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Generation Brexit: How Did It Come To This?

Waking up to news that Britain voted to leave the EU was a shock for a young generation that didn’t vote to leave.

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The morning after Brexit, my flatmate came to wake me up. “The world changed while you were sleeping,” she told me. “The markets have crashed. The rupee is at 69 to the dollar.”

At first I didn’t believe it. Britain leaving the EU seemed too radical. But when I think about it, radical changes seem to be happening all around me. We don’t need to look any further than Donald Trump’s nomination to the Republican party to know that’s true.

As a French American woman who studied in the UK, all this feels pretty personal. Sitting here in Delhi, all I can do is watch as Europe the way I have always known it ceases to exist. And market prices aside, we haven’t even begun to comprehend what the consequences will be. Experts say the repercussions of the Brexit move will be felt for the next 10 years at least.

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Waking up to news that Britain voted to leave the EU was a shock for a young generation that didn’t vote to leave.
Remain voters campaign outside Parliament. (Photo: AP)
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I didn’t see it coming. On my Facebook feed it seemed like my old university friends were primarily voting for Britain to remain in the EU. Many of them wrote lengthy pleas to their Facebook community.

“Vote remain to keep your workers rights, your human rights, your cheap flights, your ability to move freely around our nearest neighbours, your locally grown produce subsidised, your chance to study with the Erasmus scheme,” my friend in Birmingham wrote.

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Waking up to news that Britain voted to leave the EU was a shock for a young generation that didn’t vote to leave.
For the most part, the younger generation didn’t vote for Britain’s exit. (Photo: AP)
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My Facebook feed reflected a young British population, as well as a young European population. And this generation wanted Britain to stay in the EU. More than 70 percent of people between the ages of 18 to 24 voted remain, according to a YouGov poll. So the vote results were a big shock to all of us.

It’s a good reminder of the social media bubble we all live in. Often, there are so many people and opinions that we are shielded from, whether intentionally or not.

And in the end, though our generation didn’t want Brexit, we are the ones who are going to need to live with the consequences– consequences that will shake the whole world.

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Waking up to news that Britain voted to leave the EU was a shock for a young generation that didn’t vote to leave.
Brexit vote on 23 June. (Photo: iStockphoto)
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So what drives such radical change? There is no easy explanation. But I have seen a growth in right wing, anti-immigrant sentiment in the last few years. And conservative parties have been feeding on those fears.

It’s definitely the case in mainland Europe. Following the Paris attacks, France’s conservative Front National party won in half of the country’s regional elections. That doesn’t even begin to cover all the racist attacks on immigrants fleeing war-torn Syria.

Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party, stated in 2015 that there was a problem with Muslim people coming to Britain to kill Brits. His pro-Brexit campaign was fed by fears that immigrants would come to the UK and steal jobs.

These fears are not well founded, many economists say. Immigration is good for economic growth and actually creates jobs. But often that is hard for people to swallow, especially for the five percent of the British population that is unemployed.

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Brexit could really hurt the British economy. Even before the vote, the referendum took a toll on jobs. More than 21,000 jobs were lost in the months before the vote, according to economists.

Many of my friends think that if politicians had listened to their citizen’s fears rather than fuel them, there would have been a different outcome. Aniruddh Mohan, a friend of mine who went to the University of Manchester and later did a Master’s at Cambridge was really upset by the result.

“The key thing here is this is a failure of the left to listen to ordinary, working class people who are concerned about immigration, who are concerned about their wages, who are concerned about places in hospitals and in school but have been ignored by the labour party,” he told me.

“This is a problem of the left failing the working class across Europe,” he added, echoing fears that Europe is on a more conservative track in the coming years.

Now let’s see if the European Union can stay intact.

(At The Quint, we are answerable only to our audience. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member. Because the truth is worth it.)

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