I read in the press over a million people have not returned their Census forms.

Why am I being singled out for prosecution?

I challenge the legal basis of these proceedings.

I have not come here in any case to defend myself, I have come here to enlist your support.

Our country is faced with the gravest crisis in all its history, a crisis in which its very existence as a nation is being sedulously assailed by people in high places seeking to see our nationhood swallowed up in a German dominated federal Europe.

If I were to complete the Census form I would be increasing the power of the government, and government today is using its power to promote mischief, sedition and treason. By its actions the government has broken the bond of trust that should prevail between government and the governed. It is using the power of law to usurp law itself and to reduce law to a mere adjunct of political scheming in which the framework of justice is destroyed.

Like the vast majority of my fellow countrymen and women I am strongly opposed to this plot. I do not understand why instead of standing here and being asked to defend myself, the people promoting this monstrous project are not under lock and key in the Tower of London.

I am told that 'Europe' will bring peace. Has any existing large federation of power achieved that goal?

Has the federal government of the USA, which has been involved in every major war of the last 150 years?

Has federal China, with its invasion of Tibet and its arms build-up in North Korea?

Has India, which has had a military confrontation with every one of its neighbours since colonial power was transferred from London to Delhi?

Has Russia, which even now is waging war against Chechnya?

Has it escaped notice that every one of these federal powers is at the forefront of nuclear armaments programmes and maintains enormous standing armies?

Has it escaped notice that moves are already afoot to create similar military might for a federal Europe? What else can bigger armies and bigger bombs presage but bigger conflicts and bigger wars?

But it is urged that the real case for a federal Europe is that it will ensure untold prosperity, perhaps indeed on the USA model.

Has it escaped notice that millions of US citizens, for all the magnitudes of material wealth that has been amassed, are living below its own defined poverty levels whilst over 2 million are in prison? That both India and China are among the world's poorest states as measured in per capita GDP terms? That giant Russia is in much the same state?

Has it escaped the notice of our sedulous plotters for the abolition of British sovereignty that of the top forty of the world's richest nations, thirty of them have populations of less than ten million?

Is there not in any case something as unrealistic as it is morally squalid in assuming the validity of targets of limitless economic expansion, when the same assumption has already polluted the planet, destroyed a vast range of species which form part of the complex interlocking life support systems on which all life is dependent, and has devastated the stocks of the world's finite resources to a degree which will inevitably beggar our posterity?

The same witless, immoral and suicidal assumptions behind the single-minded obsession with the pursuit of economic goals has largely destroyed the social structures of our villages and urban neighbourhoods, by the continuous expansion of central government power over many matters of essentially local community concern, such as the education of our children, healthcare, housing, police and numerous other matters, whilst the uncontrolled expansion of supermarkets, TV advertising and other commercial forces have destroyed our community shops and all the impoverishment of social riches that is entailed.

It is seriously supposed that any attempt to provide the same levels of economic consumption for the teeming billions of other continents, so that they have the same number of cars, aeroplane journeys, dishwashers, computers, televisions, mobile telephones, foreign holidays and the rest of the package can be attained without rendering the planet uninhabitable?

It is this monstrous process of unreasoning excess on which all the europlotting is based against which I am protesting.

The Census form calls for a mass of detailed information which can only strengthen the power of the government to pursue this path; the government is massively abusing that power and clearly intends to go on abusing it until our nationhood is destroyed.

I protest even more strongly at the wholesale perversion of the democratic process which all this secret and devious europlotting has engendered and which of course it entails.

My understanding of democracy is that we, the people, elect a government to govern in accordance with what we want; the process now seems to be reversed so that the government is impelling people to accept what the government wants after people have been subjected to a prolonged softening up propaganda process and other devious manipulative strategies.

It is an approach which repudiates the democratic principle in two important respects.

First that government is in no way able to claim to represent the majority of the British people. It was elected on the basis of 42% of the voters, and only 24% of the electorate. It might be thought that on a basis of such slender representative authority that any government might be reticent in putting forward any major constitutional changes, far less ones which involve the virtual abolition of our status as a sovereign nation.

Which brings me to my second point. These moves are opposed by the overwhelming majority of the British people. Is the court aware of a single branch of any mass political party of any persuasion which has called for a unification of Europe or for Britain to be a member of it? Or of any branch of a trade union or indeed of any significant social grouping which has made any such call?

It is one thing for a government to act in response to a widespread call for a constitutional revolution, it is surely quite another for a minority government to foist such a change on people strongly opposed to it.

Such a step bespeaks a contempt for people and a thorough-going contempt for the democratic principle, and when one adds to this the maze of secret plotting that has preceded it, the barrage of tendentious and utterly misleading propaganda at taxpayer's expense that has sought to block off critical appraisal, the immense levels of outright deceit that has accompanied it, all with the object of transferring the sovereign powers of Parliament to a ludicrously unrepresentative cabal of boardroom puppets in Brussels, it makes it clear that our nationhood is in dire danger.

Breathes there the man with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land.

