Daniel Hannan for Vote Leave and Brexit

Thursday February 25 at The Athenaeum in Warminster I took my first steps into Political Activism. I joined a 'full house' of apparently mostly like minded individuals attending a meeting of the 'Vote Leave' campaign.

We were (at least I was) there to hear Daniel Hannan, Conservative MEP for Britain's South-East Region. I first became aware of Mr. Hannan  several years ago when I lived in the US. He was a guest of Sean Hannity, a Conservative host of a prime-time show on the Fox News Cable Network, the only National Center-Right TV News source in the US. I no longer recall the specifics or even the subject of their conversation, only that I was impressed by Hannan's easy ability to communicate his 'Conservatism'.

I now follow Dan Hannan, on his website, in his blog  and on You Tube. In my opinion he makes the most comprehensive, convincing and compelling case for Brexit I have heard so far. The speech he delivered on the 25th. was something of a 'stump' speech, one I have seen in various forms on You Tube refined over the last couple of years, but with perhaps a new added urgency as June 23rd looms.

I understand That Dan Hannan has declined the Leadership Role in the Vote Leave campaign and while I respect this personal choice and even sympathise with his rational I believe it to be a mistake. 

The Vote Leave campaign does not have the time and the resources to compete head-to-head with David Cameron, his bureaucracy and the vested interest blocks, all busily trying to scare the electorate into inertia. Dan Hannan's intimate and apparent near encyclopaedic knowledge of the EU. His 'refined' arguments against absorption into the 'Superstate' project and his vision for the future outside of the EU I would argue offer little that a Brexit believer can disagree with and much that would appeal to those we must win over to our side if we are to be victorious June 23.

I believe that the Vote Leave campaign can be won and that Brexit offers our Country (and much of Europe) a bright and independent future. But time is short, Exceptional Leadership is required and I believe and I am convinced that Daniel Hannan can provide that Leadership.

If you truly believe in Brexit it's time you took charge Dan.

No EU Superstate

While our fearless leader, Big Dave Cameron  has negotiated away our Nation's future in secret. ( I heard it described as 'keeping on lowering the bar until everybody trips over it.') We must prepare for yet another visit to the ballot box June 23 this year. I suspect this almost indecent haste is part of his strategy. Choose a time in the summer when he can hope for a low turnout, then just keep his fingers crossed. That way, with a low turnout, if he wins he'll claim victory but if he looses he can claim the poll as unrepresentative and either disregard it or, more likely, do things the EU way and keep holding votes every year or so until he gets the answer he wants.

As one of those who voted to join the Common Market (as it then was, and still should be) I find this European Union Transnationalism of much of our political class grossly abhorrent. A Common Market of six western European states which we joined in the seventies has, forty years on, now morphed into a bureaucratic behemoth with scant regard for the wishes or indeed welfare of the 350 plus million people it wishes to subjugate.

The democratic deficit which is so clearly apparent in the EU,is at the very heart of this mega-bureaucracy. From it's founding after the Second World War it's purpose has always been abundantly clear, It was (and indeed still is) a Protectionist Regulatory Bureaucracy tasked with protecting the uniform mediocrity it would impose and enforce across it's member states. The net result has been economic growth almost exclusively through geographic expansion  and the introduction of successive waves of low cost workers imported from that expansion Eastwards.

This moribund behemoth offers no peace to people interested in self determination. Its obsessive introspection stifles free speech, free thought and free enterprise. Unelected Apparatchiks in Brussels constantly expand their regulation of even the minutiae of our daily lives whilst those we had thought we elected to run our affairs must seek permission to do so, not from us as it should be, but from those same Apparatchiks.

I am constantly mindful of a quote from Daniel Webster. “There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters” . It is as true today as then, the only real difference is that those men now benefit from a much more powerful and intrusive Government.