We should have warned the English, shouldn't we?

After our own experience in Scotland in 2014 we should have told them that referendums are highly dangerous things. They're not just about policies or politicians we don't like -- the temporary stuff -- they're about national identity.

Referendums stir up vicious, divisive feelings about who we are and who our country belongs to. They polarise opinion and allow people to express extreme, racist views on foreigners and immigration. They can lead, tragically, to violence and hate crime.

Hitler loved referendums. That was his kind of deadly democracy.

Even when a referendum vote is long gone, the divisions fester on in people's minds. As some of the hurtful things said in Scotland in 2014 still do. As Jo Cox's awful death will.

Most of all, though, we should have warned our children. We should have told them what could happen, what the terrible risks were. Because although younger people voted overwhelmingly to stay in the EU, they have been landed with a decision which will make their world unnecessarily anti-community, intolerant and regressive. Backward-looking. Small-minded. Illiberal. Much more right-wing.

Exactly the things they're not.

It is any wonder that the international figures celebrating Brexit are Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Kim Jong-un, Marine Le Pen and other far-right activists?

This is catastrophic. This is what makes me, the mother of one of the millennial generation, so angry about what happened last week. I'm furious for young people, because it is they who will have to deal with the mess which older generations, the majority of Leave voters, have dumped on them.

The under-30s simply don't see things in such binary terms, in extremes of black or white, or love or hate. They're more easy-going and nuanced. They're not into borders and boundaries and restrictions. The internet makes a mockery of such things. Besides, they are far more open-minded and forward-looking than their parents. Their busy, fast, open, globalised modern world is about tolerance, progressive policies and kindness. It's what they know.

The younger generations are better at hugging and communicating and supporting each other than we were. They have been brought up with wider horizons. There's a lot more love about now. In the referendum they voted overwhelmingly, by more than three in every four, to stay in the EU. Because, in its purest concept, and for all its flaws, the EU represents peace and cooperation with other human beings.

The millennial generation can send messages around the world in a click; they have friends with skin colour of every hue and friends who are working aboard; they can travel cheaply without restrictions, or buy fashionable clothes for under a tenner.

These are high-speed kids who get irritated if their smart phones are two seconds slow in picking up free Wi-Fi. How will they cope with queuing for visas or paying extortionate costs for an air ticket or seeing mates of different colour being discriminated against?

All my girlfriends, mothers of children in their late teens and twenties, are having the same conversations -- listening to the shock, tears, anger and dismay of our offspring, but unable to offer any reassurance. As one friend's daughter put it: "The vote was won by people aged 60 and upwards -- and with all due respect they're going to be dead in 20 years or so, but it's us who are going to have to live with the consequences."

Another young Scot, who has just got a job, her first, in the European travel industry, is equally devastated. What will her fate be? Laid off no sooner than she is trained?

That's exactly what Middle-England's baby boomers, in voting Leave, have done -- utterly betrayed our young people. I think that it is incredibly selfish of them. Already I am hearing of families split by division -- a young man incapable of speaking to his parents because they live in East Anglia and voted out. It has caused a real rift.

In kicking back against the political elite, a knee-jerk of resentment, older Britons have also kicked their own children and grandchildren in the teeth. The referendum was a lethal combination; a perfect storm. Three things came together. There was the deep-rooted euroscepticism of a large section of the Conservative party -- those right-wing Shire Tories, seeking a return to some 1950s nostalgic island idyll -- combined with the failure by the abysmal Jeremy Corbyn to lead his neglected, alienated Northern Labour voters.

Then there was immigration, the sense that white Britain, its jobs, housing and NHS were under threat from incomers, and the referendum turned.

The inevitable result was that the young were stuffed.

What makes it worse was that much of the argument was based on cynical, blatant lies by the Leave campaign. Such as the myth that £350m a week which went to the EU could be diverted to save the NHS. Or Nigel Farage's appalling poster about levels of immigration being at breaking point, which played to the darkest, most racist currents. The Leave campaign have known all along they will never, in the real world, be able to stop immigration.

Young people are sickened by this. Rightly so.

Although I voted Remain, I feel embarrassed and ashamed to be in my fifties, to be representative of older generations who have had it pretty good all their lives, yet have now slapped the young in the face. We had it easy, for the most part: free education, lots of job opportunities, stable careers, good pensions, nice houses -- none of which we have bequeathed to our kids.

And now we've quite happily taken away from our children the keys to a future in a globalised society, just because we don't like change, don't like foreigners, feel resentful of them coming here and taking over things we paid for. Oh, and by the way, we fully expect the young to keep working hard though, because we need them to pay our pensions and fund the NHS for us as we get old and fail.

Social media is rightly buzzing with protest. I hope that young people will organise huge, peaceful demonstrations in the big cities to show politicians, and the country, just how furious they are. I hope more enter politics, get engaged, spread the word of moderate, tolerant, progressive politics.

And I hope against hope, for their sake, some bright, steady, calm minds find a way to re-run or block the secession from the EU.

Comment by Melanie Reid. Melanie's Spinal Column appears in The Times Saturday magazine.