‘Brexit jihadis’: British liberal leader blasts over-65s who voted to leave EU

by WorldTribune Staff, August 6, 2017

Those who voted for Brexit are “predominantly elderly” people who were “obsessed by the worry of 80 million Turks coming over and being in their village,” the leader of Britain’s Liberal Democrats said.

Vince Cable, writing in the Mail on Sunday, blasted Brexit supporters over age 65 as “self-declared martyrs” after a YouGov poll showed more than a third of Leave supporters would give up their own job to get out of the European Union (EU).

Vince Cable

The 74-year-old Cable wrote that he was “struck by … the heavily Brexit mood of church-hall meetings packed with retired people,” adding that elderly voters were “imposing a worldview colored by nostalgia for an imperial past on a younger generation much more comfortable with modern Europe.”

“Martyrdom of the old comes cheap, since few have jobs to lose,” Cable wrote. “To describe such masochism as ‘martyrdom’ is dangerous,” he added, saying that an “undercurrent of violence” in the language of people who opted to leave the EU could lead to violent “jihad” in the name of Brexit.

“We haven’t yet heard about ‘Brexit jihadis’ but there is an undercurrent of violence in the language which is troubling,” Cable wrote. “We have already had the most fervent of Brexiteers, such as Nigel Farage, warning of civil unrest if the ‘will of the people’ is frustrated.’ For the Brexit martyrs, paradise beckons.”

Cable also slammed “sinister” calls by UK government ministers to oust anti-Brexit trade envoys, who they accused of “talking Britain down” as it leaves the EU.

“This is how McCarthyism started,” Cable wrote. “At this rate, we will have Brexit thought crimes before long. Perhaps it is not surprising that the Brexiteers are becoming desperate.”

Cable, who in June said he was holding informal talks with Tory Remain supporters to sabotage Brexit, had said last month that people he met during the referendum campaign were mostly older voters and poor people in “second-tier” northern towns “who were obsessed by the worry of 80 million Turks coming over and being in their village.”

“Immigration was a massive issue for them although they never actually encountered any,” Cable said, adding that “in that age group … there was a sense of nostalgia – the Britain that they’d been brought up in and loved and were comfortable with was no longer there.”


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