No taxation without representation!

The Reverend Jonathan Mayhew is supposed to have first used the phrase "No taxation without representation" in 1750 during a sermon in Boston, then a town in the British colony of Massachusetts. With it, he was saying that the colonists weren't willing to pay taxes imposed by the British parliament because they were not represented there.

Twenty-three years after Reverend Mayhew's sermon, a group of Bostonians boarded three British ships and threw their cargoes of tea into the harbour. "No taxation without representation!" they shouted during what become known as the Boston Tea Party.

Well, one thing led to another and in 1776, the Americans, as the colonists now called themselves, declared their independence as a new nation — the United States of America — and rejected the rule of the British monarchy.

The only reason I mention this history is that it seems many of us will now be forced to pay off the enormous debts of the bankrupt government of Greece. Yet we will not be represented in the Greek parliament and neither will we have any say in how the billions upon billions are spent. Our leaders would do well to remember the revolutionary power of Reverend Mayhew's words: "No taxation without representation!"