It is 'dead souls' who are engaged in this mischief, and it was Jefferson who declared that a country which trades its independence for economic advantage deserves to lose both. This of course is what we are in process of doing, for the continuance of this monstrous national betrayal is simply at the behest of international boardroom financial spivs seeking their own advantage regardless of the consequences to others.

Economic activity based on no moral precept is simply brigandage, but my concern here with this Census form is in relation to matters of much graver import. I protest with all my strength against an attitude of mind that sees the destiny of my country in purely amoral economic terms such as may be adopted by any mafia gangster.

Britain is not just a pocket and a stomach and it is an insult to human stature to seek to impose a rigid framework of narrow economic calculation on every aspect of its life to a degree which distorts its own sense of itself and imperils its existence, not least when the calculation itself is so obviously erroneous.

My country is not a shopping mall or any business that might be merged or taken over by another.

Let us tell these commercial sharks intent on such depravity that Britain is a culture, a history, an identity, a body of law and custom, a corpus of traditions and decency, of fair play and equity, traditions which embody respect for truth, concern for the underdog and above all which involve upholding the banner of freedom and even justice in defiance of the direst odds.

It is not to be thought of that the flood
Of British freedom, which to the open sea
Of the world's praise, from dark antiquity
Hath flowed, with pomp of waters withstood,
Should perish…

Those who engage in this monstrous exercise of national elimination in a quest for profit are trampling upon every principle that has contributed to Britain's greatness. The fact that they are doing so in high places so that lofty principles of statehood are submerged in a welter of pecuniary speculation, whilst Crown, Court and Parliament are relegated to a subordinate status in which cash-till reckoning predominates, may lead them to suppose they have been elevated to high office, they are instead simply dragging high office down to their own level of moral squalor and counting house calculation.

The Census form gives these perfidious currency calculators more power to pursue their nefariousness and I will have none of it.

All the evidence of modern history indicates that giant federated states engender giant wars, just as they engender giant economic upheavals such the global economic collapse of 1929 - which originated not in Iceland or Liechtenstein, but in the United States, the biggest open market in the world. It seems the bigger the ocean the bigger the storms we must expect.

We have all heard much of the economic argument for the united Europe of big business but we have heard little of the moral argument for this course. The reason for this is that there is no moral argument for it.

In terms of material wealth we are as a nation are as rich as any nation has ever been in history; we are also far richer than many nations of the world today, whilst millions of people in poor countries are lacking the ordinary basic needs of material existence. We have in any case achieved our material standards of consumption often by robbing poorer countries of their resources and with extortionate trading arrangements which have increased their poverty.

Not least we have done so by means which are even now destroying God's creation from one end of the planet to the other as fast as we can. Do I need to remind you of global warming? Of the decimation or extermination of thousands of living species which form part of the interlocking equilibrium of nature on which all life ultimately depends? Or that we are continuing to poison the land, the seas and the air at an ever accelerating rate? Or of the way we are devouring the finite resources of the planet to an extent which will inevitably beggar our posterity?

You will note of course that concern for our posterity, or for the long-term health of the planet, or for the fate of millions of impoverished people, or even concern for God's creation, are not economic concerns, they are moral concerns and that if we ignore moral principles then economic activity has no justification except in terms that repudiate morality such as may be employed by any band of brigands; such terms can have no moral justification in the proceedings of this court.

I have been addressing you as an accused person charged with an offence. I find myself addressing a court consisting of yourselves as magistrates, sundry court officials and members of the police force.

Despite our different roles we all of us have one thing in common, we are all citizens of a sovereign state and all subjects of Her Majesty the Queen.

I take it we all have a common concern for the preservation of that sovereignty, and if there are any among us who do not then I have nothing to say to them except that in the court of honour and of history it is they who are in the dock and it is I who might claim to be a witness for the prosecution.

We live in momentous times and each one of us must measure up to the way we respond to them at a time when with guile, deceit, outrageous abuse of office, the wanton expenditure of public monies on lying propaganda and sedulous attempts to induce a mood of apprehension and panic in the public at large that if we refuse to surrender our sovereignty we may lose some imaginary crumbs from the Brussels table, we are being lured and locked, by one bureaucratic strategy after another, into a German dominated federal Europe.

In the narrow sense I may be guilty of breaking the law, but in a far wider sense I am upholding the law.

For when the private citizen is confronted with the abuse of law and the subversion of law by means which seek to abolish the law, making the powers of his own parliament subservient to those of a foreign power, he has a right and even more, a duty, to challenge the law so that decency, just dealing and democratic ordinance may prevail.

Our nation is not an object it is a subjective reality and as such the prime repository of our deepest sense of attachment, of belonging and of being; the embodiment of the most sensitive and responsive instincts of our sense of duty, service and loyalty, things integral to the finest qualities of our natures, things of our blood and lives for which no love, no service and no sacrifice is too great to preserve.

A good law is one which formally establishes objectively what people subjectively understand and agree. When that subjective sense of affinity is absent, law then becomes an adjunct of fecklessness and irresponsibility.

So I plead with you to send a message to the world that England is not for sale, it is not available for a merger, whether with Germany or America or anywhere else.

