gooner said:
Fair enough whatever their reasons for voting Leave but on social media today in the reaction by some Remain voters to the result, it has been made out that older people voting for Leave who won't live long with the decision while the intelligent youth have to live with it for decades to come.
That is plain wrong. This is just one example I seen today of it.
https://twitter.com/DanielEspinosaR/status/746421578393591808
All voters have an equal right to have a vote irrespective of age and older people's vote carries the same weight as that of the youth.
Brexit: The wrinklies have well and truly stitched us up
Giles Coren
The Times
I had lunch with my mother on Wednesday and as our starters were being cleared away she turned to me and said, “So, Giles, how are you going to vote tomorrow?”
And I replied, “why?” because I sniffed a trap. I’m not saying my mother loves a lunchtime broigus, it’s just that she doesn’t usually ask a question unless she already has a strong opinion of her own fired up and ready to go.
On this, I was guessing she was for Brexit. My mother was (and remains) a great admirer of Margaret Thatcher, almost always votes Conservative, has an abhorrence of bureaucracy and red tape thanks to 40 years working in the NHS (and owning a house in France) and voted to leave the EEC in 1975.
And so her answer astonished me.
“I’m asking because whatever you vote, I’ll vote,” she said. “After all, I’m going to be dead soon so it doesn’t matter what I think. I won’t be affected.”
If only every older person in Britain had had the humility to think the same way this week and pass on their vote to a generation more likely to be affected by the result. We’d still be in Europe this morning. We’d be laughing at how ridiculous it was to have had a referendum in the first place and just getting on with our lives.
For make no mistake, it is the old people who did this to us. I assume you have seen the voting breakdown by age? In the 18-24 group it was 64 per cent to Remain and 24 per cent to Leave. In the 25-49 age group it was 45 per cent to 39. Only in the 50-64 bracket does the balance shift, going over to 49 per cent for Leave, as against 35 for Remain. And then among the over-65s it was an astonishing 58 per cent for Leave, against 33 per cent for Remain.
The less time a person had left on earth to live and face up to their decision, in other words, the more likely they were to vote to leave the European Union.
The wrinkly bastards stitched us young ’uns up good and proper on Thursday. From their stair lifts and their Zimmer frames, their electric recliner beds and their walk-in baths, they reached out with their wizened old writing hands to make their wobbly crosses and screwed their children and their children’s children for a thousand generations. (Except my mother — who wants it made clear that she was for Leave anyway.)
I always knew it would turn out this way. From the moment the referendum was called, the polls showed a massive majority for Leave in the over-65 group — bigger than any differential in wage, education, geographical location or political leaning. And it was how I formed my eventual decision to vote Remain. I just knew that I could not vote with the old people. Because old people are always wrong. About everything.
Take global warming, for example. In all opinion surveys that I have seen, belief in anthropogenic global warming declines every year after the age of 25. In other words, the likelihood of a person accepting the truth of global warming is inversely proportional to the likelihood of their being alive to see its disastrous effects. Is it because people become more stupid with age? I wouldn’t presume to say so. Although obviously Nigel Lawson has. But mainly it’s just that they give less and less of a damn what happens to the rest of us as time goes on.
The older people get, the more they think they have earned the right to do and think whatever they damn well please. And this leads to their being wrong. About everything. Not just about elasticated waistbands, brightly coloured outerwear, fluffy little pale blue hairdos, big chunky spectacles, beige trousers, Countdown and young people today. About everything.
Older people care less and less what happens to the rest of us
Take recycling. Old people never recycle anything. They think it’s all mumbo jumbo. And why should they bother? After all, by the time that bottle of milk stout is crushed, melted and made into another bottle of milk stout, they’ll be far too dead to enjoy it. They can’t work the TV, they can’t hear their mobile phone or answer it if they do hear it, they don’t understand the self-checkout at the supermarket or why there aren’t price tags on things anymore ...
And then of course there is immigration. A report for the World Bank in 2012 found that, “It is old people everywhere who oppose immigration the most, across the board. In every country for which we have data (except Sweden) older natives disproportionately oppose immigration, regardless of income, education and employment status.”
And that is despite the fact that it is old people who benefit most from immigration, seeing as they no longer compete in the labour market and require, or will soon require, the sort of care that is made cheaper by immigrant labour. But, oh no, old people are against immigration because, well, because they are wrong about everything.
Should they have been allowed to vote in this referendum? I’m not sure that they should have been. A general election, yes. Everyone should get a say on what happens over the next five years. But over the next 50? I don’t think so. Not if you’re not going to be there to face it.
And don’t go telling me that we owe at least a debt of respect to the elderly. Respect for what? Don’t confuse the elderly of today with the elderly of the recent past. This lot did not fight a war (not many of them). They didn’t free us from the yoke of tyranny. They didn’t live in modesty and hardship and hunger so that future generations might thrive. They just enjoyed high employment, good pay, fat benefits, enormous pension privileges, international travel, the birth of pop music and lashings of free sex. We don’t owe them a thing. We should cut them off. Rewrite the franchise to start at 16 and end at 60 and do this thing all over again.
We won’t, of course. So we will be compelled to make our strength of feeling felt in smaller, subtler ways. In fact it is already happening. As early as lunchtime on Friday, Twitter was showing 15,000 retweets of what may come to be the standout mantra for Brexit 2016:
“I’m never giving up my seat on the train for an old person again.”
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