This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

The part of the referendum campaign that has angered me most is this: the suggestion, repeatedly made by pro-EU persons, that there is something narrow, mean and small-minded about wanting to live in an independent country that makes its own laws and controls its own borders.

I can think of no other country where the elite are so hostile to their own nation, and so contemptuous of it.

I have spent many years trying to work out why this is. I think it is because Britain – the great, free, gentle country it once was and might be again – disproves all their theories.

Most of our governing class, especially in the media, politics and the law, is still enslaved by 1960s ideals that have been discredited everywhere they have been tried.

These are themselves modified versions of the communist notions that first took hold here in the 1930s. But the things they claim to want – personal liberty, freedom of conscience, clean government, equality of opportunity, equality before the law, a compassionate state, a safety net through which none can fall, and a ladder that all can climb – existed here without any of these airy dogmas.

How annoying that an ancient monarchy, encrusted with tradition, Christian in nature, enforced by hanging judges in red robes, had come so much closer to an ideal society than Trotsky or Castro ever did or ever could.

The contradiction made the radicals’ brains fizz and sputter. How could this be? If it was so, they were wrong. Utopians, as George Orwell demonstrated, prefer their visions to reality or truth. Two and two must be made to make five, if it suits them.

So, rather than allow their hearts to lift at the sight of such a success as Britain was, and ashamed to be patriots, they set out to destroy the living proof that they were wrong.

They took a hammer to our intricate constitution. They dissolved the best state secondary schools in the world and then attacked the best universities in the world for refusing to lower their standards too.

They dismantled the most relaxed and generous union of neighbouring nations ever seen in the history of the world.

And while they did this, they moved our landmarks, such as our unique coinage and a human, poetic system of weights and measures, polished in use. They replaced the advanced world’s only unarmed police force with a baseball-capped, scowling gendarmerie festooned with guns, clubs and gas canisters.

They presided over a systematic forgetting of our national literature, so that a land where every ploughboy once knew the King James Bible is now full of people to whom the works of Shakespeare, Bunyan, Dickens, Wordsworth and Tennyson may as well be written in Martian.

They declared themselves ‘Europeans’. They regarded this as superior to their own country. ‘How modern! How efficient!’ they trilled. I have heard them do it. They did not notice that the EU was also a secretive, distant and unresponsive monolith, hostile or indifferent to the freedoms we had so carefully created and so doggedly preserved.

They failed to see that its ‘parliament’ does not even have an opposition, that its executive is accountable to nobody. They inherited jury trial, habeas corpus and the Bill of Rights – the greatest guarantees of human freedom on the planet – and they traded in this solid gold for the worthless paper currency of human rights.

If they win on Thursday, the process of abolishing Britain will be complete. If they lose, as I hope they do and still think they will, there is a faint, slender chance that we may get our country back one day.



Random horror of mental illness



I would not dream of exploiting the untimely death of a young mother for political purposes. I am grieved for all those who loved Jo Cox, and are desolated by her death. I extend my sympathy to them.

But I have the strong sense that others do seek to turn this event into propaganda for a cause. It has happened very swiftly. It needs to cease. And to counter it I shall need to say some things I would normally have waited some time to say, as I would prefer to have more evidence than I now have. This consideration does not seem to bother those whom I criticise.

The suggestion has been made that Mrs Cox died because of her views on the EU. The implication is that those with different views are in some way to blame for her death. We should scornfully reject this insinuation. Nobody on any side in the EU debate wishes any opponent dead.

In this country, no cause is served by violence and no rational person believes that it is. Political murder is not common here, and in modern times has usually been the calculated and vengeful work of Irish criminal terror gangs.

What is regrettably common is the random killing of innocent people by the mentally ill. Numbers vary and can be calculated in many different ways, but even The Guardian accepts that in 2010 there were 40 such killings across the UK, carried out by patients with mental-health problems. In 2005, there were 92. In the decade 2001-2010 there were 738 by one calculation, or 1,216 by another.

People going about their daily business are pushed under trains, stabbed, kicked to death, even beheaded by unhinged assailants, who have suddenly and unpredictably become violent.

Many of these killers are known by the authorities to be ill but still allowed to walk the streets, because dozens of mental hospitals have been shut to save money. Some of them have become ill following long-term use of cannabis, now decriminalised in all but name. A long-overdue reversal of these foolish policies would be a better cause than trying to take partisan advantage of a human tragedy.

Disturbed people do sometimes embrace the wilder political and religious creeds. But it is their mental illness, not these barely understood ‘opinions’, that makes them capable of the dreadful act of killing – an act which separates them from the rest of humanity.

The alleged killer, Thomas Mair, is said by neighbours to have a history of mental illness. By his own account it seems likely that he has taken some sort of medication at some stage. He is said by his family to have had no interest in politics. Let us leave Jo Cox’s family and friends to mourn. And let us all listen carefully to the evidence when it is, eventually, placed before the courts.

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