May the rafters ring with many rounds of cheers! Britain has voted to leave the European Union.

After hours of anxiety as the polls went on indicating a defeat for “Brexit” (the campaign for Britain to exit Europe), good news came at last – all the more glorious for being sudden and unexpected.

Nigel Farage, leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party, made a very good victory speech:

Prime Minister David Cameron, who had argued passionately for a “remain” vote, has announced that he will resign.

To add to our pure delight, we find cause for Schadenfreude too. The hard Left is bitter and furious. The Guardian, for instance – which recently carried an op-ed by the evil George Soros urging Britons to vote to remain – headlines: “Nigel Farage’s victory speech was a triumph of poor taste and ugliness.” The typical snobbery of the Left on full display as disappointment bites.

And the prospect of yet more joy looms ahead. The (London) Times (which has dispensed with its paywall for 24 hours so its opinion on this enormous event can be easily accessed) promises:

The dream of a united Europe is over. … Britain decided to walk away “without a shot being fired”, as Nigel Farage put it when dawn broke this morning.

Brexit will strike terror into the hearts of European governments and force a dramatic rethink of the organisation which aimed to bind nation states tightly together in the name of peace and prosperity.

Britain, the EU’s second-largest net funder, is the first country to walk away and the fear of contagion is real. Most European leaders also know they would struggle to win an in-out referendum. That is why they are so desperate to avoid one. …

The British referendum had already forced even Jean-Claude Juncker, the arch-federalist president of the European Commission – the institution which proposes all those directives and regulations – to admit that the EU meddled too much in everyday life.

There will be many declarations around the continent today that the show must go on and the British must not be allowed to bring the whole edifice crashing down. …

However, Europe’s ruling elite knows that the EU has to change. …

There were already some signs that senior EU figures grasped the seriousness of the situation. Donald Tusk, president of the European council, the forum for national leaders, said this month that European elites had to awaken from dreams of “all kinds of Utopias” such as the idea that nation states could be banished. “Obsessed with the idea of instant and total integration, we failed to notice that ordinary people, the citizens of Europe, do not share our euro-enthusiasm,” he said.

Breitbart sees it this way:

Brexit: Britain Votes with Trump, against Hillary, Obama 

British voters chose to “leave” the European Union on Thursday, defying the polls — and President Barack Obama, who had urged Britain to “remain” in the EU. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had also urged Britain to stay in the EU. Only Donald Trump had backed the campaign to leave.

Republican strategists had panned Trump’s decision to travel to the UK in the midst of campaign turmoil, and in the wake of his blistering attack on Hillary Clinton earlier this week.

Now, however, it looks like a risk that paid off handsomely, in the currency of foreign policy credibility.

Obama’s advice may have pushed some voters to “leave”. In April he warned British voters they would be at the “back of the queue” in trade with the U.S. if they left the EU. …

Trump, who happens to be in Scotland to open a golf resort, promised in May that leaving the EU would not put Britain at the “back of the queue”, and said: “I think if I were from Britain I would probably want to go back to a different system.” He reiterated that support last week, telling the Sunday Times: “I would personally be more inclined to leave, for a lot of reasons like having a lot less bureaucracy. … But I am not a British citizen. This is just my opinion.”

Perhaps this will prove to be a turning point; marking the limit to the leftward trend which has been taking the West back into medieval darkness; and the start of a return to the values of the Enlightenment.