One of the very first subjects I saw last Friday morning was the blaming of the older generations for the eave vote. This, alongside the denouncing of all leave voters as racist, selfish and / or stupid. People may think that this point of view is based on “facts” and statistics, but a closer look at the numbers doesn’t quite back this up as clearly as you might think.

For me this was a little surprising and disappointing. In all of my thoughts about political and social issues, I try and stick to a value of understanding, thinking about what could be the cause of someone’s situation or attitude and giving them the benefit of the doubt.

This is in the hope that I will continue to believe that most people are good and do whatever they do for the right reasons.

I struggle with the perspective that you can stand up one minute for groups groups of people, insisting that just because some Muslims are terrorists doesn’t mean all are, for example, and in the next minute exclaiming that the older generations together with those less educated than some have let us all down.

A major issue I find with the media, including, if not especially, social media in the presentation of “facts” and statistics to support points.

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Let’s take a look at the numbers

A lot of numbers have been bandied around, but few take the time to really ask what they are based on, what they are really saying and what other conclusions could be drawn.

Who has seen this one?

The good thing about a summary table is that the information is easy to absorb. The bad thing is that without due care and attention, you will miss what you are actually reading.

Firstly, this is not based on the result of the referendum, noting the citations under the table, you’ll see that these are the results from a YouGov poll carried out the week before the referendum even took place. Is it reflective of what happened in the referendum? Maybe, maybe not, we don’t know.

Secondly, a quick check of the percentages, none of the rows add up to 100%. 64% + 24% = 88%. Where are the other 12? Well, without looking at the YouGov data directly, I’ll assume that they are the undecideds. Or maybe those who weren’t going to vote? The point is, this table does not explain a full picture.

If anyone knows where you can actually get your hands on this poll data though it’d be great if you could highlight that source.

OK, so how did people of different ages vote?

First thing to mention here is that if you voted, you’ll notice that you didn’t need to write your name or age on the polling card. Or any other personally identifiable information for that matter. So the one conclusion that can be taken from this is, what a surprise, we don’t know.

But what do we know?

The Financial Times (FT) have quite a sensibly laid out set of figures. Check out the graphs below. What this says is that looking at the different voting areas, the trend is that the higher the proportion of people in the “older generations”, the higher the proportion of people voted Leave last week. That’s it, that’s all it says. It doesn’t actually say that more older people voted Leave than younger people.

You’ll also note that it shows where a smaller percentage of people have university degrees, more people voted leave. Also the fewer people who have passports in an area, the more people voted leave. Where people have a lower income and lower proportion of people in professional jobs, higher proportion of Leave voters.

The FT also highlights that the more an area depends on EU funding, the higher proportion of people voted leave…

But what about voter turnout?

The counter argument to blaming the older generation for voting leave is to blame the younger generations for not voting at all.

The Guardian report that Young remain voters came out in force, but were outgunned, only to go on to say that the turnout of young voters was low, and a fleeting mention, easily missed in a skim read, that actually, again, we don’t actually know who voted in what age groups or how they voted.

Back to the FT, they highlight that in areas where a higher proportion of people are older, turnout was higher, as a general trend, but actually said specifically that “The relationship between between median age and voter turnout is far from clear cut. But on a very general basis, areas with younger populations had lower turnout”.

Three areas bucking the trend were Oxford and Cambridge who had a high turnout and comparatively young age, and Glasgow – comparatively old with lower turnout.

I don’t have an data on education levels in Glasgow, but Oxford and Cambridge clearly will have higher levels, suggesting that education could be more important than age – ? So we could blame the stupid people, or if that bothers us maybe vote for people in elections based on better education for those who need it. That’s up to you.

Sky Data also published some turnout figures, this seems to be based on a poll conducted via telephone over night after referendum voting had closed, although I actually can’t find the details of the survey. If you have a source for this, please do let speak up.

Here’s what Sky posted:

Well, actually that proves the point about the turnout of different age groups doesn’t it.

