Below is a reply in the comments page in response to this article
The editor points out that we are potentially facing the gravest national humiliation since Suez. He is right, but that is to miss the broader question, and is understatement.
Suez was a calamity and our reputation was traduced. But there was no threat to democracy, no destruction of our Constitution. Politicians were to blame, prestige was lost, we thought differently about ourselves as a military power. We moved on.
This is different.
If A50 is revoked, or Brexit in Name Only is passed; if we witness a powerful political class defy the Referendum result, after a relentless and massively funded campaign over two years, of propaganda, distortion and threats; if they are permitted to act directly contrary to the national interest and on behalf of an obviously hostile and increasingly aggressive foreign power, and get away with it; if they surrender control of our Armed Forces, as PESCO permits them to do; then we will lose so much more than was lost after Suez.
Westminster will become a powerless regional assembly; we will lose any meaningful democratic control; the Common Law will be sacrificed to the European Napoleonic Code; the Armed Forces, steadily and with time, will learn to answer to Brussels and not Westminster; we will become as the Catalans are to Spain, and that subject status will not easily be reversed.
But it is broader even than that.
The ideology against which Brexit is a reaction, is the One World Government utopianism of Bertrand Russell, and we have rejected it. We have rejected the idea that we can only avoid state level warfare by ceding sovereignty to an International Authority; to wise men who govern in the interest of all of us, and whose authority is absolute. That ideology is in plain view, and very determined; we see it in the delegates at Davos; we see it in the necessary rejection of democracy which so many EU leaders are unashamed to declare; we see it in the relentless acquisition of ever more power, and return of none, which informs EU policy.
We also begin to see its sheer nastiness, and to taste its authoritarianism. Herman Achille, the Count van Rompuy, speaks of the ‘knife on our throat’, Donald Tusk, speaks of a ‘special place in Hell’ for those who disagree, Michel Barnier speaks of his job as an exercise in making the departure of our nation from the EU so unpleasant that we wish to remain, a deliberate act of hostility against all of Europe, not merely the UK. In France, Emmanuel Macron, who has presented himself as the first defender of the globalist ideology, presides over a regime which begins to have the look of authoritarianism, ruthlessly cowing protesters with heavy force. Dissenting opinions are increasingly suppressed using technology and a panoply of newly enacted law.
And it is false, even on its own terms. Globalist institutions are not responsible for the post war peace. NATO, an alliance of sovereign nation states, has kept the peace, together with a healthy dose of bourgeois liberty that causes people to take more interest in their garden than their nation – and that’s a good thing.
So we are at a moment of choice, and the stakes could not be higher. If we do not stand up now, peacefully and respectfully, we stand to lose everything which will guarantee that our children inherit a country worth living in, the legacy left us by our parents and grandparents.
Leave supporters now need to ask ourselves these questions.
If I do not speak out then what will I say to my grandchildren, who will grow up in a terrible dystopia?
If not now, then when?
If not me, then who?
Time is short.