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.
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