Boris Johnson

Boris Johnson: I will be advocating Vote Leave… or whatever the team is called

This is not about whether you love Europe or not. Actually, I love Brussels, I used to live in Brussels – fantastic city, wonderful place – and I love European culture and civilisation.

I consider it to be the greatest civilisation this planet has ever produced, and we are all products or most of us here are products of that civilisation and it is a fantastic thing but there should be no confusion between the wonders of Europe and holidays in Europe and fantastic food and friendships and whatever else you get from Europe – with a political project that has basically been going on now for decades which Britain has been a member of since 1975 and I now think is in real danger of getting out of proper democratic control. That is my view, and it’s a view I’ve held for a long time – I’ve written a huge number of articles about it.

And when people talk about sovereignty, this is not something that is possessed by politicians. Sovereignty is people’s ability, the ability of the public to control their lives, and to make sure that the people they elect are able to pass the laws that matter to them. And the trouble is, with Europe, that that is being very greatly eroded. You are seeing it more and more over employment, over border controls, over human rights, over all sorts of stuff. And you’ve got a supreme judicial body in the European court of justice that projects down on this entire 500 million-people territory, a single unified judicial order from which there is absolutely no recourse and no comebacks. In my view, that has been getting out of control. There’s too much judicial activism, too much legislation coming from the EU.

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