To secede from the EU ....

that's something that occupies  Daniel Hannan's mind all the time. Many of his countrymen realize, a little too late,  that it was a mistake to have joined the  failed concept  of an united Europe. A concept that was doomed to fail from the word 'go'  and only the truly intelligent could see it.  Hannan gives us a little history lesson on states in the USA that were in like situation, whatever may have been their reasons for their quest to secede. When one looks at a given issue from all possible angles, like Hannan seems to be doing, there are umpteen number of examples and reasons for breaking away from rigidly held former concepts and ideals that have failed to work as expected.  Keeping up the pretence of normalcy, just like in many a failed marriage,  makes for more grief all around. 

I hope Hannan and others like him will be successful in their endeavors to pull UK out of the strangling grip of the EU.

.....As a localist and a Eurosceptic, I am sympathetic, in principle, to the argument that states have the right to break away from unions. But one point cannot be stressed too strongly: the eleven secessionist states were not representative democracies. According to the 1860 US census, there were 3,953,761 slaves as against a free population of 27,167,529. When the representatives of South Carolina and, later, the other ten states of the Confederacy, proclaimed their independence, they could not fairly claim to be speaking for the majority: slaves accounted for around 40 per cent of the Southern population. Add their numbers to the Union loyalists and there might very well have been a majority against withdrawal......