I refer to the misunderstanding of Soviet Russia as an aggressive power, militaristically and ideologically bent upon world domination—'seeing', to q… - Enoch Powell

Opinion has been right to fasten upon sovereignty as the central issue. Either British entry is a declaration of intent to surrender this country's sovereignty, stage by stage, in all that matters as a nation, and makes a nation, or else it is an empty gesture, disgraceful in its hollowness alike to those who proffer and to whose who accept it. The superior people laugh at those who talk about losing our Queen and our Monarchy... The Queen is the Queen in Parliament, as truly today as when her predecessor, Tudor Henry, observed that ‘we are nowhere so high in our estate royal as in this Our High Court of Parliament’. The question which the people of this country will have proposed to them is: will you, or will you not, continue to be governed by the Queen in Parliament? It is no less than that, and they have understood it.

The right finds it easy to explain what is and to justify what is, but not to account for change. The left finds it easy to justify change, but not to account for what is, and what is accepted.

That power and that glory have vanished, as surely, if not as tracelessly, as the Imperial fleet from the waters of Spithead—in the eye of history, no doubt as inevitably as “Nineveh and Tyre”, as Rome and Spain. And yet England is not as Nineveh and Tyre, nor as Rome, nor as Spain. Herodotus relates how the Athenians, returning to their city after it had been sacked and burnt by Xerxes and the Persian army, were astonished to find, alive and flourishing in the blackened ruins, the sacred olive tree, the native symbol of their country. So we today at the heart of a vanished empire, amid the fragments of demolished glory, seem to find, like one of her own oak trees, standing and growing, the sap still rising from her ancient roots to meet the spring, England herself.