Peace—real and enduring peace—must always be our supreme and ultimate aim, for with our swollen industrial population we are dependent on trade with … - Arthur Bryant

What any elector who feels that this is fundamental has, therefore, to decide is whether he or she has sufficient confidence in our present rulers of all parties to resist the declared intention of those who, out of however sincere and high-minded motives, hope to make our continued membership of the European Economic Community a first and irreversible step in the creation of a supra-national political union in which our nationhood—the most important of all the political assets we inherit from the past—would be submerged for ever.
If that were the sole issue of the Referendum—the sacrifice of a national society evolved over 1,500 years of Christian history—the answer would be undoubtedly No.

Without justice and charity there can be no England. That is the historic and eternal English vision.

Even more striking than England's unity has been the freedom of individual choice on which it has been based. Because the Channel lay between her and the continent, her people were able to develop a form of government in which power, instead of being centralised in a few hands, was distributed in many. Not being threatened across a land frontier, they had no need to entrust their rulers with standing military forces or despotic rights over private liberties. Authority normally was exercised only after those subject to it had had an opportunity to make their views known. From the Saxon Witenagemot to the twentieth century Parliament, from the village hustings and manor court to the trade union lodge and parish council, there was nearly always some working machinery in England by which those in authority could test the opinion of those over whom authority had to be exercised. Government was conducted subject to the right of the governed to criticise and, within lawful limits, to oppose. "His Majesty's Opposition" is the most characteristic and certainly the most original of English contributions to politics.