IF THERE’S one thing the last three days have taught us, it’s that 20-year-old social justice warriors on Twitter are smarter than 52 per cent of the British population.
If you believe the outraged media, those 17.4 million Brits who decided they were sick of the bloated, anti-democratic, corrupt European Union telling them what to do are comprised entirely of old, racist, straight white men who should be stripped of the vote because they’re going to die soon.
Well, one of them did die, in fact. World War II veteran Leonard Moore’s last words to his family last week were: “Post my Leave vote.”
As his nephew told The Daily Mail, the former submariner “believed what he fought for wasn’t what we have now”. “He was so passionate about England,” he said.
The same crowd who demonise the likes of AB Moore are the same people who would also like the EU referendum — which had a higher voter turnout than the last UK general election — to be rerun until the correct result is achieved, thanks.
Or as former Belgian Prime Minister Jean-Luc Dehaene put it in 2004 ahead of a vote on the EU constitution: “If the answer is ‘no’, the vote will probably have to be done again, because it absolutely has to be a ‘yes’.”
It’s astonishing that in the wake of one of the single most emphatic displays of pure democracy in recent history, there is a concerted campaign to subvert the will of the people.
“Wake up,” Labour MP David Lammy wrote. “We do not have to do this. We can stop this madness and bring this nightmare to an end through a vote in Parliament.”
Apparently, democracy is only a good thing when it goes your way — anything else is “madness”.
Daniel Hannan, a Member of European Parliament who has campaigned his entire career for the abolition of his own job, summed up Lammy’s position: “Little people! You have been misled!
We, your betters, will now act in your true interests!”
Writing in The Sun on the weekend, Mr Hannan said “Project Sneer” was doomed to fail and that British voters, threatened with “Armageddon”, reacted with “calm, common sense and courage”.
“When they started, Leave was 20 points behind in the polls,” he wrote. “But they stuck to a simple message: that the British people should be able to control their own affairs.
“It’s amazing how often that message was deliberately distorted. Listening to the other side, you’d think that the Leave campaign was anti-foreigner or anti-immigrant.
“What Remainers didn’t, and still don’t, understand is that it was precisely this snotty attitude that pushed many waverers into backing Leave.”
While immigration was a central issue — and why wouldn’t it be when EU laws prevent the UK from deporting foreign criminals — a ComRes poll found sovereignty was a bigger issue for Leave voters (53 per cent) than immigration (34 per cent).
Meanwhile, the barrage of anti-Brexit lines as the media attempts to spin the “second referendum” narrative is becoming ridiculous. (The fact that 99 per cent of the media agrees Brexit is The Worst Thing Ever should be a pretty good indication Brits made the right choice.)
First it was, British people are searching ‘What is the EU’ on Google! Get it? They didn’t even know what the EU was, how could they possibly vote to leave? Look how stupid they are!
Then came the protest angle. These days all it takes for a bleeding-heart headline (‘Young voters furious, depressed’!) is 20 blue-haired millennials waving signs crying about how unfair it all is.
Yes, 75 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds voted Remain — but only 36 per cent of them actually bothered to turn up. “But surely the responsibility to motivate and engage young people is on the shoulders of politicians!” whined one young socialist on Twitter. “Young people feel left behind.”
Sorry, but if munching pingers in the mud at Glastos is more important than your working holiday in France, that’s your problem.
Now the line is, lots of people who voted to leave didn’t actually want to leave, whoopsie daisy, just kidding, can we please have another go? They’re calling that one “Bregret” — how good is that? Rolls right off the tongue.
To be fair, a ComRes poll found eight per cent of Leave voters are “unhappy” that Britain will leave the EU while four per cent of Remain voters are actually “happy” at the outcome.
But why should that matter? They had 41 years to make up their minds.
And finally, there’s the ridiculous petition, breathlessly reported by the BBC and other media outlets, calling for a second referendum — which turned out to be a prank by 4chan.
A number of similar petitions have sprung up on the UK Parliament website, including a petition to for “Arsenal to replay all games they win, until they lose”, to “Redraw the June 24th Euro Millions as I didn’t get the result I want”, and even “A rematch for the Battle of Hastings in 1066 as I am unhappy with the result”.
As a British dual national, it’s ironic to hear the most common complaint from other young people is, “But I won’t be able to travel and work in Europe anymore!”
For a group of people who are slamming the older generation for their “selfishness” in voting to leave, this mentality seems almost comically hypocritical.
They don’t seem to appreciate that their parents’ generation are the very same people who voted to join the EU the last time around in 1975.
As Mark Twain said: “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”
