Danger from within!

It is three hundred and twenty years since the nation faced such a threat from its own treacherous rulers as that posed by the proposed referendumless ratification of the Lisbon Treaty. Winston Churchill writing on the events of that pivotal year, concisely summarised its defeat as follows: "Very fearsome and dubious must the prospect have seemed to the nobility, gentry, and clergy who embodied the life and meaning of the England that we still know. They had no army; they had no lawful means of resistance, expression, or debate. They could not appeal to the unenfranchised millions of peasants and townsmen. They saw in mental eye the King in martial panoply advancing upon them with all that royal power in whose sanctity they themselves were the chief believers, with French troops ready to descend at any moment upon their shores to quell rebellion, with the children of the Ironsides hand in hand with Jesuit priests. Never did aristocracy or the Established Church face a sterner test or serve the nation better than in 1688. They never flinched; they never doubted. They faced this hideous, fraudulent, damnable hotch-potch of anti-national designs without a tremor, and they conquered without a blow. Why they conquered and above all, why they conquered bloodlessly, turned upon the action of no more than as many men and women as can be counted upon one's fingers." Where are today's handful of such heroes?