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Lau Nai-keung says the UK referendum has highlighted the flaws in such democratic exercises - they neglect the interests of future generations and ignore the long term

We witnessed another world historic moment last Thursday as Britain voted to leave the European Union, a decision that surprised many and whose consequences are still not totally clear.

British Prime Minister David Cameron has announced that he will leave office following his fellow citizens' vote to exit the EU. We were amazed. This is the person who decided to give the British people the "simple choice" between staying in the EU under renegotiated terms or leaving the EU. After the vote he announced that he would resign, leaving a mess. And we are supposed to applaud this "liberal democracy"?

This reminds us of the new breed of innocent-sounding so-called self-determination people in Hong Kong's opposition camp. They say they are neither for nor against the city's independence from China, but merely trying to give Hong Kong people a "simple choice" by the means of a referendum. If the Hong Kong dollar crashed after such a referendum returned a "Leave" vote - just as the British pound did after Brexit - I wonder how these people would respond. Perhaps they would say "tough luck", or perhaps they would regret it just like many of the British people who opted for a "Leave" vote did.

In addition to economic and social consequences, Brexit is interesting from the perspective of a political narrative.

First of all, it is interesting to see how different generations react differently to globalization and integration. Brexit is, at its heart, about immigration. Exit polls have shown that almost three-quarters of voters aged 18 to 24 wanted to remain in the EU. By contrast, more than 60 percent of seniors aged 65 and over voted to leave.

Xenophobia exists in basically every country. The UK is no exception: Polling data show high levels of hostility to immigrants going back decades before mass immigration began. But the huge increase in immigration in the past 20 years made this sentiment politically potent, fueling an anti-immigrant backlash.

"Between 1993 and 2014 the foreign-born population in the UK more than doubled from 3.8 million to around 8.3 million," Oxford researchers Cinzia Rienzo and Carlos Vargas-Silva write. "During the same period, the number of foreign citizens increased from nearly 2 million to more than 5 million."

Some commentators are suggesting the real lesson of Brexit is that ordinary Britons are bearing an unacceptably high economic cost from immigration. We in Hong Kong are very familiar with this argument.

There is just one problem: This narrative isn't actually true, as far as the situation in the UK is concerned. Data show that Britain wasn't suffering harmful economic effects from having too many new migrants. Research, for example, found no correlation at all between areas where wages have fallen since 2002 and the share of votes for "Leave" in the referendum.

Once again, we are reminded that a narrative need not be factually correct to be effective.

However, the question still remains: If economics is the concern, why is xenophobia more prevalent among the older people, who are less disrupted by changes in the labor market?

On the other hand, young people are more open to integration with less well-off European countries. "The younger generation has lost the right to live and work in 27 other countries. We will never know the full extent of the lost opportunities, friendships, marriages and experiences we will be denied. Freedom of movement was taken away by our parents, uncles, and grandparents in a parting blow to a generation that was already drowning in the debts of our predecessors," a student in the UK wrote.

The Brexit debate has highlighted a society's inter-generational tension like never before. Not only are the issues split along generation groups, but there will also emerge a whole new case against electoral politics.

"Despite young people having to live with the decision of the referendum for an average of 69 years, it has been decided for them by people who will only have to live with it for an average of 16 years," a young pro-EU British pundit wrote.

It is common sense that the yet-to-be-born have no votes. They are disenfranchised just like slaves, black people and women before them. But we seldom hear people complain about electoral politics in this light. From a philosophical standpoint, this criticism is beyond the issue of Brexit. Current voters are always deciding things for the next generation who mathematically will have to live with the decision for a longer time. Does this suggest democracy is fundamentally unjust, or will democracy evolve to also take into account those who cannot vote?

(HK Edition 06/28/2016 page10)