Nationalist Populists? No, Just Democrats

Another day, another intolerant Guardian article sneering from behind empty phrases at their own readership. Jon Worth, an 'expert on EU affairs,' laments the rise of 'populist nationalists' over the 'positive solutions' of 'mainstream' parties. Let's see what the Guardian is going to accuse Eurosceptics of today: harsh anti-immigration rhetoric, ethnic nationalism, and, of course, being far-right. It's a familiar charge that Eurosceptics have often laboured under; we've been called mentally deficient, racist, xenophobic, nationalist, swivel-eyed, knuckle-dragging thugs, who could be wiped out by one cold winter.

One thing that these trendy politicians and politically correct commentators do not tell us, however, is that we represent 74% of the British electorate, and 51% of Europe as a whole. There are 30% of people who want to remain in the EU - and a far smaller percentage that wants a federal superstate. An even smaller number of people want a federal superstate under the current arrangement, and they're the ones calling the shots. That isn't many people. Across the whole country, it's probably in the tens of thousands. How can such a tiny minority of people ever find the nerve to call the tens of millions of people who oppose them that they are the extremists? People in this country, according to every single poll ever produced, overwhelmingly want limits on immigration, they overwhelmingly want to reassert the sovereignty of our elected parliament, and they overwhelmingly want to leave the European Union.

Those who oppose mass-immigration and more EU are not extremists. They are people who have grown tired of seeing their money poured down the drain that is Brussels, where £94,000,000,000 is affected by 'irregularities,' and throwing away more and more in net contributions each year. They do not want hundreds of thousands of more people coming into an already overpopulated and under-resourced country every year, radically transforming the places they were brought up in beyond all recognition. They do not want to have to support these people and bankrupt foreign countries with their tax bill when the services and prospects for their own dependents, and themselves, are woefully inadequate.

These concerns are not hard to understand; doing so does not make you an extremist, it makes you human. I have little to do with the inner-city suburbs and the low-income families that the EU has hit the hardest, but I have far more in common with them than the unelected inhabitants of Brussels and the MPs in the Westminster bubble. Our politicians have far more in common with the honourable gentlemen on the opposing benches than they do with the people of this country. Whether they genuinely cannot understand, or whether it is simply expedient for them not to do so, is irrelevant. They have not acted on the concerns of the people, and are now paying the price.

What is so hard to understand about the simple premise that people vote for anti-immigration and anti-EU parties because they want less immigration and less EU?