When I woke up on that warm 24th of June, at six o’clock, other than my regular neck ache, I felt something, a sense of disappointment. I knew Leave had lost the referendum. The exit polls had said that leave would lose. The bookies had said we would lose. My natural-born pessimism had seeped in.

Of course, I was in bed at this time. I was left to my thoughts. My own cynical thoughts. I hadn’t actually bothered to look at the news.

That was until my sister came screeching in exclaiming, “We are leaving the EU! You won!”

I had to make sure. “It couldn’t be,” I thought. “The people taking a stand? No chance. She must be pulling my leg.”

But lo and behold, it was true. Utterly. 52% for Leave to a 48% for Remain.

I won’t lie, I did cry. I’m not ashamed of it either. I’m rarely made happy by the political discourse, but this was the rare exception. I had actually had a sense of pride for the nation and the people who finally took a stand against its masters.

Lying there on my bed, since the power of this event had stunned me from getting up, I started to reflect on how far the movement to officially leave the EU had come to pass.

I recalled last year, at the start of the referendum campaign, right after the general election. I was in a conference hall, partly funded by the EU, for a rally on our “Future Relationship with the European Union”. It was a UKIP event. I found the event powerful. The smell of smoke filled the room. Reporters were standing by. It was full to the brim of people, young and old. Nigel Farage, the man to thank for bringing us this referendum in the first place, gathered to do his speech. Playing the song The Final Countdown by the band Europe, as he came down. The crowd was in rambunctious cheers and applause as he talked. They loved it.

As did I. I never considered myself a member of any movement until that day. I loved the power it invoked in me. I was with real people who truly believed in what they said. They didn’t care about Political Correctness, they believed in doing what was right.

My mind fast-forwarded to one of the days where I leafleted in a city center. In my gut, from the looks people gave me, the discussion with people on the busy street, even the diversity of the other leafleters, I felt that we were going to vote for Brexit. Leave had the arguments and it had the people behind it. Remain had University students prepping themselves for a degree in Politics.

I ignored my gut until the morning of the 24th and went with the bookies. A wise choice for most instances. But I was wrong, and I’m glad of it.

The white working class was truly key to this referendum, though, rejecting the usual, Center-Left consensus from their natural party, the extremely pro-European Labour party. They picked the chance of controlling their own borders as they thought for the future of their own kin. Only four of the constituencies in the poorest section of England, and Labour heartland, the North East, voted narrowly for a Remain vote, compared to the 11 constituencies that voted to leave. Things were similar in the Labour heartland of Wales.

[EU referendum results and maps: Full breakdown and find out how your area voted, by Malcolm Coles and Ashley Kirk, Telegraph (UK) June 24, 2016]

The Left wasn’t the only one shook up by the rebellion. Real Tories came out and defended their sovereignty in the south. They rejected the “Great” deal made by Prime Minister David Cameron, who can now be seen to be a political failure—a deal that even Cameron’s own MPs had a hard time praising. [EU deal: What David Cameron asked for... and what he actually got, by Peter Foster,Telegraph (UK), June 14, 2016 ] Though usually more loyal when it comes to Conservative policies, they decided they had had enough and voted with their hearts.

These people knew how the EU had harmed them. They were not blind sheep who blindly follow their party’s whims. They ignored the fear peddled by Obama, Cameron, Juncker, and every other “enlightened” expert. They knew that none of those people lived or had even been to the areas affected by the EU.

The working class saw the EU applied, and they didn’t like it. Nor did the real Tories in the south. The economic arguments used by Remainers, meant and mean nothing if their own quality of life was being squandered because of cheap labor and living in perpetual fear from the dangerous effects of immigration.

When Britain joined what was then deceptively European Economic Community in 1973, Britain was still reeling over a lost empire. We were stranded, and we stumbled onto what seemed like something we could latch onto. However, that quickly changed. The EEC became a unionist, empire-building political project. Enoch Powell, famous for his “Rivers of Blood” speech on immigration, knew this. He cost the Tory Party, which had he quit dramatically, the election by telling supporters to vote Labour in 1974, because it was offering a referendum on membership in the EEC.

Unfortunately, many didn’t see the upcoming globalist travesty that Enoch envisioned and in the 1975 referendum Britain gave a resounding “Yes” to the European Union (as it renamed itself, now frank about its political goal). They never knew what they were truly getting into. The small print was too tough to see. The back door was closed on them.

But now that they have seen the EU’s aims, and actually feel the impact that the EU can have on the “serfs”, they gave Merkel the rightfully deserved two fingers (in America this would be one finger) to her, her bureaucrats, and her project.

This was a triumph for the nationalist movement and for nationalism in all countries—whether or not people who voted realize this. This is bringing independence to the natural borders of nations. You cannot merge different cultures and races in a top-down system centered around a utopian vision. A nation can only truly look after its own. Europe is not a nation, nor should it be treated as such.

After our historic vote, real nations, places like Holland, Denmark, and even France, are already asking for their national identity back from the globalists in Brussels and Germany in similar “Brexit” referendums.

This is not perfection, as I might seem to be portraying it. Problems will be encountered. We need a democratically-elected government that actually will control its own borders, instead of that we have currently. Much of the damage is already done. Instead of having a neoliberal economic policy, we need an economic policy that actually cares about Britain’s own industries. In addition, we need a foreign policy, not made by NATO and the neocons of Washington DC.

The barrier of the EU would always prevent us from ever changing those matters. Our own major parties would like keep this up also. We can get rid of them though. We could not get rid of Brussels. Leaving the European Union is the right direction. It is not the right destination for making Britain truly, great.

Nationalists should praise what has happened to the UK for what it is; a sign of the shifting tide of opinion that has been constantly ignored by elite opinion. Hopefully Brexit will not be the last of the exodus. The European Union has gone onto too long. It is high time real nations broke free from its shackles.

Adam Young[Email him] is a writer, blogger, editor, and proud Briton