Nexus Masterclass Roger Scruton 'Brexit: yes or no?'

thank you very much to was for that very warm welcome and congratulations on your English which is actually more beautiful than mine because you think about each sentence and pronounce it correctly and obviously I have now been put in a very difficult position because I know I'm I'm talking to a largely hostile audience and I came here in the hope that that you all had open minds perhaps your minds are open even though your conclusions are closed let's hope Thomas just raised the question which is apparently being discussed here of what it is to be a European and I gather my friend Pritz Boca Stein has said that he counts himself as a European because he was born in a European Union country and that is a remarkable definition I count myself as a European first of all because I was born in a European country not a European Union country because it wasn't part of it then but much more importantly because I am heir to the Christian faith the Roman law and the civilization of Europe embodied in its institutions its universities and in above all in its Parliament's and his political procedures which to me is the most important fact of my own upbringing and I think those my country embodies those traditions as European traditions as well as any other country in Europe and has done perhaps more than any other country in Europe to defend them so inevitably therefore I don't think that whatever it is that makes the people of Britain wants to move away from the European Union whatever it is is really a proof that they are not European on the contrary I think many British people certainly of my persuasion would say that it's precisely our nature as Europeans that makes us move in the direction that we're moving that we become doubtful about the European Union because it does not represent Europe does not represent the Europe that we know and love and which made us the civilized things that we are or at least some of us now so let me just say why I think the British people feel so doubtful about the European Union I think there are three big reasons which are not often put into discussion which which perhaps ought to be known by people in this room the first is the post-war situation we the British had successfully defended our sovereignty against Nazi aggression and had not been occupied all other nations save Spain Portugal and Sweden which maintained a kind of neutrality had suffered defeat and/or occupation and this means there's an enormous difference in the underlying psyche of the British people's particular my parents generation who had fought that war protected our country came from it came away from that war with a sense of having achieved what they set out to do which was to protect our freedom independence and sovereignty from a major threat to which other countries had succumbed and I think this means that that there we start from a different premise the premise that we have earned our freedom we've defended our freedom and in doing so defended Europe the European values against the most recent attempt to submerge them which was the attempt of the Nazis of course then there was the attempt of the Communists which is another question coming later of hope for most of us so the motives for us British people to surrender our sovereignty to a transnational body politic or inevitably different even if they existed at all they weren't the same motives as the Germans had or the French had who had survived occupation and the enmity between them and wanted a new kind of reconciliation we didn't need that reconciliation because we had never been forced to have it thrust upon us so our parents asked the question was the fight worth it just to give in just to surrender that thing that we had spent our lives and fortunes on defending and I think that question is it always been in the back of minds of the British people as one reason why they've been skeptical about attempts to take national sovereignty away so that's the first big reason and that the British are skeptical the second big reason is that our country has enjoyed a different kind of government and a different kind of law from the rest of Europe the rest of the Europe has largely not all of it but most of it has undergone the great transformation inflicted upon it by Napoleon and the imposition upon upon the nations of Europe of external sovereignty recent constitutions and the Napoleonic jurisdiction the code Napoleon your country used to have a beautiful system of law Roman Dutch law which survives in the modern world but only in the places which were part of the British Empire because we stole them from you that's to say Zimbabwe you used to be Rhodesia and South Africa forget about that the fact is that that the Netherlands are governed by a Napoleonic style jurisdiction in which law is imposed upon people from above by the decisions of the legislature and works down into those capillaries of society in my country law is not largely or wasn't largely imposed from above but was created in the courts and indeed to say that it was created is already to beg an important question the British people regarded the courts of law courts of the common law as it's called as discovering the law you take your dispute to a judge and the conflict that is really troubling you you put it before that judge and if he is impartial and proceeds according to the principles of natural justice as they're called then he will discover the legal solution even if nobody has ever said it before Parliament then has the business of ratifying this if it comes before Parliament but much of our law has never come before Parliament and this is an extraordinary fact that we have built up a legal system from below from the resolution of the conflicts that occur between ordinary people and only our now and then with the intervention of the legislature imposing laws from above you can understand this if you contrast the law of products liability in English law with the laws all the laws and regulations about product liability which have been created by the European Commission and the the European Court of Justice we have one law which is not even a law it's a decision of the courts in the case of Donoghue against Stevenson which tells you that somebody who is issuing something for sale so that in the general public is prima facie liable for all the adverse causes that will adverse effects that would result from consuming it that was a decision of the common law courts and it has been sufficient to generate a fully developed system of product liability without consulting Parliament cause Parliament comes in but then when there is an additional difficulty but that particular innovation saved us from all the problems that that bothered European states in the in the interregnum it interwar period right so that I think is in a very important point to remember that our system of law is structurally completely different from those systems of laws are applied in Europe has great difficulty accommodating things like the decisions of the European Court of Justice and certainly causes feelings of rebellion in people's in the minds of ordinary people when they find themselves subject to a regime of regulation which is vast by a hundredfold than anything that they've been accustomed to and that I think is important because it gives people a sense that somehow we are being governed from outside by people who don't understand us who only know how to to regulate and don't know how to resolve conflicts regulations produce as many conflicts as they resolve the common law only resolves things but that's the second great feature of my country which makes it so skeptical towards the European Union but the third feature I think is one which hardly ever mentioned but is even more important than the other two which is that we speak the international language indeed we speak it so we're so deeply immersed in it that we hardly speak anything else we are a Monogue lot a highly ignorant community which doesn't