The title of this piece comes from a speech by Sir Winston Churchill on the occasion of Victory in Europe Day in 1945. Although the stunning, almost unexpected but very welcome result of the EU referendum is something to celebrate, it’s not directly comparable to VE day. We have not come out of a destructive war but we’ve regained our freedom without a shot being fired.
However, we should not forget that this is not the end of the story. There is a long way to go to repair the damage to our economy, our culture and our society that the EU has contributed to. We still have excessive immigration and that needs to be got to grips with as soon as possible as far the transition period for leaving the EU will allow. We still have a state broadcaster which has excelled itself in pro-EU bias and which is in urgent need of reform. We still have an education system that is dominated by the Left and which has short-changed generations of our children with regards to learning. Our schools also need to be forced to remove the ‘social engineering’ stuff that takes up far too great a part of our children’s curricula. An EU promoted policy of multiculturalism has created more and deeper divisions in British society and we must always remember that we still face the serious problems of Jihad and political Islam. Furthermore there is the need to heal the political wounds caused by this referendum, although I accept that some of these wounds may not heal very quickly.
These are but some of the problems that we still need to deal with and put right, but be put right they must.
As Churchill again once said, the medium term future for the United Kingdom will have to encompass a limited period of ‘blood sweat and tears’, but we will be expending our blood, our sweat and our tears in the service of walking our own path. However hard the problems we may encompass as a newly independent nation, the right to be free to make our own laws, is a price worth paying for not being a vassal state of Germany or the European Union.
The referendum result is a sign that there is a growing self confidence about Britain. We are no longer the ‘sick man of Europe’ that we were in the late 1960’s or early 197’0’s, beaten down by loss of prestige, industrial problems, social upheaval and economic problems that made politicians see the EU as a viable option. We are now much better than that and have a much better economy. I reckon that the Home Nations of the UK, Scotland, Wales, England and Northern Ireland could, working together, be world beaters again.
We have achieved a much greater degree of freedom today than we had yesterday, and we should celebrate that. We should allow ourselves some time to rejoice, but on Monday morning we should wake up, shake off our hangovers, and get to work rebuilding our nation.
