Political analysts are giving different readings to the Brexit result. However, I am struck by one particular study, which sought to explain it through age cohorts. The analysis stated that senior citizens in the UK voted to leave and the younger generation voted to stay. This analysis can be seen in isolation but needs to be analysed within the scenario that London, Northern Ireland and Scotland voted to remain and rural England and Wales voted to leave.

It is being claimed that the older generation decided for the younger generation and the older generation is being blamed for having decided the vote for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union. The blame is being put on what is being described as rural England, for it is in these areas that the leave vote was predominant. Yet this argument is omitting Wales and the rest of the country where there were also voters who supported the leave option but they were not in majority. Hence, I find these arguments interesting even though they are demographically unfounded. I will explain why.

They are interesting because traditionally the old people are the ones towards who respect is shown. In the past, old people were considered the “elders” to whom the younger generation turned to for advice. The explanation given by political analysts is presenting a dangerously perverse logic that the older generation is now the generation that ruins the future of the younger generation in the UK and not the one that seeks to sustain it.

More importantly, this argument is demographically unfounded. The first conclusion regarding this argument is that Northern Ireland and Scotland have a younger generation when compared to England and Wales, since in these two former areas the voters voted to remain in the European Union. I don’t think that this is the case.

The demographic reading should be different and this pattern of voting should be related to the electoral system in the UK.  The right to vote in the United Kingdom is not related to nationality or citizenship but to residence. In the UK, any person, irrespective of whether he is an immigrant or not, has a right to vote provided that he is resident in the country. Therefore it is no surprise that, in London, the majority of voters supported the remain campaign. Cosmopolitan cities normally have the highest number of young voters. The older generation moves out of these cities. In fact, major cities voted to remain. Secondly cosmopolitan cities have also the highest percentage of young immigrants, including “temporary residents,” mostly foreigners. This explains why London voted to remain. Without these voters, the Brexit vote would have been even higher.

Therefore for those who would like to understand clearly what has happened in this referendum, one needs to analyse the trends through the issue of Nationalism and how this is unfolding in the UK. It is through understanding the different forms that Nationalism can take that one begins to understand the complexity of this vote and explain why the surveys were wrong; they were simply less representative of the “rural” areas where today most of the English live.

Therefore, rather than expressing an age segment, this vote expresses more a new nationalistic trend that is engulfing the United Kingdom. Wales and England too are moving closer to each other. The difference between the two is becoming far less important and they are now virtually one. Different is the case with Scotland and Northern Ireland. While the way Scotland voted was written on the wall, Northern Ireland’s vote came as a surprise. It seems that Northern Ireland will be slowly pushing towards union with the rest of Ireland while Scotland seized the opportunity to re-assert her identity as diverse from England.

Both the vote in Scotland and Northern Ireland should also be read in a nationalistic context. Staying in the EU was viewed in Scotland – and for different reasons in Northern Ireland - as a Nationalistic way to defy Britain and affirms one’s Nationalistic position. It is this issue of Nationalism that the European Union needs to address if it wants to survive in its present form.