Ed West writes in The Catholic Herald of Britain:

I’ve often wondered if Ukip is not some sort of latter day Puritan revolt; if you look at maps of their support it is strongest in the eight counties that were involved in the Great Migration [to New England in the 1630s], from Lincolnshire down to Kent. These are the areas where Protestantism was strongest but even before that they were traditionally rebellious; Kent, Essex and East Anglia were the homes of the Peasants Revolt and the following century Kent was home to the Cade rebellion, when angry yeomen turned on what we’d now call the liberal elite. The most rebellious folk were the upper peasantry, the yeomen, the same social class who today are the most likely to support Ukip, and the peasants revolt wasn’t in fact called that until centuries later. The 1381 uprising also had a strongly xenophobic undertone, and when they reached London they attacked the Flemish migrants. These are the most Protestant parts of England and not coincidentally the most eurosceptic, but as the polls show, Nigel Farage’s party also has considerable support among papists.

I wonder why post-Puritans have opposite feelings on immigration in the UK and the US?

In recent years, I’ve spent a little bit of time in the most post-Puritan parts of America, like Stockbridge, MA and Chautauqua, NY, those beautiful little towns west of Boston with so many colleges and bookstores. I visited Mark Twain’s tomb in Elmira, NY, where it’s evidently customary to smoke a contemplative cigar and leave the butt on his gravestone.

I liked the region quite a bit, in part because it’s so out of touch with the rest of modern America. There are few low skill immigrants, in part because there are so few construction jobs. The whole place was relatively prosperous in the past, so it’s full of buildings, but now that air conditioning exists, lots of people would rather live somewhere to the south.

It’s still a moderately influential part of the country because of its colleges and high cultural standards. So it would be great if anybody could figure out how to penetrate their cognitive cocoons and get these post-Puritans to grasp that those horrible people in Arizona aren’t objecting to mass immigration just to annoy them.