Read into it what you wish, but this really sucks for the younger generation who did not want this yet will be stuck with this decision, likely for their entire lifetime.
Well at least it'll hit their pensions. Oh, wait, no it won't because most of them will have final salary pensions schemes the working generation is paying for and could never hope to have themselves...
At least they can sell their houses which have increased in value by 100%s of percent over the last 30 years. So the older generation (& working class) have fucked us.
Britain has been in the EU for 43 years, 65 year olds were kids themselves when it joined. Everyone in Britain has been in the EU their whole lives. Couldn't it possibly be to do with anything more recent?
If anything I see the reverse. Immigrant fears was the driving factor for the Leave vote. Given that UK tabloids have been doing quite a good job exploiting immigrant fears of late, who's being manipulated here?
The Donald Trump phenomenon has very similar parallels (build a wall!), demographics (white, leans no college education, leans elderly), and root cause (largely cultural discomfort). The rise of other far-right parties in Europe shows similar concerns.
This vote to me smacks of the decades of American Southerners (and others in similar areas) voting against their own economic interests in order to protect a race-based pecking order. As in the American South, now England. It probably won't be the last vote like this, either.
This will affect everyone for their entire lifetime, regardless of their current age.
Reminds me of a Ricky Gervais stand-up where a woman is scarred for life at the age of 93, which is technically true regardless of how many years she lives to.