I went straight out and bought a bottle of champagne. I have been waiting for this moment for most of my life. I was in high school when it was announced that Heath was taking us into the EEC (without a vote on the matter). In 1975 I was just too young to vote, but I was appalled that people still went for it, even though at the time I did not know about the lies told by Heath and Wilson to get us in and keep us there. Of course, things went downhill after that, when the inevitable happened and the EEC became the EU (without a vote), and then there were further losses of sovereignty with the constitution (hidden in other treaties when it was rejected) — once again without a vote.
I also thought at the time that the fight for freedom from the EU bureaucrats had only just begun. I did not imagine that we would be allowed to leave, simply because we had a democratic vote to do so. The EU does not believe in democracy, it is based on the idea that politicians know best, and the electorate should shut up and do as they are told. I thought the political elites that have most to gain from our membership would do all in their power to subvert that result and keep us in, and such has been the case. We have been landed with a Quisling Prime Minister who bypassed her own Brexit secretaries and handed the job to the EU’s primary agent in Britain (Ollie Robbins), which is exactly what you would expect if you had followed what happened with the Greek negotiations. So, naturally, instead of simply making all due preparations to leave and become an independent country again (like most of the world), the process has been a shambles, with May concentrating on keeping us as much tied to the EU as she could without sparking popular unrest. But the process has started, and cannot be stopped.
We also saw which parts of the press were not actually British press but Brussels press, particularly The Independent, The Guardian, and the BBC, and that has been useful to know. I hope people will remember, as things play out, those that tried to play on people’s fears and attempted to scare people into staying.
Finally, one of the most valuable things has been the chaotic scenes we have seen in parliament, and the machinations that have been carried out by those politicians wedded to Brussels to thwart the will of the majority of Britons. We have now started to see remainer MPs leaving the two main parties and forming a new one that is unabashedly in favour of the EU. This is a good thing, although it looks like it isn’t at first glance. The problem we have always had is that a good number of politicians wanted in to the EEC/EU against the will of the people (in 1970 only 15% were in favour of joining the EEC). However, this difference could not be expressed at the ballot box, because all three major parties were in favour. That only started to change with the growth of UKIP, and it was the threat from UKIP (who ended up with one MP, even though they had more votes than the SNP, which had 20) that finally caused the Conservative party to allow us to vote on who we wanted to be ruled by. A division whereby Labour and the Conservatives (along with a UKIP-like party perhaps) are against and Liberal Democrats and these new Independents are in favour means we can once again express what we want peacefully, at the ballot box.
As far as the Conservative party is concerned, there is also underway a much-needed clean-out. Over the last 40 years, Conservative Central Office has made sure that EU-supporting candidates are selected. Now, we are getting those people ousted and replaced by those that represent their electorate and the UK, not themselves, the political elites, and Brussels.
Ultimately, this makes democracy in the UK stronger, even as it gets weaker on the Continent as ‘ever closer union’ brings more and more power into the hands of unelected and unrepresentative elites.
