Remembrance Sunday makes us all think – as I did at events in Royal Wootton Bassett, Cricklade, Blakehill (where the glider pilots took off on their way to Arnhem), Hullavington and finally Malmesbury over the weekend. We think of course of the brave men and women who gave their lives for our freedoms in the past. Especially in a very military area such as this, we think of those who daily risk life and limb under orders today, and without, I hope, any undue tendency to pacifism, we think about how to prevent armed conflict in the future.

Now there are some who still believe that the existence of the EU, or perhaps even the Eurozone, will by itself continue to prevent future wars in Western Europe. That seems to me to be the worst possible excuse for the project. I do not believe that there is even the remotest risk of Germany, France, Italy, Eire or the rest going to war with each other. Or at least, if there were any such risk, then the existence of the Euro would not prevent it.

It might even be arguable that the turbulence which the forlorn project of the Euro has caused in Greece and  Italy where the democratically elected Prime Ministers have essentially been removed by the EU, to be replaced by technocrats without apparently any kind of popular mandate at all, risks making Western European security less, rather than more, stable. If you believe good settled government is best provided by decent local democracy and Parliamentary accountability, and if you believe in free liberal economies, then is there not a risk that the increasingly centralised federal Europe, which is the only means by which the Euro can survive will actually de-stabilise the Continent rather than the contrary?  Force people together into a straitjacket, and there is a higher, not lesser risk of them trying to break out of it.

Peace is assured in the world by means of great nations entering into mutually advantageous agreements - the Commonwealth, NATO, nuclear limitation treaties, the World Trade Organisation, the UN. These are all (more or less successful) examples of independent nation states agreeing to help each other, trade together or defend each other. The Roman Empire, the Holy Roman Empire of the Middle Ages, Nazism, the Soviet Union , and now I would argue, the EU – these are all prime examples of failed attempts to bind widely differing  peoples together against their wills. The EU must become a Union of free and independent states liberally trading with one another. An ‘ever-closer union’ is both a forlorn ambition and potentially a disastrous one.

Remembrance Sunday should also be a chance to reflect on what it means to be British,  a citizen of a free and independent nation; to recall our long and glorious history; and to repudiate foolish centralist European ambitions for any kind of a Euro superstate and currency.