Stripped of distractions, it comes down to an elemental choice: whether to restore the full self-government of this nation, or to continue living under a higher supranational regime, ruled by a European Council that we do not elect in any meaningful sense, and that the British people can never remove, even when it persists in error.
.. We are deciding whether to be guided by a Commission with quasi-executive powers that operates more like the priesthood of the 13th Century papacy than a modern civil service; and whether to submit to a European Court of Justice (ECJ) that claims sweeping supremacy, with no right of appeal.
.. The banking union belies its name. Germany and the creditor states have dug in their heels.
.. The Project bleeds the lifeblood of the national institutions, but fails to replace them with anything lovable or legitimate at a European level. It draws away charisma, and destroys it. This is how democracies die.
.. Nobody has ever been held to account for the design faults and hubris of the euro, or for the monetary and fiscal contraction that turned recession into depression, and led to levels of youth unemployment across a large arc of Europe that nobody would have thought possible or tolerable in a modern civilized society.
.. Has there ever been a proper airing of how the elected leaders of Greece and Italy were forced out of power and replaced by EU technocrats, perhaps not by coups d’etat in a strict legal sense but certainly by skulduggery?
.. On what authority did the European Central Bank write secret letters to the leaders of Spain and Italy in 2011 ordering detailed changes to labour and social law, and fiscal policy, holding a gun to their head on bond purchases?
.. You can argue too that the accession of thirteen new countries since 2004 – mostly from Eastern Europe – has changed the chemistry of the EU beyond recognition, making it ever less plausible to think of a centralized, close-knit, political union.
.. We require constant inflows of foreign capital to keep the game going, and are therefore vulnerable to a sterling crisis if foreigners lose confidence.
.. However unfair it may seem, the whole Western world deems Brexit to be an act of strategic vandalism at a time when Pax Americana is cracking and the liberal democracies are under civilizational threat.
.. Vladimir Putin’s Russia has ripped up the post-War rule book and is testing Nato every day in the Baltics; China’s construction of airfields along international shipping routes off the Philippines is leading to a superpower showdown with the US.
.. Americans of all people should understand why a nation may wish to assert its independence.