From Infidel753:
For ordinary people’s profound attachment to their own countries and cultures (whose roots go back more than a millennium), for their objections to mass immigration unprecedented in the history of those lands, for their concerns about the encroachment of a corrupt and unelected EU oligarchy upon national laws and sovereignty — the mainstream parties have had no response to offer except scolding and name-calling. This has generally been true of right-wing mainstream parties as much as the left, driving voters toward fringe parties, some of them dangerously extremist.
(As a personal aside, my own family roots lie among just such ordinary people, in the unfashionable industrial cities of England. It was the Labour party government after World War II that gave them a chance at better lives, somewhat like the New Deal and the GI Bill in the US. That the party is now led by snobs infected with the same slimy, aristocratic disdain for ordinary people that it once rebelled against — this is beyond infuriating. Yes, there are some hints of such disdain among the Democratic left activist fringe in the US, but nothing like this bad — and the party leadership has not succumbed to it.)
The UK broke out of this pattern almost by accident when David Cameron, a Conservative prime minister as pro-EU as any other mainstream politician, called a referendum on leaving the EU. He did this primarily as a threat to strengthen his hand in dealing with the EU oligarchy, probably never seriously considering that voters might actually choose to leave. Even after the referendum, it took more than three years for a genuinely pro-Brexit figure — Johnson — to emerge as party leader. It could just as easily have been the Labour party that got out ahead on this issue; it should have been. But with the current leadership, such boldness was unthinkable — and now it will be the Conservative party that reaps the benefits.
It could have been worse.