have any ability to understand anything in any language other than its own but the language that we speak is the first language that everybody else learns so anybody who is remotely educated from any part of Europe can move into our country and establish himself or herself in our territory at the same time our territory is small very small it's much loved - because we fought for it in two world wars and this was the great propaganda message that we had this beautiful country which must be saved and anybody who's travelled in the British countryside knows what I mean it's much loved and protected protected by long-standing institutions and initiatives which I am going to talk about tomorrow in Amsterdam at a meeting organized by the European Union interestingly enough any this is a it's a small territory our territory is even more densely populated this territory of England at least than that of the of the Netherlands it you wouldn't think so to look at it so we are effectively under siege due to the European Union's freedom of movement provisions which bring half a million people each year into our tiny country and those provisions are part of the treaty deeply embedded in the treaty almost impossible to change and they are the things which are most objectionable to the British who see that they have lost control of their borders and are now hosts to vast number of people from the former communist countries in Eastern Europe who compete for jobs of course and most of all compete the houses and a in effect causing an enormous housing crisis which we don't know how to resolve so again this goes back to the first big reason you know the fact that we defended our sovereignty in a time of great emergency and people ask themselves how can there be such a thing as national sovereignty if we have lost the right to control your borders you can't exclude those whom you don't want in the country or invite it will make give special privileges to those whom you do so those three great features of my country's position which are not duplicated elsewhere in Europe are the real underlying cause as to why British people feel so dissatisfied you may object to them feeling dissatisfied in that on these grounds you may think that this is primitive or in some way involves a kind of the kind of nationalistic consciousness from which the rest of the world has released its itself but I think that it probably is not really fair because these feelings come from a deep sense of a political order that is endured for a thousand years it's we are not nationalists as is proved by the fact that we don't have a single nation therefore nations wrapped together in the United Kingdom but none of which accept how possibly the Scots have recently expressed their national feelings in belligerent belligerent terms but all of whom think that they share this great political tradition and the land in which it has established itself and they share also the law that I was referring to we have to add to these those three facts two very basic observations first that the European Union has in its enthusiasm for dissolving borders left itself unprotected against mass migrations German guilt feelings of course make this worse and there's no point in hiding from the fact that we're all extremely worried about what is going to be the consequences of angular Aguila commercials gestures in recent weeks it's there no limit to the people that we are going to welcome and if so are we forced to accept however crowded we are have a little review resources we have to offer are we forced to accept a complete transfer of populations into a country which has fought to protect itself from just that very thing from the labels realm ambitions of its neighbors are we to ignore factors like knowledge religion adaptability culture in incorporating new communities in our midst that's a review june that the European Union has fudged and forbidden assent that in many ways from discussing the second observation is that to be governed by a treaty is to put yourself in this situation where you can't adapt to change each nation can localize its problems and solve them or adapt to them if it can take legislative initiatives on its own and that's the normal way in which countries face their problems try to adapt to changing circumstances and to go on into the future they pass laws or create institutions initiate discussions which enable them to take a decision for themselves but if they can't take that decision how are they going to adapt the treaty is it needs the signature of all its members to change in any very basic respect but it was a treaty signed over 50 years ago people who are dead in a situation that has vanished why should we be still governed by that rather than by our own decisions taken in our own Parliament's according to our own sense of what our problems are surely this is irrational when Lenin imposed communism on the Soviet you what became the Soviet Union he destroyed all the institutions in which opposition could take shape not just the parliamentary institutions but the legal institutions - abolishing the courts and and the legal profession and all the rest so that there was no reverse gear and the Soviet Union went on for 70 years until it finally met the brick wall which had been there all along building a political order without a reverse gear or without a bit an ability to change in accordance with the needs at the moment is the greatest political mistake is the mistake of making a political order which won't recognize mistakes and that's what we after what I think the European Union has done by attaching all of its procedures to a treaty signed in a situation that has vanished so out of this there is a arisen a strong sense that there's not just a democratic deficit in the European process which in many countries admit that there is but a deficit of legitimacy in the whole thing that the European processes confiscated national sovereignty but offered nothing in exchange great and now of course here people give lots of economic arguments and of course they're very complicated economic arguments to which I give two replies before stopping because I know that you don't accept anything that I've said so far so I might as well get the whole lot down so you guys have some more things not to accept first of all the economic arguments don't tend in one direction a customs union of course amplifies trade and therefore prosperity but the European Union regime of regulations cuts against that giving a competitive edge to countries on the Pacific Rim and controlling hours of work and conditions of labor in ways that make the European Union nations uncompetitive in the modern global economy now these matters are complex and I've discovered that no expert agrees that any other and the evidence of history in my view is that all economists are self-appointed authorities and that all their judgments are wrong but you know that's only my view this the second reply to this is that the argument is not about economics anyway it's about identity who are we imagine persuading people to share their house and their land with a family whose manners and values they cannot accept on the grounds that they will be twice as wealthy if they do so their response would be you know okay that's great that we would be twice as wealthy but we wouldn't have what we really want which is our love for each other our attachment to this place and our ability to govern ourselves according to our own way of life and you know that seems a perfectly reasonable response and one of the great questions that this whole debate raises is whether there are not other values and economic ones in the world in which we live politicians as soon as they're given a question to answer they collapse the question into economics say will be worse off if we do this better if we do that and so on even though economic questions only come after all the other questions the questions of our integrity sovereignty and freedom and that's what it is all about thank