Or does it?

It’s time to crunch some numbers

Just for fun, because I love a bit of number crunching, let’s add in how the population of the UK breaks down into these age bands, according to data published by the Office for National Statistics last summer.

Age From	Age To	Turnout	Population	Voted
18	24	36%	5,878,472	2,116,250
25	34	58%	8,822,757	5,117,199
35	44	72%	8,378,302	6,032,377
45	54	75%	9,196,082	6,897,062
55	64	81%	7,452,381	6,036,429
65	65+	83%	11,611,167	9,637,269
Total			51,339,161	35,836,585
Overall Turnout				70%

So the first thing that jumps out at me here is that the population of the youngest group with by far the lowest turnout is about half the size of the oldest age group with the much higher turnout. This means that in terms of number of people, there were actually about the same number of people who didn’t vote from each of those groups.

If you combined the two youngest groups, between them they’d have a turnout of about 49%. Still much lower than the older people but suddenly you’re looking at a gap of 34% instead of 47%. And if you combined the younger three and the older three groups, you’d be looking at 57% VS 80%, a difference of only 23%.

Does this really matter? Potentially not, but depending on how you slice the numbers up, you can choose to show a larger or smaller difference between the generation’s respective turnouts.

There is another problem with the stats provided by Sky. The savvy of you may have noticed that these figures result in a total of 35,836,585 voters voting in the referendum. Adding together the 17,410,742 leave voters and 16,141,241 remain voters you get 33,551,983, so somewhere we’ve gained 2,284,602 voters. That’s 1.8 times the difference between the Leave and Remain totals. This is of course all despite the BBC’s published number of total voters who turned out, unless I’ve missed something, I have no idea where the 45.5m number has come from…

Does this change much? Maybe not, but the point is that these turnout figures don’t add up to the actual result, by some margin, and further illustrates why you need to take care drawing conclusions from numbers you see in the media, especially if it is driving you to denounce entire age groups, many of whom share the same point of view as you.

So who did actually vote for what?

 

Taking some of these numbers on a little bit further you can start to see that although what people are saying is likely to be correct, you can actually pull a number of different conclusions, if there was a point you were trying to make.

Here we go. Let’s keep the Sky stats, with the caveats that we know all of it’s flaws already, and we’ll add in the Remain / Leave vote split according to the YouGov survey. We need to make some adjustments though:

• We need to split You Gov’s 25 – 49 and 50 – 64 into Sky’s 10 year age splits to make this work. Not perfect, but overall you end up with the same number of people.

Age	Turnout	Population	Voted	Remain	Leave
18 – 24	36%	5,878,472	2,116,250	64%	24%
25 – 34	58%	8,822,757	5,117,199	45%	39%
35 – 44	72%	8,378,302	6,032,377	45%	39%
45 – 54	75%	9,196,082	6,897,062	40%	44%
55 – 64	81%	7,452,381	6,036,429	35%	49%
65+	83%	11,611,167	9,637,269	33%	58%
Total		51,339,161	35,836,585
Overall Turnout			70%

• Also, remember all the people that I assumed were undecided? Well, let’s assume that they all did vote, and they voted in the same proportions as the rest of their age group. So we need to increase each of the Leave / Remain percentages proportionally. Then we know how many people in each group voted for what. Also, just removing the turnout percentage and population for a smaller table!

