By the time we got around to implementing it enough old people had died off that the vote would have gone the other way already.
That's what we're dealing with. Underinvestment only enriches their camp.
Like when people are against a president if the economy isn't doing well, regardless of if the alternative candidate would've been better.
This also isn't an issue thats being campaigned on. If there was another vote to join the EU, and people got flooded with anti-eu messaging specifically targeted at the demographic, I'd bet that number would drop.
And there are plenty of people on HN would say otherwise and say UK is fine.
You also see this in countries still in the EU and it will happen as long as we will not have true integration, it is always easier to blame the EU for your own failings, since it is harder for the EU to fend for itself in national politics.
One recent example in my country is nitrogen deposition. Long ago, countries have committed to keeping certain nature reserves in good health (or improving them when necessary). Then many subsequent governments always chose the side of the farmers at the detriment of nature. Now many reserves' soil quality is in a terrible state and the courts have told the government to stop and fix the problem. Then we got a bunch of right-wing populist countries that have wasted many more years by blaming the EU and questioning scientific methods for measuring deposits - while it has been abundantly for a long time what actually needs to be done, buy out farmers.
At any rate, this constant undermining and blaming of the EU has the effect you'd expect it to - it destroys trust in the EU. Ironically, the saving grace now seems to be the agressor and the lost ally. More people realize that we can't act in an increasingly hostile world as small and mid-sized countries.
Sortez les sortants...
The UK just keeps kicking young people down. The boomers voting against our interests are whipping us into working to pay for their triple locked pensions.
Have you got an ancestor that was born in Canada? [1]
It sounds like that a child of a "red coat" born on the lands that would become Canada is sufficient... [2]
[1]: [Heads Up: Canadian Genealogy is about to get VERY popular!](https://old.reddit.com/r/Genealogy/comments/1qqkzte/heads_up...)
> On December 15, 2025 Canada enacted "Bill C-3", granting citizenship to people born before Dec. 15, 2025 with ANY level of Canadian ancestry they can document. (It used to be a "first generation limit")
[2]: https://old.reddit.com/r/Genealogy/comments/1qqkzte/heads_up...
> ancestors domiciled in the former colony of Newfoundland are still considered as Canadian born or naturalized for the purpose of citizenship by descent.
This is misleading.
Outside the first generation, the Canadian parent must have spent 3 years cumulatively in Canada prior to the birth, otherwise the child will not be a citizen. That's not a threshold you're likely to meet with a few holiday trips here and there.
https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/ne...
An anti immigration sentiment has also taken over half the country due to rising costs and shortages, which is trickling down to various aspects of the life here.
The harsh weather is not pleasant either. Ironically, young Canadians are looking to move elsewhere.
The years where I want the freedom of movement the most will have passed by then.
The ballot paper arrived the day before the vote.
It was impossible to return it in time, and indeed, when I checked, my vote had arrived too late and was not counted.
I think this was indicative of much of the thinking on both sides of the debate though; focusing tightly on a single, subjective aspect for or against.
"Why the EU is important / abhorrent to me right now?" rather than something like "What is the anticipated future nature of the EU and what does that mean for the UK?"
The Leave side was for immigration control (which has not materially changed, we still have an influx of small boats, but have made it harder for educated, hard working people to get in), and mythical funding for the NHS to the tune of £350m a week which never happened.
On a related note; do you enjoy what America is right now? Because centralizing power and handing your country’s (American states are/were/should be essentially countries) sovereignty and self/determination to Brussels is how you get this, become the US of Europe, the next iteration in the centralized war machine of the psychopathic, narcissistic parasitic ruling class. When you lack diversity through separate, unique, district, and sovereign countries where people have oversight and control and can push back against horrible ideas and actions, you end up like us.
I’ve always found it unfortunate that the EU did not become a legitimate, constitutional form of the USA like it was before the Civil War that created this centralized authoritarian fake federal state that we know today. It would have been awe inspiring and really could have become the example for the rest of the world. Instead, the current version of the EU is strangling the whole continent.
The EU is right now talking about becoming a great military force to fight Russia. That’s the kind of movement you’re advocating for, my friend.
You think young people are kept down now, wait till they’re laying in some muddy battlefield as chopped meat or hiding from drone swarm or hypersonic missile attacks on their cities due to the belligerence of the EU aristocrats with no clothes.
Uh, the fact that I cannot stay in Europe for more than 90 days in a 180 day period without a visa? As for all that other rubbish, every European city I’ve been to lives better than the people where I live in London. That’s proof enough for me that the EU is working.
Obviously they can still travel to Europe, but they will need an ETIAS Visa Waiver in the future, instead of just going, they can't move for work and studying just as easy without applying for Visa/Permits and they don't have the same rights and access to services as Citizens of a country.
