the vote to leave the EU will probably be our biggest “brain drain” since the 1970s. The consequence of embracing isolationism makes this inevitable despite Boris’ bizarre claim we are now “more European than ever.”
The second likely impact will be on our ability to plan for economic growth. Any UK based company should, for the next two years or so, be visualising how to become a smaller business. I’d be advocating cutbacks far deeper and more wide-ranging than any we’ve seen since the 1980s. Unfortunately unemployment will grow rapidly. And Brexit will be blamed (as it should but only up to a point). Employers haven’t ever had so obvious a whipping-boy. Suddenly they have a get-out-of-gaol card. It’s one they’ll use to powerful (and sometimes, maybe, unfair) effect.
Finally the good news is all about Democracy. It was a huge turnout. This was not the voice of apathy. Some of us – well nearly ½ of us actually - may not like the result of the vote. Most of all we may dislike the untruths about £350 million weekly windfall promised to the NHS before and then admitted as
being, well, untrue afterwards. Meanwhile despite noise about a re-run of the vote, Thursday’s message must surely be accepted, we must move on and make the best of the hand we’ve been dealt.
Most of all we must seek out the opportunities that revolutionary change like this will create. Those nimble and angry in marketing and finance will daily face the potential opportunities from the fall-out of Brexit and will need to seize them.
I’m sitting in a temperature of 34C in blissfully calm Venice seething about how so many people at home (strange that it feels much less like home now) seem so triumphant in having interfered with their children’s and grandchildren’s futures. I’ve had a lot of messages from American, German, French and Italians asking why, what, how and when? They are astonished and a bit hurt by what they see as our rejection of them.
Have you at home any idea just how witless and bumbling we seem over here? It’s been an embarrassing few days and I fear it’ll get worse. But let’s be calm, thoughtful and dignified.
Dignified? Ah…I’d forgotten about
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2 comments:
Next – how does the new PM, with a tiny 12-seat Tory majority get this though the Commons, when 75% of MPs backed Remain? It only needs a few rebels. Then there is the Lords, with no Tory majority. This is not over yet.
These percentages can mess with your mind (as the young say).
Unfortunately, only 36% of 18-24s bothered to vote, so that's 75% of 36% (ie 27%) who wanted to remain.
That leaves 73% who wanted to leave, or didn't care.
Hardly convincing!
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