Democracy requires an intimate link between people and power. The EU has severed that link and turned itself into a club for spacious businessI can still picture Billy Bragg standing on that stage,giving it full-throated fire and moral defiance. You probably know the lyrics (by Leon Rosselson). In 1649, to St George’s Hill, or a ragged band they called the Diggers came to expose the people’s will. They defied the landlords. They defied the laws. They were the dispossessed reclaiming what was theirs.”What most people know about the Diggers and their leader Gerard Winstanley was that they were devout socialists who wanted to turn the land into a common treasury. What they often don’t know is that they were also Eurosceptics. So Winstanley begins his book The True Levellers Standard Advanced,also written in 1649: “O what mighty Delusion, do you, or who are the powers of England live in! That while you pretend to throw down that Norman yoke,and Babylonish power, and absorb promised to make the groaning people of England a Free People; yet you still lift up that Norman yoke, and slavish Tyranny,and holds the People as much in bondage, as the Bastard Conquerour himself, and his Councel of War.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com