Spare us another couple of months of hair-raising panic attacks by Remainers like Stephen Crabb for whom the days when the British people used to make their own laws and elect their own governments where back in the dark ages, indeed before he had even started school.
Beware of the reckless fools who advocate Brexit, he warns us. Should we leave the EU he says, our unemployment rate would soar to match those in Greece and Spain. What is more, he quotes all those wise men of the grand economic forecasting who failed to see the last great financial crisis coming, but kept their jobs to get it wrong again.
Well, I offer him and all his Remain colleagues a warning given by Gladstone 125 years ago:
"The finance of the Country is intimately associated with the liberties of the Country. It is a powerful leverage by which English liberty has been gradually acquired ... It lies at the root of English liberty, and if the House of Commons can by any possibility lose the power of the grants of public money your very liberty will be worth very little in comparison ... That powerful leverage has been what is commonly known as the Power of the Purse, the control off the House of Commons over public expenditure, the root of English Liberty."
Gladstone ended with a final warning: "If these powers of the House of Commons come to be encroached upon, it will be by tacit and insidious methods, and therefore I say that attention should be called to this."
And during Mr Crabb's lifetime how those liberties have been encroached upon?
How many of those eminent persons and institutions now forecasting disaster should we dare to reclaim our right to govern ourselves were, not long ago, forecasting disaster unless we joined the eurozone?
But nothing restrains the audacity of the Remain faction of our deeply divided Government.
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