I’ve steered clear of opining here about tomorrow’s Brexit vote as so many others have been doing such a good job of it, like Jonah’s article today. But as this is the culmination of a thirty-year fight for me, I thought I should at least put on the record why I would be voting “Leave” if Her Majesty’s Government hadn’t disenfranchised me for living out of the country for too long, and why I hope that others should do the same.
First, and most importantly, a vote to Remain would represent an end to Britain’s 800 year experiment in restraining the executive through consent, natural right, and popular will. When King John sealed the Magna Carta, he agreed that his decisions would have a degree of popular oversight, a degree that ebbed and flowed over the years until it was cemented in the Glorious Revolution, and that Englishmen had rights which were not the grant, as someone later said, of princes or parliaments. Those rights were discovered through the common law, rather than outlined in some document, even if many of them sprang from their formulation in that Great Charter.
That experiment is now under threat more serious than any time since the time of the Stuarts. Large amounts of the rules Britons live under are now made in Brussels by the Commission (not the European Parliament, which rubber stamps them) and are implemented under treaty obligations, not by discussions amongst Parliamentary representatives. The regulatory state is replacing the common law, and British bureaucrats have been inspired in turn to “gold plate” those regulations. The common law rights of Britons have been replaced by a list of statutory positive rights, the statute implementing the European Convention on Human Rights (which, ironically, was in part drawn up by British lawyers for countries that did not enjoy the tradition of common law).
In short – the European Union is an alien institution to the way Britons have governed themselves. It represents a far greater change in the way of governance for Britain than it does for its European neighbors, which had long been governed by some version or other of the Code Napoleon.
….
In the end, Britain has to decide whether it wants to continue its self-government or not. As a great man once said, this is a time for choosing. I hope that my nation will choose to govern itself again.
- Discussion
-
I agree with pretty much every word of this @ismurray post on Brexit: https://t.co/sjiBuVH2eS
— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) June 23, 2016
You must be logged in to reply to this topic.