I never thought I’d see the day, truly I didn’t.

Britain’s iconic Union Flag was ceremoniously lowered, folded, and taken away in the European Council building in Brussels ahead of Brexit at 11 p.m. on January 31st.

Video of the history-making moment shows a sombre atmosphere as EU functionaries lower the flag of what had been one of the bloc’s top economic and military powers — powerful imagery symbolising the island nation setting out as a free-standing democracy once again and the diminishment of what is now a 27-member confederation.

Might Farage’s and Johnson’s unexpected victory inspire a drive for withdrawal in other dissatisfied member-nations still under the thumb of this decrepit WW2 relic? We’ll see, I guess. But for now, Merrie Olde England has, against all odds and to however slight a degree, reestablished governance in accord with the will of its people. And that’s always something worth celebrating.

Update! EUrocrats, shabby and spiteful to the bitter end—like all bureaucrats everywhere.

Brexit goes through today, and Britain is finally independent, free from the clutches of the European Union. It’s a great event regardless of how it happens, but in this case, it was cool beyond description. 

It all ended with a pretty amazing flourish, one that told us a lot about both the European Commission and newly sovereign Britain itself. Chief Brexiteer Nigel Farage made his last speech before the European Commission, which was a great scolding and call to shut down the whole operation altogether, which was subversive enough. But he drove it even farther. 

Farage and his buddies ended the whole thing by explicitly waving the British flag of sovereignty right in the faces of all the angry little European Commission eurocrats, even as they sputtered and cut off his mic.

What freedom-loving person couldn’t love it? Breathes there a man with soul so dead…

Metaphor, anyone? It was the mother of all metaphors, a Britain that asserted its sovereignty in waving its symbolic flag as its soulless eurocrat masters got angry and tried to stop it, not on political grounds, not because they were afraid the other member-states might follow, but on petty rules grounds, little administrative state foot-stamping, insisting on cookie-cutter order and obedience, no exceptions, in the face of a newly freed state that just asserted that it can do what it wants.

That last is what REALLY frosts the EU-rats’ withered, desiccated little nuts. Again, like all bureaucrats, all around the world. Seems to me this auspicious, thrilling occasion calls for running the famous Sixth Canto of Sir Walter Scott’s epic poem in its entirety:

Breathes there the man with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d,
As home his footsteps he hath turn’d
From wandering on a foreign strand!
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;

For him no Minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonour’d, and unsung.

Well said, cousin. Yes, I know Scott was actually a Scotsman, not Ainglish. But I can call him a small-c cousin anyhoo, seeing as how I’m through-and-through Scots-Irish myself, on my mom’s side. So there.