Tell them we are not going to see a thousand years of history and achievement snuffed out by whoever may have won the last election, that we have always paid our way in the world and always will and that if, in the event of retaining our independence, some crumbs from the European table may not come our way, tell them we insist on being proud and free at whatever cost rather than affluent and servile to any degree.

Tell them England will always be free and that those delinquent cardsharpers seeking to persuade us to sell our birthright for a carefully calculated ration of commercialised Brussels sprouts are utterly at odds with the character and the spirit of the British people.

These moves are not being made to ensure greater reverence and respect for God's creation, they are in no way concerned to regress the gross misbalance between the rich and poor of the world, they are not aimed at conserving the finite stocks of the planet's resources so that some well-being of future generations may be assured, nor are they concerned to protect the fragile bonds and structures of community life, they are in fact working in an entirely contrary direction, they will continue to destroy God's creation, to widen the gulf between rich and poor, to waste and squander even more of the globes resources, to gear people even more to a consumerist dominated society whatever the damage to social relationships and structures.

What does drive them is greed; greed for money and power, and nothing must be allowed to stand in their way; not care for the earth and its people, but greed, greed naked, powerful, unashamed greed, seeking only to gorge itself on the proud traditions of freedom of Europe's historic nations.

Please allow me to remind you of something:

This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This precious stone set in a silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This dear, dear land; this land of such dear souls,
Dear for its reputation throughout the world…

Are we now to tell our children and our grandchildren that we of our generation have allowed:

This England, which was wont to conquer others,
To make a shameful conquest of itself
And is now bound in with shame,…
With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds

with treaties signed at Maastricht and elsewhere, and is now leased it out to a gang of amoral power freaks in Brussels, whose motives are as mercenary as they are mean spirited and mischievous, for a dubious mess of pottage that makes nonsense of every war memorial in every village in the land?

Is it not time to tell these traders and traducers of the public weal that we have had enough, that we, the people of England have had enough, and that perhaps the magistracy of a court sitting in Swindon, has had enough? That we shall no longer be silent as moves designed to betray our history, our nation and its destiny are calculated and engineered, and that we will fight this monstrous wickedness with every breath and bone of our bodies and that we will dare and dare and dare again until we die rather than acquiesce in the most awesome degrees of betrayal our people have ever encountered.

And let me not be subject to sneers about xenophobia.

My late wife to whom I was happily married for many years, was a Frenchwoman, my children are of Anglo-French parentage, I have a love of German poetry and literature, I have a passionate admiration for Italian renaissance painting and of its ancient cities and architecture, and I have made a deep study of Swiss political institutions, for which I have a profound respect.

I do not claim to be an admirer of European culture for the simple reason no such culture exists, what does exist and compel my admiration is the multitude of cultures of Europe in all their variety and splendour, glories I have no intention of seeing snuffed out by the uniform dead hand of a Brussels bureaucracy.

When I was eighteen my country was being threatened by a mad Austrian corporal; I responded by joining the armed forces, I wanted to be a fighter pilot, but owing to a partial deafness they made me a cook instead. I served for seven years in the RAF and I do not grudge a day of that service in response to my country's need.

Now in my eightieth year I find the very existence of my country is again threatened. This time it is not by military forces but by a mad British Prime Minister employing underhand, bureaucratic duplicity, monstrously secret scheming and massive exercises in lying propaganda at taxpayers expense, all designed to persuade people that the reduction of Britain to the status of a minor province of a German led European Federation is in the best interests of their country. Do you think we would have responded to the call of duty in 1940 in the same way if we had been told it was in order to establish a German led Europe where our own nationhood was to be abolished?

In my wartime service I learned a popular song which helped to keep our spirits up in a tough period:

There will always be an England,
And England shall be free,
If England means half as much
To you, as England does to me.

Well, of course, at eighteen one can be ready to believe anything, but at eighty I am older and can claim perhaps to be a little wiser, and nobody is the worse for being wiser. Even so I believe there was wisdom in my decision to fight for England then, just as there is no less wisdom in my decision to fight again for freedom today.

So I call on you in your verdict to speak for England.

Let the world learn that here in Swindon Magistrate's Court there are limits to treason, deceit and dishonour, that there are magistrates who are not blinded by the bondage of the law and who see clearly that this royal throne of kings, this precious stone set in a silver sea, this dear dear land, this land of such dear souls, dear for its reputation throughout the world is not leased out but a vital living entity that depends as ever for its defence on the loyalty of its citizens of whatever rank.

And please remember:

This England never did nor never shall
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror.
But when it first did help to wound itself…

Come the three corners of the world in arms
And we shall shock them, nought shall make us rue,
If England to itself do rest but true.

 

Addendum to Defence

If there is a growing lack of decency in private life today it stems as much as anywhere from the growing lack of decency expressed in the untrammelled perversion of democratic principle in public life. Mr Blair and his colleagues must accept their share of moral responsibility for the tragic events in New York this week.

This unbounded contempt for the norms of democratic principle expressed so freely in the europlot have echoed for far too long the words of Lady Macbeth when contemplating murder, "what need we fear when none can call our power to account?"

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