Whereas the old remember the "good old years before all those funny Polish shops started opening".
Well at least it'll hit their pensions. Oh, wait, no it won't because most of them will have final salary pensions schemes the working generation is paying for and could never hope to have themselves...
At least they can sell their houses which have increased in value by 100%s of percent over the last 30 years. So the older generation (& working class) have fucked us.
I do love it when retirees talk about immigrants taking all the jobs... Of course, all the immigrants taking all the jobs are also stealing all the benefits. Logical, really /s
Yours is a simplistic cartoonish and insulting strawman of the older generation.
Britain has been in the EU for 43 years, 65 year olds were kids themselves when it joined. Everyone in Britain has been in the EU their whole lives. Couldn't it possibly be to do with anything more recent?
The comment about the youth being easily manipulated was also frankly cartoonish and insulting.
If anything I see the reverse. Immigrant fears was the driving factor for the Leave vote. Given that UK tabloids have been doing quite a good job exploiting immigrant fears of late, who's being manipulated here?
The Donald Trump phenomenon has very similar parallels (build a wall!), demographics (white, leans no college education, leans elderly), and root cause (largely cultural discomfort). The rise of other far-right parties in Europe shows similar concerns.
This vote to me smacks of the decades of American Southerners (and others in similar areas) voting against their own economic interests in order to protect a race-based pecking order. As in the American South, now England. It probably won't be the last vote like this, either.
My children are much more engaged with all the issues than my parents who continually parrot what they have read in the papers without any critical thought. I don't think this is unsual.
Engaged doesn't mean well researched and thoughtful, nor does it mean they are wise and experienced in life. Sure they can parrot back what some marketing firms decided what they should think, call that critical thinking.
