Last week Matthew Parris argued that Ukip was ‘extremist’ because its supporters thought of the EU’s ‘methods, despotism and oppression of them and their daily lives as barely distinguishable from those of the Soviet Union’. All right, if Mr Parris insists; but not all ‘despots’ are like Stalin.
We entered the EU voluntarily, but as this column noted a few weeks ago, Athens quickly turned a voluntary agreement among Greeks in 478 BC to keep the Persians at bay into something like a tyranny under Athenian control. In 429 BC Pericles acknowledged this, arguing that Athens had no option but to continue down that path ‘because of the danger from those whose hatred you have incurred in gaining your empire… which you now possess like a tyranny. It may be thought wrong to have acquired it, but to let it go would be extremely dangerous.
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