We the working people of Britain created our own democracy. We had the advantage of living in an island, so there was no issue between ourselves and foreign countries over the definition of borders. We denounce and disown the traitor class who tried and try now to use Britain as a base for seizing other countries.
Countries’ borders are always porous – ours as much so as any other. Daniel Defoe’s hugely popular satirical poem of 1701, The True-Born Englishman, proved that no such person exists: we are all of mongrel stock and the stronger for it. But those who live here and feel they belong here, who work here and raise their families here, are British no matter where they were born.
Britain is for the British working class – to own and to run.
It has not always been so. There were still slaves in Britain when the Domesday Book was compiled (1086). The king was a tyrant even when forced to sign Magna Carta and concede the right to trial by a jury of one’s peers. The peasants were still serfs after 1381, when their revolt was put down. But the hunger for democracy was stirring over these centuries, and the tide began to turn with the Civil War and Commonwealth of the 1640/50s, which saw the end of absolute monarchy in Britain and the assertion of the mass of the people in the New Model Army.
When, a century later, the greedy land-owners began to enclose the common land, and capitalists opened factories in the towns with offers of work (14-hour days) for dispossessed villagers, people flooded into the towns and, out of the depths of despair, invented a new twist on democracy: trade unionism. Organised in unions, workers won the 10-hour day and then the 8-hour day, and could stand up and face the employer and the world, with pride in their trade, money in their pockets and affirming this country as their country.
This has been the root from which real British democracy, British rule over Britain, began.
But now we find ourselves with our laws made by a foreign body, daily asserting extra powers for itself, trying to force us into a single economy with a single currency, soon to establish a single armed force, already attempting to impose its Constitution and Head of State upon us.
We fought off Napoleon and Hitler and their would-be pan-European dictatorships. We the people demand rule by the people (true democracy). Not rule by professed “representatives” – they don’t represent us. Cut out the middlemen. We demand a referendum: Britain out of the EU now!