A message to young people.

I’m not ‘old’ yet, but to you I’m probably as ancient as that mosque which has been there on the corner of your street from the beginning of time. (Fun Fact: the mosque is probably a third of my age) Long before the European Union existed (although many years after it had been conceived as a means of taking away sovereignty by stealth) I worked overseas. Friends of mine did gap years abroad and at university some of my fellow students were exchange students or, you know, just foreign, fee-paying fellows.

Since the beginning of the postal service people had pen-pals all around the world (pen pals were Facebook friends in which you had to invest some actual effort) and visits were often seen as an extended part of that communication. You may be surprised to learn that Britons, far from being imprisoned within this moated island, were the most travelled people on the planet. Visit a national museum some time, but avoid the politically correct, right-on exhibits designed to feed your prejudices against empire.

The history you have been brought up with is, if not precisely ‘wrong’, framed to make you hate your country of birth. In fact, scrub that, it is wrong. The social politics you have been inculcated with is predicated on the basis that white Europeans are responsible for every bad thing in the world and preeminent in this evil are the bloodthirsty devils of England. But I see something you do not see; that the history I was taught has been erased in front of my eyes to be replaced by the revisionist nonsense your heads are filled with.

The British were overwhelmingly a force for a greater good and at no time has our island been ‘a nation of immigrants’ any more than any other great trading nation. We have always imported the best from elsewhere and exported even greater riches abroad - law, governance, culture, civilisation, learning, science... We always had the sovereignty to resist the imposition of people, laws and customs injurious to our national interest, while revelling in a true diversity of thought, experience and aspiration, as opposed to the imposed diversity of ghettoised and hostile monocultures.

The EU has sought to dampen, to control and ultimately to subjugate that great  world-bestriding pioneering spirit and infuse instead a sense of belonging, a sense of allegiance to nowhere except the EU. Ask those subsumed to Mother Russia how that worked out – the Berlin Wall was in place not to keep people out, but to keep them in; see how those formerly imprisoned embraced their new freedoms and abandoned their gaolers.

Brexit is our wall coming down, it is our gift to you, the young, because the future is what you make of it. It is because we are older and have lived on this world and we have seen these things which we bequeath to you, where you have not. This gives you a far greater freedom than the EU’s illusory freedom of movement; we are trying to give you freedom of everything. But are you grateful? Do you even care to listen? What has been done to you to make you imagine that your parents, your grandparents and great grandparents wish you ill? This goes against everything humanity is genetically implored to do.

Daily we hear the shit-stirring Remain rhetoric that says old people always vote to hurt young people. Stop and think about that. You don’t quite grasp that because we were once young, yet you have never been old, we have been where you are; but how can you presume to know what we think? And why would we want you to be poor? On the contrary, we wish you riches, so that in our very old age you can afford to maintain the support our parents enjoyed on retirement. We, far more than you, have a sense of community and a respect for the social contract.

Removing workers rights? Fuck off, we invented them. Rolling back Health and Safety legislation? Have you seen the harm done to small businesses by the overbearing imposition of unthinking regulation to counter the tiniest risk? No wonder UK productivity is poor. As for the nebulous and ever-expanding smorgasbord of entitlement under the heading of Human Rights... where do we start? Once we relied on common decency and the rule of law, now everything that offends your warped perspective is exploited as another money-maker for the corrupt.

Can I call you back? I'm creating happy memories

of my childhood for my father...

It will take many years to halt and then reverse the decline, but this won’t be because of the crippling effects of Brexit. Rather it will be a long journey into light as we recover from the loss of optimism and the blind obeisance to some godly EU commission. We need new teachers, new legislators and a new political class at the very least, but if you put in half the effort you have devoted to bleating about how the old people stole your future into making your own lives better, you will have a long, healthy prosperous life. And one day you will be old, too. I hope the young people of your elder years treat you more kindly.