It is no surprise that the losers in the EU referendum should be using every trick in the book in order to undermine the result, including grossly exaggerating the difficulties involved in making our departure. However it is disappointing that someone like Christopher Booker, who speaks sense on such matters as climate change, and the appalling behaviour of social workers and courts concerning the forced removal of children from families, and who has written so eloquently about the iniquities of the EU, should now be obsessed with what he considers the only means available for leaving, namely remaining within the European Economic Area. He also claims that the UK is so tightly tied into current international agreements that we cannot escape from the problems which provoked the vote to leave in the first place.
For the most part politicians think only in the short term, and media commentators follow their lead, yet there are occasions in the life of a nation when a great historical change takes place, reducing much of what in normal times would be considered important to insignificance. One can think of how, as Britain faced up to the Nazis, one of the most evil regimes in history, government minister Sir Howard Kingsley Wood, when asked about bombing the Black Forest said "Oh you can not do that, that’s private property. You’ll be asking me to bomb the Ruhr next." Wood was actually instrumental in helping to bring Churchill to power in May 1940 yet he could still fail to see just how meaningless such an objection was in the face of the reality.
We are told that whatever we do, we will still be obliged to pay as much as £50 billion to Brussels, while non EU bodies, such as the European Convention on Human Rights, will force us to continue to accept hundreds of thousands of migrants. Are we really to tell those people waiting on trollies in A and E departments, to be treated by an NHS starved of funds, that the money that could save them must go instead to Brussels? Must youngsters in the depressed manufacturing areas, who cannot find a decent job, watch the employment they might have had given to those from abroad, because selfish employers can recruit the latter for wages that offer no hope to British workers, and lawyers tell us we can do nothing about it? We constantly hear the refrain that we must give jobs to migrants, as the indigenous population refuse to take them, but it it surprising that this is so? Pay people fairly and they will not refuse to take the jobs.
The decision to leave the EU is as significant a step as was our break with Rome in the 16th Century, the Civil War, the Restoration, the Glorious Revolution or the decisions to oppose Napoleon, the Kaiser or Hitler. It is not some piffling administrative change, to be organised by lawyers, but concerns the Ship of State taking a completely different direction, and it must not be thwarted by legal quibbles, or the servile observance of the terms of agreements made by quislings who had never asked for, or received, the approval of the people, as they gave away our right to rule ourselves. Can one imagine Cromwell allowing such considerations to deflect him, when he threw out the corrupt parliament which had betrayed the people, in order to restore England to herself and to create the fundamentals of the country we live in today?
When we first set up UKIP we promised that on the day we won a parliamentary majority we would pass a bill revoking the 1972 Act of Accession and inform the masters of the EU, civilly yet firmly, that we had now left. No further payments to EU funds would be made, the MEPs would be called back and made redundant, and we would return to the status quo ante. Any negotiations necessary would be conducted between Brussels and a proud, sovereign nation, not a supplicant province and no rebellious civil servants or parasitical lawyers would be permitted to derail the process.
Instead of procrastination and doubt we should ignore the nay sayers and seize the day, confident in our ability to once again be a free, democratic and independent country, which has left behind what was no more than a temporary aberration, inflicted upon us by pusillanimous politicians, but now consigned to the dustbin of history. We owe it to ourselves, and to those who made this country what it is, to remember that Britain is a great nation and to once again stand tall in the world.