Age	Voted	Remain %	Voted Remain	Leave %	Voted Leave
18 – 24	2,116,250	73%	1,539,091	27%	577,159
25 – 34	5,117,199	54%	2,741,357	46%	2,375,842
35 – 44	6,032,377	54%	3,231,631	46%	2,800,747
45 – 54	6,897,062	48%	3,287,235	52%	3,609,827
55 – 64	6,036,429	42%	2,515,179	58%	3,521,250
65+	9,637,269	36%	3,494,834	64%	6,142,435
Total	35,836,585		16,809,326		19,027,260

So here’s some conclusions supported by this data. According to the ONS, the median age in the UK is 40, so feels like a reasonable mid-point. I won’t say “young and old”, let’s say “younger and older“:

1. It does appear that those over 55 provided more than their fair share of leave votes, 51% of all leave votes with just 37%% of the population
2. BUT more than half of the remain votes, 55%, with 55% of the population, came from those over 45. Considering 40 is the middle age, it seems that the older lot did their fair share to keep us in as well
3. Add another age group in there and you see that 75% of the remain vote came from those over 35 years old with 71% of the population. Come on, where were the spring chickens then?
4. Just under half of all the leave vote, 49%, came from those under 54. Whilst a little over or middle age, potentially not all that old.

There we have it

Hopefully what you take away from reading this is that the numbers aren’t that clear cut. There are sweeping statements being made about whole groups of people based on misleading numbers, conclusions drawn from figures that are filled with untold assumptions, or in some cases are flat out not based on the actual vote itself.

Whether leaving the EU is a good idea from an economic or democratic point of view aside, this is the biggest reasons I voted remain was to vote against generalisations about whole groups of people that encourages negativity and prejudice.

I’d call on everyone to check what they are reading and not get sucked in by the headlines and memes, take numbers and “facts” with a pinch of salt if you don’t have time to research them thoroughly yourself. And most of all, give kindness and the benefit of the doubt to our fellow humans.

Stay in touch folks.

I knew it was going to happen. I don’t know why, but I just had a bad feeling, especially in the week leading up to the vote. Even though I was expecting it, I still felt surprised and shocked when I woke up on Friday morning and saw the result…

52% Leave – 48% Remain

Of course, I am a remainer. And I’ve been quite taken aback but how much the result has bummed me out. But a few days on, watching the news and people’s reactions on social media, I feel I’ve started to wrap my head around how I feel about it.

We’ve decided to kick off this site. Why? Because we want to try and pull together some sort of home where we can share ideas, opinions and stories about how all of our people feel, regardless of where they are from, how it is affecting them, and hear from as many people as possible.

Whatever comes next isn’t going to happen quickly. It’s going to take years, and all of the issues that have come up, plus many more are going to take time to work through.

We’re going to be here keeping you up to date on all of it; researching the facts and figures of everything the government and Leavers do from here on out so everyone can understand what is happening.

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We’ve been coming across some of the same attitudes and statements from both sides the last few days, and we just want to bring everyone back down to Earth on these:

The just accept it and pull together to make it work point

We actually just don’t understand this. What is it that we’re being asked to do? Before the vote we’ve already been outspoken about social issues, multiculturalism and anti-racism generally. We’re going to carry on doing that now.

The Leave campaign promised a lot, that actually it’s not really in a position to deliver. They complained that the EU enforces free movement of EU citizens, for example. They never said that voting to leave the Union would end this, but that is (fairly) reasonable for people to expect this to happen, and so, am I being asked now to work on removing free movement?

Because I don’t believe in that, and I’ll be campaigning to retain it, and that’s that.

Additionally, not that I would generally advocate doing something because UKIP would, but do you imagine that if it had been a Remain vote on the 24th that they would pack it up, simply saying “well, that’s democracy folks, the people have spoken.” No, they’d continue fighting for what they believe in until they got what they want. And that’s what we should do.

So just accept it and move on? I don’t think that’s for us.

The young VS old point

We’ve seen many a graph highlighting that looking at the votes result by age band, the older groups voted to leave, and the younger voted to stay.

The is correct, but actually was already known before the referendum even took place via polls. We’ll get into the data soon in a new post, but the difference in votes wasn’t even that large. Most of the graphs don’t show the fact that considerably more of the older generations actually bothered to turn up to vote or indeed, the total number of people that are in each of those age bands.

All of this aside, this has been reasonably upsetting older people, especially those who voted to remain, feeling that their generation is effectively being blamed for the result.

