Hannah Scott: It's the young who have to live with EU vote

Along with many other young people who wanted to stay part of the European Union, I feel as though we have been ignored by those who are older and in power, who did not consider what we wanted to happen.

Different generational upbringings mean that many of those who voted to leave have done so with their old world ways of thinking – which many young people would disagree with. Those dated thoughts and opinions will now mould our futures.

Young people are much more open-minded and can allow for our country to grow and develop. We have the ideas and the passion to do great things but feel we can’t because of a lack of communication and understanding between age groups.

Young people are educated on topics like Europe and Brexit. We know what is happening. Yet we can demonstrate time and time again that we are not being taken seriously.

Many people my age who I speak to believe we are having our future picked out for us by a generation who were, quite frankly, scaremongered into voting to leave. Many older people who voted to leave used immigration as their reason for Brexit.

But that’s such an awful way to look at it. Having spoken to people who voted for this reason, it seems to me that they are extremely closed-minded. Don’t want refugees? It’s ridiculous that we would turn our backs on the rest of the world – least of all for the very reason that we should consider how we would react if we were the refugees.

It may seem unlikely, but what if we needed help in the future? What if we had to evacuate our families? Nobody will help us – why would they? We have singled ourselves out and, by leaving, we are alone and isolated.

We are going to have to live with the consequences of what happens when we officially leave the EU. It will make our whole lives more difficult. We are going to have no ability to travel through Europe like we do now, again cutting us off.

From the viewpoint of a young person, we have the right to influence politics. We want to do that. It will be us who lives in this future being decided right now, by a generation that refuses to take us into consideration.

Hannah Scott is studying journalism at the University of the West of Scotland in Ayr.