Recently representatives of the Daily Express newspaper hand delivered one of the biggest petitions in British history to the prime minister at his No. 10 Downing Street address.

A delegation led by editor Peter Hill and including five senior members of Parliament carried more than 20 Royal Mail sacks containing 373,000 signed coupons demanding a referendum on the UK’s continued membership of the European Union.

The Daily Express editorial column commented February 1:

These are exciting times for all those opposed to the European Union. The view that Britain would be better off out is rapidly gaining ground and the capacity of the political class to ignore such an opinion is draining away. …We do not expect David Cameron to bow to this demand today, tomorrow or even this year. But the pressure will grow inexorably upon him to grant the British people a vote on the future of their country.Millions of people have always been hostile to the EU, with its ludicrous ambitions to become a superstate. The difference now is that for hundreds of thousands at least, the issue will determine how they vote at the general election. …Mr. Cameron should know this: The Crusader is at his gates and he is not going away.

The Daily Express’s campaign is part of the Better Off Out movement, which counts ex-cabinet minister Lord Tebbit, 17 MPs and 16 peers of the realm among its distinguished patrons. The movement’s purpose is to encourage and promote a national debate on the critical issue of Britain’s loss of national sovereignty to the EU, whereby, it says on its website, “the UK’s ability to act as a nation-state is being increasingly constricted to the point where the EU now dominates the UK.”

Mr. Cameron was said to be considering his response to this, the largest petition collected by a newspaper in living memory. The MPs that accompanied Mr. Hill to Downing Street praised the Express for shining a spotlight on the great strength of feeling about an issue “almost entirely ignored by the political establishment” (Daily Express,February 1).

In the same issue of the Express, in an article titled “European Union: A Problem That Won’t Go Away,” chief political commentator Patrick O’Flynn wrote: “David Cameron has a problem looming on the horizon, and he knows it. For month after month the European Union has brought nothing but bad news for the British people. We are contributing billions to bail out the casualties of the single currency; we face a new wave of migrants as the eurozone becomes an economic dead zone; the European Court of Human Rights is demanding that prisoners are given the vote while making it impossible to deport hundreds of foreign criminals each year.”

He continued, “The prime minister, under pressure from his Lib Dem allies, has abandoned any idea of repatriating powers from Brussels and appears to be after a quiet life. But there is no chance of that.

“As anti-EU sentiment grows across the country, Tory MPs will come under growing pressure to support a referendum on leaving it” (emphasis mine).

Decades ago when Britain joined the European Common Market of which today’s European Union is but an outgrowth, Herbert Armstrong declared, based on provable Bible prophecy, that “Britain is going to look back on Monday, Jan. 1, 1973, in all probability, as a most tragically historic date—a date fraught with ominous potentialities! For that date marked the United Kingdom’s entry into the European Community” (Plain Truth, March 1973).

In the same article, Herbert Armstrong asked a question that is right up to the moment today as the Vatican draws Anglican bishops, other clergy and parishioners into Rome’s maw: “Britain will be faced with a dilemma. Will she abandon Protestantism? She will be forced to do this if she is to have a permanent role with the other nine that will form this united Europe! [Revelation 17:12].”

Referring to the religious divide in Northern Ireland, Herbert Armstrong then declared: “Today’s violence in Northern Ireland is the tragic beginning of a generally unforeseen religious struggle that will be intensified throughout the Western world when the European Community becomes a united political union.”

The EU is now a united political union per the Lisbon Treaty/European constitution. Once current efforts by Germany to impose fiscal and military union on Europe are completed, it will remain but for Europe’s traditional ideology—Roman Catholicism—to be enforced as the state religion to glue its fractious member nations together. Then the prophecies of which Herbert Armstrong warned would result in a final resurrection of the cruel old Holy Roman Empire will be fulfilled, to the letter!

In respect of the pressure mounting on the British government for a referendum on the question of Britain’s continuing membership of the EU, we don’t need to guess where this is leading or what will be the outcome of the pressure groups eager to regain British independence from the deeply corrupt, undemocratic EU bureaucracy.

In his masterpiece work Mystery of the Ages, Herbert Armstrong prophesied that, whether expelled or by voluntary withdrawal, “Britain will not be in that empire soon to come!”

Read Mystery of the Ages plus The United States and Britain in Prophecy and Daniel—Unsealed at Last! for deeper insight into just what it is that is building in the current tensions between Britain and the EU and where it is all leading.