Nigel Farage Was Right

Farage to radio host Laura Ingraham:

...but the key argument today isn't the battle between free markets and state control, the key battle today is about community and identity, who are we as nations? Who are we as communities? How do we want to live? And this stuff has all been threatened by excessive immigration, and by things like our small businesses being closed down and our communities changing. The politics of the future, the politics of the next decade is about community and identity.

Source.

Appeal to Dwindling Core Proves Costly for Labour Party in Britain

But in the face of economic anxiety and the nationalist revolution in Scotland, which destroyed Labour’s inbuilt demographic advantage in a first past the post system that rewards regional concentrations of support, the core strategy backfired badly. Labour won 41 of Scotland’s 59 seats in Parliament in 2010. On Thursday, it won one, and it won very few seats from the Conservatives in England.

...These elections were more about identity than a left-right battle, Mr. Leonard said, not only in Scotland but in England, too, when Mr. Cameron used the prospect of a Labour government propped up by Scottish separatists to appeal to English nationalism. Labour failed to win many Conservative seats in England, taking gains there from left-leaning Liberal Democrats.

Labour this time got “squeezed by two nationalisms,” as Labour grandee and former strategist Peter Mandelson said, by the Scottish National Party and by English nationalism, not just by the Conservatives but in the form of a strong U.K. Independence Party vote in northern England. The anti-immigration, anti-European Union UKIP hurt the Conservatives in the south, but it had a big impact among Labour voters in the north, and was the main reason that Labour’s shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, lost his seat in Leeds to the Tories.