Furious 16-year-old and ‘proud European’ praised by Question Time viewers

A 16-year-old teenager laid the blame firmly at the former prime minister’s door for the gamble he took to try to see off a possible electoral threat from UKIP.

She told the Belfast audience: ‘I’d like to say you’re all right. This goes back much further than this week, but it goes much further than any of you have said it does. When the plans for the referendum were first announced, it goes back to David Cameron trying to negotiate in the EU.

‘David Cameron made the referendum policy because he didn’t want to risk losing ten or 15 seats to UKIP. And look where it’s got us.

‘This has always been because of the Tory party playing party politics with issues that are going to be huge generational changes for all of us.

‘I’m sixteen years old. I didn’t get a say in Brexit and I won’t get a say in Brexit because there is not going to be a second referendum as things stand. But either way, what we have to face is this is not an issue of parties not coming together.’

The audience member, however, did not believe a People’s Vote was likely.

‘This is not an issue of direct democracy, or what a People’s Vote can solve what it failed in the first place. What we need to look at is this is all caused by a party putting itself first before the country that it is trying to govern.

‘What we need to do is not look back to a People’s Vote. We need to look at a further extension and we can solve this where this could have all been avoided in the first place – by going back to a general election and representative democracy because that’s what this country was built on.’

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Meanwhile another audience member was also praised for proudly declaring herself as European during the programme as she held up her passports.

She told the panel: ‘I’m one of those people who doesn’t identified as Irish or British, the important thing on both of those passports is the ‘European Union’.

‘I am European and I want to remain European. I want to enjoy the rights I currently enjoy as a European citizen.

‘How can you assure me on the panel that this is going to happen, given my rights as a European citizen?

‘I want whatever my fellow citizens in Europe going forward enjoy. It’s about rights, it’s not about trade.

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‘I am one of a very small margianlised group of people in Europe. We didn’t gain any rights either in the Republic of Ireland nor the UK, except through the European Court of Justice.

‘We want to maintain that going forward.’