It’s time I came clean and owned up: I am a Europhile.

But, before all my fellow Brexiteers disown me, I must make clear that the Europe I love and daily thank God for has nothing to do with that monstrous tyranny in Brussels. I hate and despise the EU: its unelected Commissioners; its extortionate fraud called the customs union which sets British taxes and disbars us from trading freely with the rest of the world; its manifest corruption demonstrated by its refusal to publish audited accounts for two decades; its doctrine of universal rights derived from the blood-soaked philosophy which guided the French Revolution; its thorough atheism by which it has banished Christianity from the public realm; its relentless invention of new business taxes and regulations which stifle Britain’s economic prosperity and which have produced catastrophic unemployment among the young throughout the continent, impoverished Italy, Spain and Portugal and brought Greece to the edge of economic collapse and social disaster. Most of all I despise the EU for its suicidal immigration policy which is importing millions of members of an alien and vicious ideology  – people who have repeatedly declared their contempt for the West – to live among us and so transform our continent until it comes to resemble the s*** heaps from which these hordes are glad to escape.

I fail entirely to understand the minds of the Remainers who regard this tyrannous servitude, this blatantly repressive regime, as freedom and as a paragon of the liberal values.

Have I made myself clear? Good – then I will tell you of that Europe which I love and for which I daily give thanks.

It is the Europe which, in the early Middle Ages, began to fashion the modern world: the monks, their monasteries, their agriculture and their learning; the common Latin language and the universities as the bedrock of scholarship; logic, philosophy; men such as Anselm, Aquinas, Duns Scotus and Francis Bacon.

Then there are the sublime creations of European literature, music , art and sculpture: The Divine Comedy; the paintings of Giotto; Gregorian plainchant; the invention of polyphony which produced the classical musical tradition; Tallis, Byrd, Purcell, Bach, Haydn, Schubert, Mozart and Beethoven; the public schools; hospitals and hospices; the trades guilds and the livery companies; the Gothic and the Romanesque, a cathedral in every city and a parish church in every village; the practical virtue of charity; Europe’s scientists, mathematicians, astronomers and medical doctors who have enriched our understanding and our wellbeing.

All these blessings and wonders – and many more besides – were and are the creation of the Europe I confess I love.

I confess, but I do not apologise