INDEPENDENCE DAY Pilot’s Memorial

They

warned us of chaos and cataclysm if we voted to leave the European Union. Experts from the worlds of finance and big business said that such a move might lead to job cuts and loss of investment. Foreign leaders and stern EU commissioners spoke of the dire consequences we would face were we to make such a rash decision. Celebrities and high-profile sportsmen and women lectured us on what was best for us. And when the warnings didn’t work and the polls showed the “Leave” campaign was holding its own, the warnings became threats and the advice was replaced by insults: Chancellor George Osborne promising a “punishment budget”, Seventies’ pop singer Bob Geldof shouting obscenities and putting two fingers up to fishermen on the River Thames who were protesting about the EU (Although why he thought his opinion was so important in the debate is anyone’s guess.)

They were the wrong tactics, of course. The last thing you should do when trying to persuade the notoriously sceptical, stubborn and independently minded people of the United Kingdom to come round to your point of view is lecture them, imply that you know best and insult their intelligence. There is a long and honourable history in this country of dissent, peaceful protest and kicking against authority, and as the referendum result on 24th June showed (52% to 48% in favour of leaving the EU), in spite of all the big guns massed against them a large number of people (17 million) proved themselves to be courageous inheritors of this tradition.

After 40 years in which we have become more and more enmeshed in the European Union, there are obviously going to be difficulties in untangling ourselves and re-establishing our independence (having served long sentences behind bars prisoners always find rehabilitation a bit of a struggle) but I think it is a magnificent, exciting and proud moment (Yet another!) in the history of our country. The referendum did, however, highlight deep divisions within the United Kingdom, so I hope that the government, while extricating us from the European Union, will also work to heal these splits. This magazine has long campaigned against the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union: for us it has always been about restoring sovereignty, the right to make our own laws, the ability to control our borders, the power to vote out those who govern us. Many people deserve enormous credit for getting us to where we are today. Despite being labelled, at various stages, as “xenophobes”, “racists”, “Little Englanders” etc., they have tirelessly campaigned for decades to make people aware of the undemocratic nature of the EU and its ultimate goal of abolishing independent nation states and creating a United States of Europe. There are far too many to mention here, but I want to pay tribute to the men and women with whom I have come into contact. Some are still alive, others, sadly, are not: Norris Mcwhirter, Christina Speight, Christopher Booker, Rodney Atkinson, Richard North, Robin Page, Anne Palmer, Melvyn Rendell, James Goldsmith, Rodney Leach, Derek Bennett, Neil Herron, Steve Thoburn, Bernard Connolly, Lindsay Jenkins, Simon Richards, Rupert Matthews, Vivienne Pimm. I also want to give a special mention to our former editor, Roy Faiers, who as well as writing hard-hitting articles about the European Union on the pages of This England, organised petitions, constitutional challenges to our membership in the courts and supported a large number of anti-eu organisations. The poet and journalist G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) wrote: “Smile at us, pay us, pass us; but do not quite forget; For we are the people of England, that never have spoken yet.” We have now.

—Father found they were for sale at £200. He later regretted not buying one as when the war was over they were quite out of the question with the housing shortage. A visit many years after the war saw many changes with a large number of new houses and bungalows. Sir: I was delighted to read the item in “Cornucopia” (Spring 2016) about the unveiling of the memorial, in Dorset, to Pilot Officer Hight, a New Zealander who was killed flying his Spitfire in the Battle of Britain.

Pilot Officer Hight was my son-in-law’s great uncle and it

AUSTRALIA. (Email: halcolebatch@ hotmail.com )