Let the bells ring out for Brexit

FOR the past 160 years, Big Ben has been an enduring beacon of British freedom and democracy, not just at home but around the world. During World War II, the chimes of the Great Bell of Westminster, broadcast by the BBC World Service, gave comfort to the resistance movements in Europe and to our troops fighting abroad. The distinctive peal of Big Ben has been used by news bulletins to introduce everything from the death of kings to the end of hostilities.

Throughout the reigns of six monarchs, it sounded on the hour, every hour.

But for the past two-and-a-half years, it has fallen silent and is not due to ring out regularly again until 2021. Big Ben has been mothballed to protect the hearing of building workers renovating the tower. As I wrote at the time: the Little Hitlers of elf’n’safety have succeeded where the Fuhrer failed.

They could have spent a couple of hundred quid a pop on the kind of protective headsets issued to those working in equally potentially deafening conditions, such as on airport runways or operating pneumatic drills.

But that’s not the modern British way. Risk aversion is the name of the game. Always legislate for the worst-case scenario. Don’t panic! Which brings us to Brexit, until recently hampered by the ultimate manifestation of risk aversion, Project Fear.

But now that we are leaving the EU, at long last, it’s time to cast caution to the wind.

Originally, we were due to depart on March 29. Brexiteer MPs wanted Big Ben rung to mark the occasion, but were blocked by a committee chaired by the gruesome Remainer Speaker John Bercow — even though exceptions were made for Remembrance Sunday. With Britain finally throwing off the shackles of the EU next month, there are now fresh calls for Big Ben to sound at 11pm on January 31 — the night we will break free, no ifs, no buts.

While unseemly and unnecessary squabbles over our future trading relationship with Europe are inevitable, we will shed the Brussels straitjacket and forge a new destiny as a truly independent global nation. It’s hard to think of a more appropriate way of marking the occasion.

Big Ben could be joined by church bells the length and breadth of the land. Our departure should be the catalyst for national renewal, the first bold steps of which were outlined in yesterday’s Queen’s Speech.

Time to ring out the old and ring in the new. Time to embrace risk, not to run a mile in the other direction.

The doom-mongers and naysayers who have dominated British political debate for years have been routed.

BORIS JOHNSON, if he keeps his eye on the prize, has the opportunity to bury them for good. It’s time not just for a political revolution, but for a cultural revolution, too. The citadels of the Left, the quangocracy, the ‘ woke’ mindset which infests every single public institution, must be dismantled.

It’s not enough for Boris to hire an extra 20,000 coppers. He has to ensure they’re deployed on the streets, fighting knife crime and tackling burglary, instead of pursuing politically motivated prosecutions for ‘hate crimes’.

The fire brigade must be reminded that their job is fighting fires, not ‘celebrating diversity’ and putting the safety of firemen ahead of the lives of the people they’re paid to rescue. The Armed Forces should be told they will be judged on their ability to defend us against our enemies, not on how many sexual and ethnic minorities they employ.

Ministers should ensure that schools exist to teach children to read and write, to teach geography, maths and foreign languages — and not fill their heads with a revisionist Left-wing version of history and endless propaganda about ‘climate change’ and gender fluidity.

Boris must guarantee the extra billions being pumped into the NHS go to benefit patients and do not disappear inevitably into the black hole of the self- serving permanent bureaucracy. There has to be a bonfire of the proscriptive, enterprise-sapping EU-inspired regulations permeating every aspect of our lives. That can happen after we leave on January 31. Let Big Ben ring long and loud into the new dawn.

With an 80-seat Tory majority and the support of the secret people of this great nation, we shouldn’t have to ask for whom the bell tolls.

It tolls for the Corbinystas, and for the so- called Labour ‘moderates’ such as ‘Sir’ Keir Starmer who not only went along with the corruption of a once-respectable political party, but instigated its cynical attempts to thwart the democratically expressed will of the ‘People’ it disingenuously purports to represent.

Who comes next for Labour? Who cares? A prolonged period of silence — at least four years, ideally — is overdue. The bell also tolls for Bercow, who abused his high office to derail Brexit and is destined for welldeserved ignominy. In future, he will be found barking ‘Order, Order!’ on foreign TV shows and at passengers on the Clapham omnibus — a modernday, one-man freak- show like the Vicar of Stiffkey, who ended his days preaching from inside a lion’s cage.

It tolls for that weird Gina Miller woman, who having failed to stop Brexit is threatening more legal action to throw a spoke into Boris’s proposed constitutional reforms.

It tolls for Tory turncoats Dominic Grieve, Anna Soubry, David Gauke et al, who thought they were entitled to overturn the democratic will of the British people. It tolls for pro-EU has-beens Johnny Major, Michael Heseltine, Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair, who even now deludes himself that he is a force in the land.

It tolls for la-la-land luvvies such as Steve Coogan, Hugh Grant and Lily Allen, who think they’re morally superior to the great unwashed who watch their movies and buy their records. They are all yesterday’s news.

We’ve had to put up with decades of being patronised by the smug, selfappointed metropolitan elite and betrayed by an arrogant, self-serving political class. As of last week, those days are over. We hope.

When the scaffolding comes down at Westminster, Big Ben must once again become that shining symbol of our ancient, hard-won liberty and democracy. After we voted Leave in 2016, we didn’t expect to have to come back for an encore three-anda-half years later. But the wisdom of the people has prevailed.

Take another bow, Britain!