COMMENT: Britain is no longer a country for the young, it belongs to the small-minded and the hateful

There was a time when nostalgia was considered to be a disease. In 1688, a Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer identified this new condition in his country’s soldiers who wanted to go home. The word came from the Greek nostos, the longing for home, and algos, meaning pain. In 1733, a Russian officer was rumoured to have found a cure. He is said to have buried a homesick soldier alive. There were other treatments for the condition too. Some referred to it as “hypochondria of the heart.”

The nostalgia that drove some of the 17 million people in the UK who voted to leave the EU on Thursday is a crippling strain of the illness. Those who suffer from it will discover that there is no going back to the home they long for. The place in their minds where they feel they will be safe from the dangers of the modern world doesn’t exist. It's hard to find somewhere which will protect you from modern life.

The world has always been a dangerous place. We sentimentalise the past because we’ve survived it or never experienced it, but what happened in the UK this week was an act of self-destruction of terrifying proportions driven by a belief that they can somehow go backwards.

Britain became a more fearful place on Friday, a place driven by the hypochondria of the heart, a neurotic, wearying country which, just like a hypochondriac, believes diseases are afflicting him which don’t afflict him at all.

Look at some of the areas which voted to Leave. They have the fewest immigrants and, in many instances, they receive the largest subsidies from the EU.

But populism feeds on feelings and is less interested in facts. “The British people are sick of experts,” Michael Gove said during the campaign which is as good a definition of populism as anything. On Friday, Nigel Farage said the Leave campaign pledge that £350 million a week given to the EU would go to the NHS was a “mistake”.

For those who woke up wondering what they had done, this might have been a sobering moment. Others including Boris Johnson and Gove may also be struggling with the consequences of their achievement. Johnson may become prime minister after David Cameron’s resignation, but that, which under ordinary circumstance would be a cause for alarm, is a triviality compared to the dire consequences of this vote for Britain and Europe.

Farage thrives under these conditions. He is not a man for experts. During the campaign, he told reporters that he was back on cigarettes because “I think the doctors have got it wrong on smoking”.

Farage was not part of the official Leave campaign, but he plays on the fears of many who voted that way. He tells those suffering from hypochondria of the heart that there is something wrong with them: he calls it immigration. The poster campaign he launched on the day Jo Cox was murdered showed a vast queue of refugees with the headline ‘Breaking Point’. He was accused of Nazi-style propaganda, but he apologised only for the timing.

The referendum decision was, most depressingly, a betrayal of the young by the old. 75 per cent of those aged 18-24 voted Remain. Leave only had a majority among those over 50. In that, as in so  much, it was not just a self-destructive act, but an act of vandalism too.

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It vandalised the future for the young who had rejected the fearful visions of their elders and, instead, approached life with ambition and hope.

On Friday morning in Versailles, I sat in a café close to Ireland’s training base and watched French TV cover the referendum. People were celebrating on TV. There were young men holding union jacks and middle-aged men and women who, if they were experiencing joy, seemed to be only able to show it by making angry, taunting faces. They were, of course, all white and represented the suffocating Britain the country is in danger of becoming.

Twenty years ago, I moved to London. Three months ago, I came back to Dublin, with the intention of staying initially for a year. I had never grown tired of London and miss it and the friends I made. It is the most welcoming of cities, paradoxically because it leaves you alone to live your life which has always been an English gift.

On Friday morning, for the first time since we left, I found myself thinking we would never go back, that I was glad we had left if that was what England wanted to be.

My wife, daughter of a man from Abbottabad and a woman from Derbyshire who raised their family in a tolerant, expansive England, texted to say we would now get an Irish passport for our son and explore how she could become an Irish citizen.

Another friend in London, the grandson of a Jewish man who left Lithuania in the 1930s to live in the north-east of England, wondered what would happen to his German girlfriend in the new Britain. Is she not one of “the real friends” Farage talked about when he looked forward to his independent UK which would turn its back on Europe?

Some say the worst fears won’t be realised, but the thing is the worst fears were the goal of those who preach distrust and hatred. Voting for Leave was not a vote for the unknown, it was a vote for the known: the grinning face of Nigel Farage.

And yet the consequences already seem like a brutal shock. It was possible to believe in something as the Remain campaign made its case - to take some heart from the reaffirmation of the benefits of closer ties with Europe and the comfort of living in a post-nationalist world with progressive values. It was possible to see beyond the genuine frustrations with the EU and look at what it had achieved and how that is necessary now more than ever.

Perhaps, if the vote had passed, it would have been worth the ugliness of the campaign to see those values upheld, to see a country rediscovering the virtues of tolerance and understanding which are part of the Britain most of us have lived in.

Instead it feels as if the UK has been handed over to the pettiest of people, the leaders who demonise the other. It was as if Ireland had rejected the marriage equality referendum, rather than discovering a better version of the country through the process of voting Yes. Now the rough beast is slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.

The UK remains a parliamentary democracy, the referendum was advisory, not mandatory, as David Allen Green has explained, and maybe the worst will somehow be avoided when people realise what they have done. As someone in London put it on Friday, “these people aren’t in charge. The grown-ups are in charge.” He hoped they could somehow row back from this decision and all its appalling consequences.

The grown-ups might have been able to do that, but the grown-ups have been on the margins in a debate dominated by the immature, irrational and hateful. The grown-ups don’t seem to have a voice in a Britain which now belongs to the old who only look back, the scared and the intolerant.