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Kingdom left deeply divided

Voters over 65 were three times more likely to vote Leave than those 24 or younger.

It’s official. Britain has bid au revoir, auf wiedersehen and hasta luego to Europe. It’s good riddance to the bloated, meddling Brussels bureaucrats and their failing European superstate project, and hello to a new dawn for the United Kingdom, the Leave campaign crowed on Friday. Yet for a referendum called to resolve Britain’s most fundamental identity crisis, the surprising and emphatic vote for Brexit has left the country facing a deeply uncertain and divided future. Yes, Britain will exit the European Union, though we don’t yet know precisely when. “Article 50”, the constitutional trigger for a two-year divorce negotiations window, has yet to be pulled, and is unlikely to be for some time.

Nor do we know who will lead the separation negotiations on behalf of the UK government, after David Cameron’s stunning announcement that he will resign as Prime Minister within three months. Boris Johnson, London’s flamboyant, tousle-haired former mayor, is surely favourite to replace his former Eton College schoolboy rival as leader at the Conservatives’ October party conference. But other leading Brexiters such as Michael Gove, the fiercely intelligent and ambitious justice secretary, as well as the fence-sitting home secretary Theresa May, will be weighing up bids and should not be discounted.

We do not even know what United Kingdom there will be left to negotiate on behalf of, with pro-Remain Scotland and Northern Ireland — who both voted starkly at odds with pro-Leave England and Wales — threatening to fragment the nation into separate states. Scotland’s 2014 referendum was supposed to settle the issue of independence north of the border for at least a generation. But even the most diehard unionists would be hard-pushed to argue against a second referendum far sooner, now that 62 per cent of Scots face being dragged out of the EU against their will.

Northern Ireland also voted to Remain, but will instead find itself glancing enviously across its land border with the neighbouring Republic of Ireland, which stays within the EU. Republican party Sinn Fein has already called for a referendum on a united Ireland. The prospect of an imminent vote in Northern Ireland is less likely than Scotland’s. But the status quo within which the two parts of Ireland have peacefully coexisted under Brussels’ umbrella these past two decades is shattered, raising the spectre of the island’s violent past.

More fundamentally still, we simply don’t know what the long-term future will look like for a Britain that has wilfully cut itself adrift from the continent. This is the question that the referendum was intended to settle, but which now only time will tell. According to the euphoric Leave campaign, Britain is set to enter a glorious new age of muscular independence, with a rehabilitated judiciary, freedom from Brussels’ loathed “red tape” and bespoke trade deals with the rising powers of the world, not least India.

For those left mourning the abject failure of the Remain campaign, an inward-looking Little Britain can expect a future as an increasingly marginal Atlantic island, deprived of the negotiating power that comes from membership of the world’s largest economic bloc and bereft of access to European jobs, education, healthcare and visa-free travel. There are fears that London, the country’s overwhelming economic powerhouse, will lose its global dominance, with banks already seeking to relocate their European headquarters to the continent to retain access to that much larger market.

All this could spell bad news for India, whose Prime Minister Narendra Modi notably called the UK his country’s “gateway to Europe” during his London visit last November. On Friday morning, Indian companies with large exposure in the UK like Tata saw sharp drops in their sale prices. In the longer run, optimistic Brexiters claim freedom from Brussels will enable Britain to pursue a more productive, bilateral trade deal with India.

It is certainly easier for New Delhi to negotiate with one country than 28, and Britain has shown keen interest in fostering closer economic ties by dispatching countless ministers on business trips to India in recent years. Yet trade deals are complex beasts that are not created overnight, and it is likely Britain will have to wait its turn behind the rest of the EU, which has already begun its own trade talks with India.

The one assured outcome of the vote for Brexit is that the United Kingdom is now a deeply Divided Kingdom. Scotland and Northern Ireland aside, the electoral map exposes dramatic regional differences in voting behaviour. The Leave campaign was always expected to do well in predominantly working class heartlands of the Midlands and North of England. But as early results came in from the industrial cities of Sunderland and Newcastle, it was clear the Brexiters had surpassed even their wildest expectations.

The entire campaign has all-too-often spilled over into a bad-natured row over alleged racism and xenophobia, but there is no doubt that immigration played a pivotal role in Leave’s victory here. Boston, a coastal town in the East Midlands, emerged last night as the most Eurosceptic place in the UK, with 75.6 per cent voting to leave. It also has the highest proportion of Eastern European immigrants, and is the least racially integrated place in England and Wales. Talk to a taxi driver in this part of the world — always a journalist’s reliable barometer of the prevailing mood — and the topic of “them” migrants who have come from Poland, Romania and Bulgaria to take up low-paid farm jobs from “us” locals will invariably come up.

Legitimate or not, these concerns were foremost in the “Leave” voters’ minds. By comparison, the liberal, middle-class cosmopolitan bastion of London overwhelmingly voted to Remain. But the most toxic legacy of this referendum will be a different sort of division altogether. Look at voting patterns by age, and a staggering split emerges between the young and the old. Voters over 65 were three times more likely to vote Leave than those 24 or younger.

As innumerable angry posts on my Facebook and Twitter feeds pointed out, this poses a serious problem. Younger generations will have to live with the consequences of a Brexit they didn’t want for many more years than their parents and grandparents, who have grown affluent under the stability and economic growth Britain has enjoyed within the EU. And unlike a general election, the EU referendum cannot be “corrected” in five years’ time if it turns out we got it wrong. Once Britain has left, re-entry on anything remotely resembling favourable terms will be close to impossible.

( Source : Columnist )
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