It's happening! I can't believe it, but it's happening! Britain is going to leave the EU tonight at 11pm. I thought we'd vote to leave but I started to doubt they'd actually let us go. But it looks like if you stick to your principles and push hard enough, you can get what you want in the end.
The country won't reunite in a hurry, but the Leave campaign has by itself united people who normally have nothing in common, and isn't that a good thing? Marxists, capitalists, classical liberals, north and south, rural and town. When Britain voted out, I made a conscious decision to try to get to know the country better. I've been to Sheffield, Dorset, far-west Wales, Dundee and walked to Lindisfarne in my bare feet. It's like discovering a family you never knew you had. Is this what the War felt like? The walls of difference come tumbling down; heart speaks to heart. We are one people.
Brexit has also encouraged me to rediscover romantic socialism. Read Vaughan Williams on music, or Simone Weil on the necessity of roots, and see what I mean. The dream was never that grey nightmare of gulags and factories but, on the contrary, of village and church, freedom and responsibility, modesty and peace. The Labour movement, as Sir Roger Scruton argued, has historically been about protecting us; if the Left won't do it, the Tories now must. The great political challenge of the coming decade is to combine the preservation of tradition with the preservation of the environment, to conquer greed. An independent Britain can do this because it has discovered it can do anything it wants to!
Patriotism is not to hate or hoard, but love and cherish, and European must know that this is how most Britons feel tonight. As AA Milne wrote: "It isn't really goodbye, because the Forest will always be there and anybody who is friendly with Bears can find it."
The country won't reunite in a hurry, but the Leave campaign has by itself united people who normally have nothing in common, and isn't that a good thing? Marxists, capitalists, classical liberals, north and south, rural and town. When Britain voted out, I made a conscious decision to try to get to know the country better. I've been to Sheffield, Dorset, far-west Wales, Dundee and walked to Lindisfarne in my bare feet. It's like discovering a family you never knew you had. Is this what the War felt like? The walls of difference come tumbling down; heart speaks to heart. We are one people.
Brexit has also encouraged me to rediscover romantic socialism. Read Vaughan Williams on music, or Simone Weil on the necessity of roots, and see what I mean. The dream was never that grey nightmare of gulags and factories but, on the contrary, of village and church, freedom and responsibility, modesty and peace. The Labour movement, as Sir Roger Scruton argued, has historically been about protecting us; if the Left won't do it, the Tories now must. The great political challenge of the coming decade is to combine the preservation of tradition with the preservation of the environment, to conquer greed. An independent Britain can do this because it has discovered it can do anything it wants to!
Patriotism is not to hate or hoard, but love and cherish, and European must know that this is how most Britons feel tonight. As AA Milne wrote: "It isn't really goodbye, because the Forest will always be there and anybody who is friendly with Bears can find it."
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