This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday column

I think we are about to have the most serious constitutional crisis since the Abdication of King Edward VIII. I suppose we had better try to enjoy it.

If – as I think we will – we vote to leave the EU on June 23, a democratically elected Parliament, which wants to stay, will confront a force as great as itself – a national vote, equally democratic, which wants to quit. Are we about to find out what actually happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?

I am genuinely unsure how this will work out. I hope it will only destroy our two dead political parties, stiffened corpses that have long propped each other up with the aid of BBC endorsement and ill-gotten money.

I was wrong to think that the EU referendum would be so hopelessly rigged that the campaign for independence was doomed to lose. I overestimated the Prime Minister – a difficult thing for me to do since my opinion of him was so low. I did not think he could possibly have promised this vote with so little thought, preparation or skill.

I underestimated the BBC, which has, perhaps thanks to years of justified and correct criticism from people such as me, taken its duty of impartiality seriously.

Everything I hear now suggests that the votes for Leave are piling up, while the Remain cause is faltering and floundering. The betrayed supporters of both major parties now feel free to take revenge on their smug and arrogant leaders.

It has been a mystery to me that these voters stayed loyal to organisations that repeatedly spat on them from a great height. Labour doesn’t love the poor. It loves the London elite. The Tories don’t love the country. They love only money. The referendum, in which the parties are split and uncertain, has freed us all from silly tribal loyalties and allowed us to vote instead according to reason. We can all vote against the heedless, arrogant snobs who inflicted mass immigration on the poor (while making sure they lived far from its consequences themselves). And nobody can call us ‘racists’ for doing so. That’s not to say that the voters are ignoring the actual issue of EU membership as a whole. As I have known for decades, this country has gained nothing from belonging to the European Union, and lost a great deal.

If Zambia can be independent, why cannot we? If membership is so good for us, why has it been accompanied by savage industrial and commercial decline? If the Brussels system of sclerotic, centralised bureaucracy is so good, why doesn’t anyone else in the world adopt it?

As for the clueless drivel about independence campaigners being hostile to foreigners or narrow-minded, this is mere ignorant snobbery. I’ll take on any of them in a competition as to who has travelled most widely, in Europe and beyond it. Good heavens, I’ve even read Tolstoy and like listening to Beethoven. And I still want to leave the EU.

Do these people even know what they are saying when they call us ‘Little Englanders’?

England has never been more little than it is now, a subject province of someone else’s empire.

I have to say that this isn’t the way out I would have chosen, and that I hate referendums because I love our ancient Parliament. And, as I loathe anarchy and chaos, I fear the crisis that I think is coming.

I hope we produce people capable of handling it. I wouldn’t have started from here. But despite all this, it is still rather thrilling to see the British people stirring at last after a long, long sleep.

Two more victims of the Great Terror Panic

Our state-sponsored panic about the exaggerated terror threat is driving us mad. Recently I wrote about Lorna Moore, a young woman ripped from her children and flung into jail because she didn’t warn the authorities about something her husband (an alleged terrorist) probably didn’t even do.

Now we see an organic farmer, John Letts, and his wife Sally Lane, both in their 50s, remanded in custody on charges of sending money to their son. He may be up to no good in Syria, but that (unsurprisingly) hasn’t stopped them loving and caring for their child. Remanded in custody? From what I can see from court reports, the country is crawling with gaunt young men out on bail for violent crimes. So why are these two gentle people (who have another son at home) banged up in the cells and denied bail, while scores of dangerous louts roam the streets?

It is because of the magic word ‘terror’. It stops us thinking. Look at the Leytonstone knifeman, Muhaydin Mire. Back in December his crime – a horrible, bloody, random attack on a passer-by in a London Underground station – led the news. He was thought to be a terrorist. A man who called out ‘You ain’t no Muslim, bruv’ was much praised.

But he wasn’t no terrorist, either, bruv. When he was convicted on Thursday, the case was relegated to inside pages.

The attack was just as severe, the wounds just as deep, the crime just as bad.

But it’s now accepted by almost everyone involved that Mire was mentally ill. His family believe that this was caused by his use of the supposedly ‘soft’ drug cannabis – the one Richard Branson and Nick Clegg want to decriminalise. In fact, his family very responsibly tried to warn the police that he was a risk before the crime, and the police passed the buck, because nobody mentioned ‘radicalisation’.

Well, perhaps if the police and the courts were more interested in cannabis (which remains illegal, though they don’t enforce the law) than in terrorism and ‘radicalisation’, we’d actually be safer from the real and growing threat of unhinged young men wandering about in our midst. Some hope, but I thought I’d mention it.

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What are British troops doing in Poland? Taking part in a ridiculous exercise in which we pretend that we would go to war in the event of a Russian attack in the region – which is about as unlikely as a Martian invasion. Actually, we’d be hard put to defend the Isle of Wight these days, let alone Warsaw or Riga. This folly creates the very problem it pretends to deal with – tension and fear. Why?

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Sorry Meryl, I can't laugh at a man who's so scary

How odd that Meryl Streep, dressing up as Donald Trump last week, looks more like that noisy businessman than Mr Trump does himself. I am tempted to laugh. And then I stop myself.

Mr Trump’s rallies increasingly attract violence – by his opponents and his supporters. I actually find this terrifying. Any fool can start civil unrest and fan a populist bonfire by saying what he thinks the masses want to hear. But it is far harder to restore calm. I gasp at Mr Trump’s irresponsibility, and fear for the USA.

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