Ever Greater Freedom For the Peoples of Europe

David Green, 29 February 2016

Our referendum has awakened the people of Europe and there is already talk of a demand for referendums in other EU member states. It has rattled the ruling class in Brussels who are calling it a contagion that could spread. For them, it seems, an outbreak of freedom and democracy is a kind of disease.

Europe has a torn civilisation. It nurtured the humanism of the Renaissance, the learning of the Enlightenment, and pioneered personal freedom and democracy in place of government by absolute and authoritarian rulers. But it has also been home to their opposites: the suppression of freedom by command-and-control regimes, authoritarianism instead of democracy, and official deception and information control in place of the enlightened and open pursuit of learning.

On a continuum that has democracy and freedom at one end and authoritarianism and collectivism at the other, the EU is an empire-building project that has strayed too far from the free and democratic ideals that made European civilisation worth fighting for. Our referendum could rekindle support for the highest ideals of European political culture: law making based on the consent of citizens, and governments accountable to their peoples and easily removed by constitutional means.

Far from leaving Europe to go our own way, we will be setting an example of the real alternative to ‘ever closer union’: the ideal of ‘ever greater freedom for the peoples of Europe’.