Nikki Sinclaire, the West Midlands MEP who successfully campaigned for an historic Commons vote on an EU referendum, writes for the Birmingham Post.

David Cameron is Prime Minister. Just in case anyone has forgotten, that means ‘‘First servant’’.

Nick Clegg is deputy Prime Minister – our under-butler. Both men are highly paid out of our pockets. When MPs want our sympathy and respect, they always tell us that they are ‘‘public servants’’.

Well, the servants have long since locked their employers in the attic and are downstairs carousing on French and German wines.

They’ve flogged off all our precious antiques for their own advancement. They’ve bankrupted the home farm. Now, in response to a petition created in good faith by more than 120,000 people, they block their ears with three-line whips.

They’re damned if they see why they should take orders from us any more just because we pay their salaries.

All pretence of democratic representation has gone. We gave them an order. They simply ignored us. I started a petition for a vote on Britain’s membership of the EU because I share the frustration of the huge majority of the British people at seeing the international political class giving away our freedoms and our powers to govern ourselves.

We never gave permission for our businesses to be strangled by regulation, for our fisheries and farms to be given away and their related communities destroyed, for our courts to become subject to alien interests and laws, for Parliament to become an impotent irrelevancy.

We were never asked. Once, 36 years ago, we gave our consent for Britain to join a trading association which has since, systematically, annexed our entire nation, our freedoms and our identity. So it is surely time that we decide if that is what we, the sovereign people, really want.

The answer appears to be clear. 120,000 of you signed the petition requiring a referendum in record time. At least 50,000 of those signatures came from the West Midlands.

The latest opinion polls show that 58 per cent of the British people want us out and able to trade freely with the whole world without having our lives dictated to us by a load of unelected foreign bureaucrats.

But all that we asked was what David Cameron and Nick Clegg promised when they applied for their jobs – a say in our own and our children’s futures.

In the coalition agreement, there was a concession to the new politics.

We are aware of what is being done in our names in Westminster. If democracy means anything – and we have killed a lot of Iraqis, Libyans and British service personnel, amongst others, on the premise that it does – the people must participate more than ever in their own governance.

The coalition pledged, therefore, that any petition with more than 100,000 signatures would trigger a debate.

Well, there was a debate – a rushed, old-politics debate in our Parliament (not theirs) in which our representatives for the most part represented not us but their party-leaders and so their own interests.

Even had there been a free vote, it would not have been binding on the Government. Instead, with contempt for the will of the people whom so recently they wooed, all three principal party leaders imposed a three-line whip (translation: ‘‘Elected representatives are there to rubber-stamp our decisions’’).

Even if the proposed referendum were to have taken place, it would have been a fudge and a lie. It is sneeringly referred to in Westminster as ‘‘The Hokey-Cokey Referendum,’’ because it does not offer a clear choice.

Our servants believe us to be stupid. They think we will swallow the ‘‘shake it all about’’ option – of non-specific ‘‘reform’’.

There can be no reform while we remain in the EU. That is a straightforward lie. Twenty-six supposedly sovereign countries will have to agree for one comma to be changed in the treaties.

They won’t. Why would they? The only way that we can negotiate a deal with the EU is to get out of the Union, then, from a position of power, to negotiate a trading deal like that which countries like Switzerland and Norway enjoy – which is what we thought we were voting for back in 1975.

How much more contempt will we put up with from our servants? Lobby your MPs. Hit the streets. I will be putting together another petition. We are sovereign. We decide how we are governed and by whom.

I happen to be opposed to the EU. You may think it’s the best thing since the garlic baguette. It makes no difference.

All democrats should now unite and put our servants and representatives back in their place.

We pay the pipers. We call the tune.