brexit is a more impressive achievement than the french revolution

7/25/2019 Brexit is a More Impressive Achievement Than the French Revolution

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25/06/2016 Brexi t is a more impressive achievement than the French Revolution

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/24/brexit-is-a-more-impressive-achievement-than-the-french-revoluti/

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24 JUNE 2016 6:13PM

ANDREW ROBERTS

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A Leave EU supporter hold a Union Jack flag aloft

n Easter Sunday, May 6 1867, the Reform League pressure group had a difficult
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/24/brexit-is-a-more-impressive-achievement-than-the-french-revoluti/ 2

decision to make. Would they obey the diktat of the Home Secretary, Spencer

Walpole, and not hold a huge meeting in Hyde Park to call for Reform, or would

they defy him?

Founded only two years before, they campaigned for the franchise for all ratepayers, as

well as secret ballots and an equal numerical distribution of seats in parliament, the

basis of our modern democracy. Yet the police were padlocking the gates to the Park,which in those days was surrounded by high iron railings.

The Prime Minister and Cabinet urged caution and predicted dire consequences if the

meeting went ahead; the police were called out en masse, and there was a run on the

pound. With 200,000 supporters of Reform marching towards the park, the decision

was nonetheless taken by the Leagues leaders simply to pull down the railings and

allow the vast surge of humanity to hold their (in the event, entirely peaceful)

meeting.

Spencer Walpole burst into tears under the pressure and resigned; 10 speakers

addressed the crowds, and the Second Reform Bill was passed later that same year. The

railings never went back up.

The role of bloody-minded insurgents willing to do the opposite of what theyre told

by the authorities has long been central to great political events in British history, and

the17,410,742 people who voted to leave the European Union can certainly be ranked

among their number.
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Samantha Cameron looks on as David Cameron resigns in the wake of the news Britain voted to leave the

EU

Almost every single agency of the international Establishment was deployed to thwart

them the CBI, IMF, Bank of England, OECD, big business, Goldman Sachs, all but

one party leader, the World Bank, Presidents Obama, Hollande and Abe, the EUCommission, two-thirds of the cabinet, the Treasury, The Guardian, Davos, The Times,

and so on yet over 17.4 million people told them precisely what they could do with

their expert opinion.

It is the British people who have now sent Obama to the back of the queue.

In Melvyn Braggs fine novel about the Peasants Revolt, Now is The Time, one sees a

template for the uprising of ordinary people that resulted in the Brexit vote, much as

the pro-EU Lord Bragg might like to deny it. The huge groundswell of ordinary

peoples opinionled rather than followed their own leaders.

Todays insurgent leaders were themselves a ragbag bunch: a half-albino Classicist

whose friends called him the truffle-pig; a German-born female Labour MP; a beer-

drinking, cigarette-smoking man of the people; and an infinitely courteous

intellectual with a razor-sharp brain, who had nevertheless been sacked as education

secretary a few years earlier. It wasnt much to set against the combined forces of the
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Establishment, yet they won.

Just as the National Union of Womens Suffrage Societies (founded in 1897) and its

more militant offshoot the Womens Social and Political Union (founded 1903) took on

the Establishment and won, and as the Anti-Corn Law League had a generation earlier,

so the Brexit movement enlisted armies of supporters across the country whose

motives were traduced and posters defaced and supplications ignored, until the vote

was taken and their voices finally had to be heard.

The popular uprising campaign was therefore not like the Poll Tax riots of 1990 but

much more firmly in the mainstream of the long British tradition of legitimate peaceful

protest.

In this way, too, it was a more impressive achievement than the French Revolution,

soaked as that was in blood. This popular uprising has toppled the established order

without calling upon the tumbrel, the scaffold and the guillotine. It will secure its

place in history as a result.

And when that history of the Brexit movement comes to be written later this century,there will be a number of people who are by no means household names but who kept

alight the torch of British independence ever since it was so nearly extinguished by

Ted Heath in 1973.

Michael Ivens, Douglas Jay, Alan Sked, Patrick Robertson, Jimmy Goldsmith, Bill Cash,

Robert Oulds, Nigel Lawson, Rodney Leach, the McWhirter twins, Bill Cash and many

others did as much to keep the popular insurgency alive over more than four decades

as Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, who had the honour of lighting theblue touchpaper this year.

Their contribution should not go unmarked, even though not all of them are famous.

Similarly, organisations like the Freedom Association, British Weights and Measures

Association and Bruges Group deserve recognition in keeping the flame kindled.

The Establishment ignores legitimate popular insurgency at its peril, as it found out

yet again.


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Matt Cartoon

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brexit is a more impressive achievement than the french revolution

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