top of page

Murray: Britain’s Time for Choosing

This article appeared on the National Review website and is presented with permission by the author.

I’ve steered clear of opining here about tomorrow’s Brexit vote as so many others have been doing such a good job of it, like Jonah’s article today. But as this is the culmination of a thirty-year fight for me, I thought I should at least put on the record why I would be voting “Leave” if Her Majesty’s Government hadn’t disenfranchised me for living out of the country for too long, and why I hope that others should do the same.

First, and most importantly, a vote to Remain would represent an end to Britain’s 800 year experiment in restraining the executive through consent, natural right, and popular will. When King John sealed the Magna Carta, he agreed that his decisions would have a degree of popular oversight, a degree that ebbed and flowed over the years until it was cemented in the Glorious Revolution, and that Englishmen had rights which were not the grant, as someone later said, of princes or parliaments. Those rights were discovered through the common law, rather than outlined in some document, even if many of them sprang from their formulation in that Great Charter.

RECENT POSTS
bottom of page