Tom Wilde

It's an interesting thought experiment: what if we lose? What if the UK is split up and the bits are digested wholesale into the EU?
Possibily. There is another strategy I've been wondering about. It is based on the idea that states in the end should be voluntary and governments in the end can only rely on the active participation of their citizens.

Suppose in ten years time, the UK has been aboloished by the collective efforts of the SNP, English Democrats, the EU and so on. Separate English, Scottish and Welsh regional entities are under the boot of Brussels, with little real democracy and run by a cynical and security-obsessed bureacracy. So long as there is still freedom of assembly, here's what we could do:

We set up a new membership society, perhaps starting with members of UKIP but open to anyone else who wants to join so long as they are resident in any part of the former territory of the UK. We'd call this society the "United Kingdom Society" or just "United Kingdom" for short. After all, as a private membership society, we could use whatever terminology we liked among ourselves. Therefore we would refer to the society's members as "citizens". The society's elected leader we would call the "Prime Minister". The leadership could be elected by a system based on local polls of the 'citizens' to elect local representatives called 'MPs', who in turn would form a ruling body (the 'government') on the basis of political affiliation. Nobody could reasonably stop us setting up such a society, or using such titles, so long as our aims were peaceful. So long as the 'United Kingdom' only had a few hundred 'citizens', we'd probably be regarded as just harmless eccentrics, but as nostalgia for the old UK and disgust with the euro-tyranny rapidly boosted membership into the millions - as it might well do - we would have the basis for an alternative, opt-in national structure.

At this point, the 'government' of the 'United Kingdom' might just ask its 'citizens' to stop paying their taxes to the official EU-run structures and to pay them to the 'United Kingdom' instead. It would then use the money to fund hospitals, schools etc. Existing hospitals and schools could opt into the new dispensation by a simple declaration of loyalty. On doing so, they would cease to claim funding from the EU and start to receive it from the 'United Kingdom' instead.

At some point a little later, the 'government' of the 'United Kingdom' would ask its 'citizens' to no longer obey any rule, law or directive issued by the EU or its regional puppets, and instead to obey the rules ('laws') of the 'United Kingdom' instead.

At some point after that, we could stop using the inverted commas!

Hey presto. How to get your country back without violence, while acting on the liberal principle of society as the voluntary co-operation of free individuals.