January 25, 2014
The Freedom Association, Runnymede Speech 2013
Hon. President, Gill, Christopher, Speech at Runnymede to the Freedom Association, Runnymede plain, 15th June 2013.
“Ladies & Gentlemen, we are gathered here today as members of the Freedom Association to mark the 798th Anniversary of King John putting the royal seal to the Magna Carta.
You will hardly be surprised when I tell you that the text for what I have to say on this historic day is the single word, Freedom………..but before developing that theme I want to pay tribute to the two Prime Ministers who, in my lifetime, truly understood the meaning of that crucial word.
I refer of course, in the first instance, to Sir Winston Churchill who, against all the not inconsiderable odds stacked against him, united the then British Empire in the armed struggle against the Axis forces of terror and tyranny.
As a child I lived through the Second World War. Night after night we slept under the dining room table or in the next door neighbour’s air raid shelter. As the bombs rained down and the bullets flew my generation instinctively knew that freedom was well and truly on the line.
In the second instance, as many of you will have already guessed, I want to pay tribute to the late lamented Margaret Thatcher who unswervingly stood up for freedom. She instinctively knew that there is no ‘third way’ between freedom and tyranny and, as we all know, it was her declaration of opposition to EU imposed tyranny in her famous Bruges speech which provoked the forces of darkness within the Conservative Party to engineer her defenestration.
But before that appalling act of treachery and betrayal it was the Western world’s great good fortune that, in cahoots with Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher stood up to Soviet Russia and effectively ended the Cold War. She understood, better than most, that the way to deal with bullies is to stand up to them, just as she had stood up to the bullies in the Trades Union movement and banished the iniquitous ‘closed shop’.
To quote the Iron Lady “A man’s right to work as he will, to spend what he earns, to own property, to have the State as servant and not as master; these are the British inheritance. They are the essence of a free economy. And on that freedom all our other freedoms depend”.
Those words of Margaret Thatcher’s encapsulate some of the most important fundamental human rights – the right to act, to speak or think freely, to be master of one’s own fate – the origins of which go back to the Magna Carta sealed by King John on this day in 1215.”
To download the full speech, click the following link: Addressing the gathering of Freedom Association members at Runnymede on the occasion of the 798th Anniversary of the signing of Magna Carta the Hon-2
To download Christopher Gill’s book, “the Pocket Book of Freedom”, click the following link: The Pocket Book of Freedom
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