Building on shared values and strengths

Ancient Athens was the birthplace of democracy. The spiritual home of the political system that's now championed day after day across Europe.

For the first time in recorded history citizens were allowed to directly have their say in politics as they discussed the issues of the day in the agora. It's the modern version of that democratic process that millennia later saw the people of the UK decide to join the European Economic Community, and has now seen us withdraw.

For the British people, the decision to leave the European Union was born from a desire to gain greater control over the decisions that directly affected them. It was a vote to take our destiny back into our own hands again, and forge a different way in the world outside of the institutions of the EU. But it was not a rejection of Europe, or the important role we will continue to play within it.