Seventy-five years ago almost to the day the largest armada ever assembled by man bore down on the coast of Normandy and began the liberation of mainland Europe from the scourge of Nazi domination and the appalling atrocities of the Holocaust.

 

In the course of the invasion and its aftermath tens of thousands of young, brave, lives were sacrificed in the name of freedom and democracy. From that sacrifice sprang the greater freedoms that have represented modern Europe west of an Iron Curtain that in tandem enslaved dozens of other nation states under the banner of the communist Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. 

​

That liberty was born of conflict, certainly, but until recently has thrived on co-operation, on mutual understanding, on a desire to recognise what binds us together rather than what divides us. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the re-invention of nation States, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the Baltics, Romania and, further east, the `Stans`, gave those of us who have for years been engaged in dedicating ourselves to the democratic process real hope that the World was becoming a better, kinder, safer place for our children and our grandchildren to grow up in. 

​

That dream has been shattered and liberty is once again under real threat. 

​

It is arguable that the creation of a European Union and the replacement of a Common Market with a `project` created by Eurocrats and designed to generate a monolithic United States of Europe of a kind that was not even a glimmer in Churchill`s eye when he helped to found the Council of Europe has brought us to this pass.   The Brussels Behemoth has become corrupt, spendthrift, meddlesome and overweening in its authoritarian approach to administration to the point where ordinary, decent, co-operative people across the Continent have had enough. 

​

Throw into that melting pot the terrible strife in the Middle East that has generated a tide of refugees washing across non-existent post-Schengen border after border in search of safe haven or economic opportunity and you have a toxic mixture that has perversely provided the fertile ground in which resurgent national socialism, alongside the territorial ambitions of the neo-Soviet Union that is Putin`s Russian Federation, can once again flourish. 

​

From my vantage point as Leader of the UK delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe I have watched this process develop with increasing alarm. The advance of the far right in Sweden, Poland, Hungary, Germany, Italy, France, Spain and, yes, this now Less-Than United Kingdom as reflected in the results of the European Parliamentary elections should be no more surprising than the emboldened excursions of Russia in Ukraine, in the Baltic States, and in the Balkans. Disruption is the name of Putin`s game and Europe is playing directly into his hands through a combination of naked self-interest and `federal` arrogance. 

​

The solution should not be a hard Brexit but a recognition that sovereign states can, and need to, work together in the interests of security, economic prosperity, the environment and many other matters that benefit from agreement. That requires not a proscriptive, centralised regime but mutual co-operation. We are drinking in the much-vaunted Last Chance Saloon. It is not only Britain but the whole of the wider Europe that needs to heed the wake-up call of the recent election results.  If we all fail it will be not only the UK that will suffer the consequences until long after the armchair warriors are pushing up daisies but a European Union   that will crumble. That would not, I fear, be in the long-term interests of security or the liberty that others, seventy-five years ago, gave their lives for.

​

​

​