‘You should have listened!’ James Bloodworth writes at the International Business Times.

It was, as the former home secretary Jack Straw recently admitted, a ‘spectacular mistake’ to throw open the doors in 2004, a ‘well-intentioned policy we messed up’.  Labour expected only around 13,000 migrants a year to arrive in Britain; instead the figure was in the hundreds of thousands, hitting a record level of 333,000 just four weeks ago….

Hostility to immigration – and by extension hostility to Europe – is driven by cultural concerns as much as by economic worries. That’s certainly what the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory has been saying in recent years. It has pointed out on a number of occasions that cultural concerns better explain negative attitudes towards migration than a person’s economic position. In essence it is about whether England feels like England.

Instead, as he points out, critics of immigration were either said to be driven by fears about their personal wealth, or by darker racist undertones.  The real issue was always preserving a civilization with a bright tradition of liberty and a feeling of being at home.

That is what this mass migration was destroying, however firmly that immigration was insisted upon by the European Union’s elite, the Labour party, and the Tories.  Vox explains that immigration as the whole cause of the Brexit vote.  This one graph, they claim, shows why the vote went the way it did.

Much of the immigration was from Eastern Europe, but the sense of watching one’s civilization destroyed from within was probably fired chiefly by incidents featuring a rampant and radical Islam.  Protests demanding sharia law provoked not a defense of British tradition by the government, but an attempt to silence native Britons who were offended by the idea of setting aside their laws and traditions.  Incidents in which Muslim street gangs enforced sharia law in London cut against the sense of England being England, as the traditions of the neighborhood pub and good honest beer came under literal attack.  Murders of British soldiers in the streets, with chants of “You and your children will be next,” told the British people that their government was not defending their home or their way of life.

And, of course, there was the ongoing saga of Rotherham, where police turned a blind eye to a Pakistani-led child-rape ring for more than a decade.  “There was a Home Office investigation into charges that Tony Blair’s government had known of the ring as early as 2001, but did nothing because it conflicted with ‘his government’s efforts to pacify Muslim communities.’”

These same forces are at work all across Europe.  The BBC states:

For Europe, it is a political earthquake. No country has voted to leave the EU in its present form before. It will encourage other parties in other countries to hold similar referendums. The leader of the Far Right in France, Marine Le Pen, immediately welcomed the result.

France is one of the core members of the European Union, but the sentiment is rising perhaps faster in the other major remaining member:  Germany.  The German government has gone beyond England’s in its intense suppression of concerns about mass immigration destroying the native culture.  It has also gone beyond England in trying to import vast numbers of refugees and new immigrants, especially from the Islamic world.  It has done so in spite of clear evidence that these cultures clash severely with Germany’s own, such as the mass sexual assaults in Cologne, brutal attacks on Christian refugees by Muslim refugees, a substantial increase in crime including Islamist street gangs, and the introduction of sex-segregation in German swimming pools and on German trains.

There is no European Union without France and Germany.  The refusal of the elites to listen to these legitimate cultural concerns has driven a vast increase in the popularity of so-called “right wing” political organizations in both central countries.  The EU itself is endangered by its refusal to heed the people’s concerns.

This is as it should be.  The purpose of politics, Aristotle tells us, is not just a common market, not just “a common place, established for the prevention of mutual crime and for the sake of exchange.”  It aims at a good life, he says, in which families and members of cities share a common culture of amusements, brotherhoods, traditions, and celebrations.  Alternatively, the American founders wrote that the purpose of any government is the protection of liberty.  A government that becomes destructive to the traditional liberties of its people ought to be altered or abolished, and replaced with something better suited to the true purpose of government.  The EU fails both the ancient and the modern tests of legitimacy.

It is a new day for the British, a day of freedom.  They have struck a blow for “Merry England and Saint George,” as befits the best part of their heritage.  Others are sure to follow them.