Juliana Fonseca’s voice falters then breaks before she begins to cry.
“The UK has made me who I am,” she says. “All the friendships I know, everything that I know, England has given it to me. This country is who I am. And for that to be taken away from me.”
Fonseca, a Portuguese 18-year-old who moved to the UK six years ago, is upset about Brexit. Since the 2016 referendum, she and her mother have applied for British residency seven times and have been rejected each time, she says.
Fonseca is a politics student at Dudley college, and while the potential consequences of Brexit are more stark for her than for her classmates, the dozen brought together by the Guardian to talk about their view on the UK leaving the EU are all on the same page.
In this pocket of the West Midlands, these young people are not bored of Brexit. They haven’t switched off. They are highly politicised and increasingly frustrated at a decision they had no say in and one made, in their view, by the “senior people” who did not fully understand the implications of a vote that will affect young people’s lives for decades to come.
The college is in Dudley North, a constituency in which the average age is 50, and voted by 71.4% to leave, one of the highest margins in the country. The local Labour MP, Ian Austin, is planning to back Theresa May’s EU withdrawal deal despite voting remain. But the young people in this group see things differently. Asked whether they would vote to leave, not a single one puts their hand up – even if that means going against their parents’ politics.
Over the years the town’s political landscape has been fairly unpredictable, a seat that has regularly passed between the two main political parties. The council is Labour but on a “knife edge”, with a majority of just one.
In 2014 eight Ukip councillors were elected and the National Front and BNP, already a minor presence on the towns’ streets, had started to become more visible. Some say that was a precursor to the referendum result.
The Dudley college students’ frustration with that result is compounded by the fact they were too young at the time to influence it. When 18-year-old Raheema Matsemela calls for the voting age to be lowered, they all nod in agreement.
“This decision was made on our behalf and that is incredibly frustrating,” she says. “It is something that will affect our lives economically and our freedom of movement. They thought they could get rid of immigrants by voting to leave: they were wrong. We are very afraid about our future.”
At the time of the vote, Fonseca says she and her mother did not fully grasp the effect it would have on their lives. They had moved to the UK from their home in Lisbon, driven away by Portugal’s economic crisis, with hopes of a new start – but the past three years have brought nothing but uncertainty.
Fonseca’s mother holds down four jobs including one as a cleaner and despite paying her taxes she did not have a say in the referendum. The persistent rejection of their residency applications since then has left Fonseca with deep concerns.
“My future is unclear,” she says. “I was 15 at the time of the vote. It has been more than two years of uncertainty and since then I have become a woman. I now understand the vote and I feel upset about the reasons people voted to leave – we have been made to feel unwelcome.”
As Fonseca becomes increasingly distressed, the other students shift in their seats uncomfortably. They all say at different points that they did not want to leave the EU, and many of them note that they were disappointed with the way their parents voted.
Chelsea Jones is one of the students who disagrees with her parents. “They have failed our generation,” she says. “This vote wasn’t about the EU, it was about sovereignty and patriotism and a way of clawing back some power, saying to the government that we don’t like you.”
“It is a mess,” says Georgia Kimberlin, who persuaded her father to vote remain but not her grandparents. “I keep getting told that I don’t have enough life experience, it’s frustrating to be shut down like that. This vote matters more to us than anyone else. We are the ones that will have to deal with its consequences.”
Trying to explain why people in the area voted resoundingly to leave is the students’ politics lecturer, Stuart Turner, a former Labour councillor and deputy leader of the council who knows all too well about the shifting sands of Dudley politics, losing his seat to the Tories in 2015.
“There was so much industry here – the steelworks, the foundries, even mining, these were well-paid, secure jobs. But all of that has gone and there was nothing to replace it,” he says. “This has built up years of resentment and that has been channelled towards immigrants. There is this belief that immigrants are somehow the reason for all the area’s problems. And that is the danger; this inability to separate the fact from fiction.”
The area’s young people, of course, are not a monolithic group. On a dreary Monday night at Dudley’s Jigsaw youth theatre during rehearsals for a Dickensian comedy, there is one voice which drowns out all the others.
Sam Jones, a 17-year-old college student, says given the chance, he would have voted leave, as his parents did.
“I don’t agree with certain aspects of the EU, the currency, being part of this alliance,” he says. “I would rather be British than European.”
The teenager says the vote was about immigration. “I don’t agree with the amount of people coming over. We need to have a system similar to that in Australia where we allow people in based on their skills rather than everyone,” he adds.
However, his is a lone voice in the room.
Chantelle Baker, 28, a recruitment consultant who has been part of the theatre since she was a teenager, says it is these European workers that Sam wants to shut out that she needs to fill jobs.
“I don’t feel as a country we should have been put in this position. It was all based on fear and otherism and preyed on people’s vulnerabilities. Provocative, aggressive talk which manipulated people.”
For Fonseca the thought of being asked to leave is too much. “I cannot go back to Portugal,” she says. “We have nothing there. This is our home.”
Constituency: Dudley North
• Average age: 50
• Average house price: £120,000
• Percentage non-UK born: 7.1%
• MP: Ian Austin (Labour)
• MP’s intended vote on May’s deal: Austin is planning to back deal despite voting remain.
• Referendum result: leave 71.4%
