I'm a long way from home. Home is England. That's where I grew up and where I spent much of my professional career.

That career was politics. I was a member of the British Parliament for 12 years. My preoccupation, you might say, was and remains. Freedom. I love the word and all that it conveys. It was this preoccupation with freedom that led me to become a founding

member of the Brexit movement, the campaign to get Britain out of the European Union.

I didn't like the idea of a bunch of bureaucrats in Brussels telling me a free Englishman how I should live my life.

After we won that campaign, I decided to leave the House of Commons and move 4,000 miles to the United States, to Mississippi to be precise.

Why?

Because I believe the new battle for freedom is in America.

If it's lost here and that danger is real, it will soon be lost everywhere.

Maybe it takes an outsider to appreciate this reality, to appreciate how exceptional America is and how important it is to the world.

So let this outsider remind you of a few things you might have forgotten or maybe never learned.

One. America was conceived in liberty. In 1776 Americans weren't

merely fed up with being bossed about by a British king, George the third. Plenty of other nations have come into existence in rebellion against a authoritarian overlords.

What was different about America was that it was the first country founded on an idea, namely that all human beings are created equal,

and should be free to pursue their own best interests,

and that these rights are given to us by God and therefore can't be taken away by man.

2. The United States has the best system of government ever designed.

The founders fused this idea of liberty with Athenian and Roman

ideas of good government. Inspired by Cicero and others, they set up a system in which power

is divided between three governmental branches, the executive, legislative and judicial.

They did this to limit the power of government to keep it as small as possible.

Visiting Washington, D.C. one is struck by the evidence of America's

lineal descent from Athens and Rome. Classical columns and domes dominate the architecture,

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