By Martin Deighton
I am 77 years old.
As such I am a member of the most privileged and fortunate generation in the history of Britain. Almost all of those of us born between 1935 and 1955 have enjoyed a growth in wealth and security never experienced by earlier generations.
We were given free secondary education and then could have free university education along with generous subsistence grants.
Most of us enjoyed full and well paid employment.
We bought houses with mortgages that evaporated in the heat of rising inflation.
We enjoyed wage rises and accumulated inflation proofed pension funds and state pensions beyond the dreams of our parents and the wildest aspirations of our children.
We were provided with health care that our parents were denied and our children may be denied. Almost all of us never experienced the horrors of war.
Many members of our parent’s generation had given their lives in order to defeat fascism, nationalism and racism and to bring peace, and then unity, to a divided Europe – a unity and peace that has lasted for over sixty years.
As a leading Nation within The Union of European Nations we have enjoyed the total freedom and privilege of travelling and working and holiday-making and living anywhere in Europe. We befriended and worked with people of different cultures and with different languages.
We were not only subjects of the United Kingdom, we were also European Citizens with liberties, protections, freedoms and rights that could not be dreamed of by our parents.
We had access to a court that could at last, and at least, challenge our self-elected judges and the mighty stake-holders and power brokers of our nation.
We had civilised worker’s rights and human rights that no British Parliament have even proposed in the two thousand years of our so called sovereignty.
We had new rights and freedoms to access footpaths and lands from which we had been prohibited. We had access to clean beaches and rivers.
We had funding for dilapidated amenities, for research and for support of neglected and forgotten areas of our country. We had collaborative research and development projects, joint manufacturing projects and collaborative security.
Our industries and services had access to a market of over five hundred million people without tariff, tax, let or hindrance.
Throughout these bountiful years we selfishly dump our rubbish and plastic toxic waste into landfills that now pollute our water table and erode and discharge their poisonous contents into our seas.
We exhaust our wasted energy into our heated atmosphere with carbon pollution that now melts our ice caps and floods our polluted oceans.
We build nuclear power stations on sinking coastlines alongside rising seas. We store the nuclear waste from these dangerous monstrosities in the same perilous environment.
We do all this in the knowledge that our children’s children and the children of the next thousand years will suffer the consequences of our irresponsible greed.
And so – after this life of immense privilege and careless irresponsibility, we insist that the next generation of young people must pay £50,000 in fees and subsistence to attend a university and obtain a bachelor’s degree, and twice that for a PhD, and three times that to become a medical doctor. And those who go to work in shops and warehouses and care homes or go to work in catering and cleaning and call centres are given zero hours contracts – just so that we do not have to pay them when times are quiet – in fact – so that we do not have to pay them at all. And then we complain because we have to give these spongers “tax credits”.
We encourage house prices to rise with delight – because we like the feeling of wealth and, in so doing, we lock out vast numbers of young people from ever owning a home.
The wealthiest of us put surplus money into second homes in attractive areas of the country, pushing up prices and depriving local young people of the opportunity to live locally. Then, to add insult, we are content to leave these homes unoccupied for much of the year.
We do not recognise that the current poverty and unemployment, amongst today’s workers in our Nation’s manufacturing heartlands is the consequence of our generation shipping manufacturing to low cost nations in the Far East. We did this to make our companies more profitable and stimulate growth in share value and fill our bulging pension funds. And we are still doing it – aren’t we, Mr Dyson?
We complain about the depths of debt that young people get themselves into – forgetting that the debts that we took on when we were young were wiped away by heaven-sent inflation – an evil that at least redistributed wealth from old to young!
And then as our final selfish act on June 23rd 2016: WE, as a generation, decided to strip European Citizenship from our young people – 84% of whom had asked and voted to stay in a United Europe.
We’re stripping away from them all the benefits, rights, protections and freedoms afforded by that citizenship. We’re taking away from them the right to study, to live and to work in 27 Nations of Europe.
We are tearing up a unity that had been established by great statesmen and women and had been created upon the foundation stones of sacrifices made by our parent’s generation. We took for granted the prosperity, the peace and stability that this Unity of Nations has brought to us for over seventy years.
We decided that, rather than stay and continue the work to create a better, fairer, bigger and more cooperative Europe, we will walk away from our neighbours in a time of need.
We would leave them with a tidal wave of desperate refugees fleeing from lands that our Nation had, in part, destabilised. We will pay no more of our money towards this Unity of Nations.
We would insist that we must keep out those “Europeans” who come into our beloved country to join our workforce, build our houses, staff our hospitals and care homes. Keep out those people who bring skills, pay taxes and who help to create the wealth that feeds our pensions.
They are strangers – they speak a foreign language so we must keep them out (unless, of course, they are super-rich Oligarchs).
We insisted upon a referendum to demonstrate just what sort of a generation of people we are – those of us of the privileged generation born between 1935 and 1955. And we showed them!
We, the privileged English generation will suffer no significant consequences from our selfish action on June 23rd 2016. It will be our children and our grandchildren and our global neighbours who will suffer the consequences of our demolition of a unity that took sixty years to build. And other Nations of the world are already suffering the consequences of a new fire of fanatical nationalism we have ignited with our “Brexit”.
Jo Cox was murdered for supporting the young people of the UK in their desire to remain part of a United Europe. After she was murdered by a fanatical nationalist shouting “Britain for the British” there were 50,000 tweets praising the actions of her killer. And the Daily Mail relegated the news story of the trial of her killer to page seventeen.
On June 30th 2016, as I put some flowers on my uncle’s grave in Picardie, an elderly Frenchman, whom I had befriended over the years, approached me. We shared our sadness at the outcome of the referendum. I shall never forget his words:
“The old people of England did not recognise what “leave” could mean – they do not know what they have done, they do not know what they have undone and do not realise what they have begun. Their action and its destructive effect will be etched in European History forever.”
May God and our children’s children forgive us – for we do not know what we have done.