Correction: to not have to fight Russia. The EU falling apart is Putin's wet dream because he's very afraid of a confrontation with the whole bloc, and wants to subjugate the small European countries piecemeal (and yes, on their own, they would have to submit or face missiles/drones or, even worse, human meatwave attacks by a foe that has been whipping its populace into a death cult for decades for exactly that eventuality).
The separate, unique sovereign countries are the ones with the horrible ideas and actions. See Victor Orban's Hungary. The whole point is to not let some goulash mussolini control European affairs.
> The EU is right now talking about becoming a great military force to fight Russia. That’s the kind of movement you’re advocating for, my friend.
Would you rather... not be able to fight Russia? It's not like the EU is the one with the invasion plans and threats, they're just preparing for the changing world order.
[1]: Gilbert, Nomadic Peoples and Human Rights (2014), p. 73: "Freedom of movement within a country encompasses both the right to travel freely within the territory of the State and the right to relocate oneself and to choose one's place of residence".
The 18 year olds who vote less but vote for good parties are doing good, overall. The 60 year olds voting Tory their whole lives - not so much.
It's very easy to blame the young for all the problems earlier generations created and exacerbated. Not too wise though.
The observed damage that the UK has inflicted to itself has been caused so far by all the parties that have been in power.
Eh, this is far from a given. Mao's Red Guards were passionate idiots. And America's young men are in thrall of Clavicular.
The most powerful empires in history have had large rebublics at their cores for good reason. The wisdom of a crowd greatly increases with its diversity.
Unfortunately the UK has a voting cohort that is both large and willing to screw over subsequent generations.
It's truly a crown in the gutter moment where you can be completely off-the-wall nuts (vide AfD) and, if you're just willing to campaign on anti-immigration, your ranks will instantly swell. Yet the establishment is somehow completely incapable or unwilling to capitalize/capture this.
But then often immigration isn't the problem. It is a solution preying on the fear of people that "outsiders" are harming their opportunities, housing, way of life etc. The real problem is that people are not making living wages and wages are not catching up to cost of living.
As politicians pushing anti-immigration come to power they also realize this problem. They'd rather not solve immigration because then they need to face up to the actual living wage crisis issue. It also helps keeping the immigration talking point open so that it can be used in next election.
There has never been a successful multiracial democracy in history. There are many books on this - one was even on Obamas summer reading list awhile back.
> The real problem is that people are not making living wages and wages are not catching up to cost of living
Importing labor devalues native labor. This is outside of the cultural change, etc. These are real problems.
> They'd rather not solve immigration
Because they serve the rich and the rich benefit from immigration at the expense of natives. Immigration is a solved problem. Do it only when needed or when it benefits the people, not a select few.
Let me fix that for you: because the establishment is owned by the corporations who want to suppress wages, rise demand, pump gross GDP, and pump real estate.
And because governments running on deficits are slaves to the banking cartel, too.
The immigration we're talking about, the one of Africans etc. immigrants flooding west, is destructive to the economies based on pretty much every statistic I've seen.
Those immigrants are on welfare in disproportional numbers compared to native population.
E.g. in US 72% Somalis are on welfare and the same stats are in West Europe.
They cost the state gigantic amount of money.
And per-capita crime stats are so bad that governments are hiding them from public.
This is all documented by government's own statistics and reasonably well reported.
Immigration COULD be a net positive to the economy IF it was managed properly but it isn't and it isn't.
Tourism isn't immigration and I don't see what trade has to do with it.
There's many stories, but let's call this the average story: "Immigration brings growth, growth advances everyone".
Well, it doesn't, at least not at the moment. Oops.
Now we can argue why, of course, but a certain amount of backlash was to be expected. It was clear for 20 years or more exactly what would happen when "the alternative" to the prevailing "left+green" coalitions gains power. To an extent I don't understand how anybody can claim to be surprised.
Also, in a democracy I would think that arguing that "the uneducated masses" are wrong is a quick path to irrelevancy. That, by the way, is exactly how we want the system to work. The system needs to work well for the uneducated masses. Figure it out, or accept that the other guys are going to win the election.
Almost every country in the west is tightening it's system. In the UK claiming ILR will take a significantly longer period of lawful residence, and a shorter time will require you to meet a high income threshold. It is nearly impossible to get PR in Canada now unless you are fluent in both English and French and have a PhD or several years of canadian work experience. The bar has also gone up in Australia too.
The reason why this doesn't seem to move the needle on the anti-immigration vote is because the folks on that side can always just move the goalposts and be the "true" anti-immigrant party. I believe these days Reform UK wants cancel all ILRs and start actively deporting long term residents who don't meet an ever raising bar. Its madness.
Madness is for UK government to tax UK citizens to pay for housing and food of immigrants.
