European Elections: Boris Johnson Likens Ukip Victory To 'Peasants' Revolt Against Brussels

'This Is A Peasants' Revolt,' Says Boris

Ukip's decisive victory in the European elections has been echoed by sceptic parties across the continent is a "peasants revolt" against Brussels bureaucracy.

Likening the party's voters to Wat Tyler's grubby medieval rebels, holding pitchforks and burning torches aloft as they charged on London, Johnson said the mainstream parties in Brussels could not afford to ignore the depth of feeling.

"There is a kind of peasants’ revolt going on, a jacquerie. From Dublin to Lublin, from Portugal to Pomerania, the pitchfork-wielding populists are converging on the Breydel building in Brussels – drunk on local hooch and chanting nationalist slogans and preparing to give the federalist machinery a good old kicking with their authentically folkloric clogs," the Mayor of London wrote in his Telegraph column.

Did Boris Johnson just call Ukip voters 'peasants'?

The three main parties, have been "figuratively slapped in the face with a wet kipper" in the UK, and the trend has followed across the European Union, Johnson said. And although some of the small parties were often "bizarre or downright potty", the majority of them, from left to right, share a dislike of the EU.

"The general slogan is simple: down with technocracy, down with bureaucracy, and give power back to the people!"

With around a third of the parliament now made up of protest parties, Johnson said it marked a significant shift in attitudes. "Imagine if a third of the MPs at Westminster were dedicated to the subversion and destruction of the House of Commons: I mean deliberately so dedicated, of course, not inadvertently."

"There is a revolt going on – and we know how Brussels generally reacts to such vulgar expressions of democratic feeling," he continued. "When people have voted against the federalist impulse in the past – like the populations of Denmark, or France – they have been asked to have another go; to vote again until they get the right answer."

"It isn’t good enough just to circle the wagons and tell the people of Europe to get stuffed, because next time the frustration of the electorate may be uncontainable. The message of the people to the Euro-nomenklatura is simple: changer ou mourir!"

Throughout the night, eurosceptic Conservative MPs said the results from across Europe proved their point.

Foreign Secretary William Hague said Brussels had to acknowledge the "deep disillusionment and deep dissatisfaction" of voters across Europe.

He told the BBC he believed that Ukip's support would switch for next year's general election: "They can have a free hit , they can have a vote that does not have the consequence of bringing the wrong government in.

"So it is very different to a general election."

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