The last thing we need is to create a division amongst the 48%  based on age. WE ARE ALL ON THE SAME SIDE!

People voting out are not stupid

Another point about not segregating, tarring many people with one brush and being generally unkind to large groups of people – these are the kind of traits typical of those that have something against migrants or Muslims.

The Leave vote were actually pretty convincing. If you saw the debates you may have noticed that they just had the whole thing together more.

We’ve got a lot of people in our country and that fact that large numbers of people were swayed by some of the arguments being given, especially having been warmed up by some of the press for some time now, is it surprising that so many people bought in?

Does that make them stupid? Not really.

Political campaigns are basically marketing machines. If you are immune to marketing then you’re a special kind of person.

Bottom line here is that if you’re annoyed that people don’t have a high enough intelligence level for your liking then you should be directing your anger at the governments that have failed them from an educational perspective, getting off your arse and doing something about it.

The 52% are racist

Come on now, I think we all know this isn’t true.

The problem here is that immigration should never have been a part of this discussion, because the notion that immigration is responsible for pressure on jobs and public services is a lie. But, the press have been warming people up to this for the last forever.

The likes of Britain First, the BNP and UKIP feel this is one of the biggest issues needing addressing and one of the biggest drivers for voting Leave.

Dear the 52%, unfortunately, whilst you may not be racist, you voted on the site of those who definitely are, and your side won with a significant number of people voting for these reasons.

You can’t escape that I’m afraid.

We’ll get back into the numbers on immigration soon enough.

There are some reasons why the EU generally isn’t working

People have got large issues with being represented by officials who are unelected, it’s true, I’m not sure that bringing more power back to the UK, and by the UK I mean Westminster and the ever unelected House of  Lords is the way to fix this.

It also appears to be true that the EU does far too much for the rich and large corporations, much like our own government. A worthy cause to try and rectify, I agree.

But here’s the thing, while the discussion is dominated by irrelevant or fake promises, many who might actually want to fix or leave the EU for legitimate reasons won’t, because they can’t bring themselves to engage with the crap.

There are further arguments about affecting positive change from within rather than standing on the outside and howling at the injustice of it all. A subject for another time perhaps?

We don’t know what is actually going to happen and people probably won’t be getting what they think they voted for

It’s already been coming out of the woodwork that what the Leave campaign has apparently promised may not actually be the case after all.

It’s not uncommon knowledge that to continue trading with the EU we are likely going to need to keep abiding by many of their rules. But hey, at least we’ll be deciding on that ourselves and not having it forced on us by Brussels?

The problem is that when people ticked Leave, they probably did so for a specific reason, thinking something would happen, and that something may not come to pass. Cutting immigration numbers, pumping our EU membership fees into the NHS, to name just a couple.

We receive a lot of grants to enrich our culture by the EU

Surprisingly a lot of our charities and cultural initiatives receive substantial funding from various EU bodies and we will need to figure out what will happen to these now. Either we need to find them ourselves or like many other things valued by so many, they will need to get the axe.

I’m not looking forward to finding out which way that swings.

Need to focus on making the world better for not only us and our children, but people everywhere

Here’s a challenge for everyone.

Next time you are asked to vote on something, think about it differently. Don’t just ask what will be best for you, your family and people in your country, what what is best and fairest for all people everywhere.

Even the least xenophobic arguments from the Leave campaign, i.e. the economy, the arguments were pretty selfish and took little account of their effect on people in other countries.

Sure, I know that we all worked really hard to be born in the UK and have all of our luxuries and rights, and that everyone else just needs to work as hard as us before we’re willing to share. But maybe let’s focus more on sharing, helping others, and doing what is right for everyone, not just ourselves.

Let’s stay together on this

As we said at the start, we want to make this into a community where we can all stay connected and share our ideas and stories and stay plugged in to what is happening. If you want to hear more, enter your email address below, or share your thoughts and feelings in the comments.