Channel: TheNexusInstitute

Views: 51,503

Rating: 4.8974357 out of 5

Keywords: Nexus Instituut, Nexus Institute, Roger Scruton (Author), Philosophy (Field Of Study), United Kingdom European Union Membership Referendum

Id: Bvlg8YK3iSU

Length: 19min 46sec (1186 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 26 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/G96Saber]

A serious, traditionalist conservative, philosopher on the underlying causes of the British exit of the European Union. Recorded before the vote, speaking to some Dutch people.

You can find more at the Salisbury Review: http://salisburyreview.com/

[u/black_square]

Well reasoned of course. I agree with the points about language and how we view ourselves in light of wwii compared to other eu nations.

I don't agree with describing us as under siege due to freedom of movement. That was probably my biggest gripe. And points about housing without referencing how few houses we build, though of course as a sort of ruskinite he'll only argue in favour of tightening planning laws.

I agree with his points about the rigid nature of the treaty. Though somehow feel he might be more keen on it if it was 400 years old, based on how I've seen him speak on other matters, though this may be unfair. It's similar to how the American constitution often seems too rigid to me though of course there are mechanisms to change it somewhat.

I think he brushes off the economic arguments too easily. It might be fine for someone in a position of relative wealth and privilege but it may quite reasonably be the most important thing for some who struggle to get by each week or may not be able to find work in the future. And of course the standard line of economists always disagree with each other lol so don't listen too them is a cheap and lazy shot, especially with the general consensus the profession had on brexit.

Having said all that it's the best I've seen anyone arguing for a leave vote, even though I disagree with his philosophical view of the nation and how to interact with our neighbours I can understand and appreciate his view.