Incentives drive behavior. If you're African and see you can live for free in England, of course you'll try to get that deal. And in age of social media, they know.
Denmark did that and saw dramatic drop in number of people trying to immigrate there.
What you desperately try to paint as racism is just immune response from UK citizens.
They can see their taxes are raising, gov services are getting worse but gov finds the money to pay for housing for 110 thousand immigrants.
They connect the dots and that's why Reform UK would win the elections (if the elections were done today).
Because Labour, which won election recently with good majority, is not, in fact, ignoring voters and not doing anything meaningful.
Reform UK promises drastic changes because that's what majority of UK votes are demanding now.
It's how democracy is supposed to work. The politicians are supposed to be responsive to demands of voters.
There are billboards where offers of guaranteed rents are advertised etc.
It’s completely obvious to me (and often supported by exit polls) that people who are voting far right aren’t actually against immigration - only on the surface. Once you dig just a little bit deeper, often socioeconomic struggles surface. The working class has been taking a beating since the what, 1980s now? And it’s not like there’s any sort of legislature on the horizon that would fix their predicament.
So people look for a scapegoat. The far right gives them a scapegoat goat, and the enlightened center doesn’t know how to handle it.
the American and German far-right by contrast seem to be the polar opposite of data-driven. No the lazy 'IQ by country' maps don't count.
That is very true however you're misunderstanding why the German (where I'm from) and Americans parties aren't publishing this data. It's not because they're lazy, but because they can't.
And before you're now thinking: "aha! So they're not net negative!" ...well, these statistics aren't available either.
The reality is that the data to create these graphs aren't public, or never created. The likely reason for that being labeled 'nazi' for even considering gathering such data.
I personally suspect that they're net negative, in total but net positive on average (so numerically, most immigrants being positive). At least that would reflect my personal experience with with immigrants. However, you only need a very small percentage of immigrants to game the system in order to make the whole sample size negative because of the insane amount of money a bad actor can drain.
vide https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/print-e...
from https://www.economist.com/europe/2021/12/18/why-have-danes-t...
And I highly doubt other governments don't have similar calculations or aren't aware of them.
Japans big catastrophe happened in 1990 with the bubble bursting, but that was years before the peak in working age population. Since then, the economy has not improved much but also has remained somehow stable.
I personally was very pro-EU in my youth and deeply soured as I knew more and more to the point I'm staunchly against nowadays.
It started in 2005 with the referendum result being ignored. Then 2012 came with the shambolic management of the Greek crisis, something even the IMF points as ineffective. Then I was paid to put in place the Green Taxonomy and I saw how unready and dumb the whole thing was. Then there was the rejection of the Draghi report which made lose hope.
I find the mix of the euro being a deeply unfair currency union strongly advantaging Germany at the expense of the periphery, the fact that Germany keeps playing on it and amplifying the effect in direct violation of the treaty and yet always get a hall pass and their holier than though attitude despite being basically free loaders completely impossible to tolerate.
The 2019 CEP study showed it well. The union costs billions of GDP to France and Italy to give a minor advantage to the German. It's a dogmatic straight jacket managed by priests with zero actual economic understanding and serving the interests of a big mercantilist using development funds to shore up its tributaries in the east and still managing to gradually lose relevance as it can't even manage having a proper strategy despite the advantages, and a few fiscal parasites around it.
At 36, I deeply wish from my country to be free of the monster than the union has become and deeply ressent being a prisoner of a monetary union which intentionally didn't plan an exit path. And for what? Surrendering the ability to make law to the citizen of other countries who share neither my language, nor my culture, clearly don't have the same vision of the future than us and wants to force us into their ineffective model? No, thanks. No GDP gains or alleged diplomatic weight is worth this debasement.
I don't understand Brexiters because being out of the euros they had the best of both worlds but I respect their desire to be truly sovereign and free from the constant Germanic hegemonic push.
Edit:Lots of downvotes, very few counterarguments. I'm guessing facing the tensions at the heart of the project makes some of you frankly uncomfortable.
Also young people always blame last gen for whatever, so expects -8 ~ 0 years old would vote for exit again…
For instance: https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/brits-would-overw...
The article also says nothing about how the same age group votes at the time, but the numbers I can find suggests that over 70% votes remain. The leave side was pretty much fueled by an age group that has felt a decline in British industry and employment, much of which would have happened regardless of the EU. Immigration and Eastern European workers was just a convenient scape goat for the right, but it was believable for those who had suffered through the UKs decline in areas such as manufacturing. The younger demographics never saw this, they primarily saw the benefits the EU provided.
FWIW I think Brexit was dumb but I never felt strongly about any of it because it doesn't effect me in any way. I'm not saying their views on Brexit specifically are likely to change.
