The EU Referendum

As you may or may not know. I'm English. And 17, so just too young to vote. The EU referendum is a big topic right now, so I figured I might as well throw my opinion out there with all of the others. I'm sorry I didn't post much lately, but exams have been taking all of my time.

What annoys me the most about this Referendum, is that I and many of my friends didn't even get to vote in it.

If you look at the polls, the 16-18 group were strongly for remaining in the EU. At school, we had a vote in the 6th form (16-18 year olds) to see what we would vote. It was a 97% majority to remain.

So all these people, who wanted to remain in the EU, the ones who are going to be more directly affected by it than most of the voters. They didn't even get a voice. Meanwhile, the people who voted to leave? The majority were the elderly. The people who are retired, and won't have to deal with the impact on the future that Brexit will have.

We are the ones doing university in this. We are the ones who'll have to get jobs in a shaky financial market because of this. We are, if I'm bluntly honest, the people who will be affected by this. And if we got a voice, the slim difference means that the result would most likely be different. But we didn't get a voice.

That's not fair.

That's not right.

Yet we're the ones who have to live with it anyway.

Honestly, I didn't really bother to go into much detail in my research on the Referendum, because, really, there was no point. It wasn't like I was going to have a chance to cast my vote on voting day. But it is the principle of it, that there are thousands of people who wanted a vote, and weren't allowed to get one.

If there's any argument for lowering the voting age to 16, this is it. Why should we be forced to live in a world that is messed up by the previous generation?

So, that's my view. Maybe I'm just being a whiny Millennial. But if wanting to have a voice about my future is whiny, call me whiny. Because I'm not going to shut up anytime soon.