Why Roger Scruton Wants Brexit

now before just interjection we're now going to have Roger taking us back onto a far higher plane Rogers as daniel says probably Britain's top flight intellectual and philosopher he took one asked him how I should describe him tonight he wanted me to tell you that he's just written the definitive study of vogner's Ring cycle thank you very much and thank you for the previous speakers for having spoken so honestly and clearly I think I'm outside the political process and unable to say anything quite as succinctness them but I am thankful is what I write about that we don't have time otherwise okay I'm thankful however Justin for having raised this question of why are we having a referendum and what it you know these aren't referendums in the nature a derogation from our political process we for our stem democracy does not proceed by plebiscites it proceeds by representation we elect through Parliament the people whom we trust to represent our interests and they take charge of things on our behalf and are answerable to us but they are not our delegates they're not people who are relaying our opinions and judgments they are taking the issue forward on their own account and we can vote them out of office if they make a mistake and I think one of the problems is that we did elect we have elected these people to Parliament and over the last decades or so in the hope that they would settle this issue settle the issue of the European Union and our relation to it and at every point they have refused to address it and feeling among the people has got has run higher and higher and still the issue is not discussed in Parliament in terms of the national interest it's always in terms of the existing institutions and how we can amend them even though everybody knows that they have been immune to emendation from the beginning now I think the question and this is something which has been become very clear and was made clear by I think it's mr. Hibbert who just asked a question the question is not about the short term it is about the long term and the economic arguments are all about the short term and they are all as I think Adam zamorski said absurd because they all presuppose the ability to predict what is unpredictable and we know that from looking at the history of Economic Cooperation but the long-term question is about our identity it's not about our economics and success or failure the identity of a country is that which makes it possible for it to be ruled the the sense that we share something which brings us together which enables us to accept being governed by people we didn't vote for as I think has already been said and to join together in crises to resolve our collective problem we react collectively we can only do this because we trust each other trust and belonging is what it's all about in our history Trust has been vested in the nation the nation state and its sovereignty and the territory of which it has exercised that sovereignty territory for us is not an arbitrary thing nor are the borders that secure it this is what defines what we are and in that territory various institutions have grown and a language has come into existence and those institutions are valued too by us they are precious to us because they encapsulate our freedom and one in particular I think needs to be mentioned I think actually Tom Cramer did mention which is the common law our European partners as Laura would wrongly describe them are are governed by a system of law the Roman law which and its derivations through the code Napoleon and so on which is essentially a top-down system law is made by Parliament's or by in the European case by unaccountable institutions and then delivered to the people who are told to obey in our system this is not true and it never has been not since anglo-saxon times the fundamental legal structures of our country emerged from the courts from judges resolving conflicts in the individual case and in the course of doing so encapsulating in our law both the adaptability of judicial reasoning and also the spontaneous sentiments of belonging of the people so common law for us has always been a feature of the things that make us trust each other it's a form of rule from below rather than dictatorship from above and this is where I think we should see the great question of migration although we're told that it's vulgar to reflect on this we can't deny that is part of what people are worried about mass massive migration is a solvent of trust when your children are put into schools where English is the second leg is the second language of most of the other children in the class where the customs of the teacher and of your parrot a ton of the parents are not replicated through the classroom then you have a sense that perhaps you're not you don't all belong to the same community and a huge new effort has to be made to create trust how do we create that trust it's well known that looking at the history of Eastern Europe that totalitarian government especially under the Communists depended upon breaking down trust between people if there is no spontaneous trust between people they then depend upon top-down government in order to stay together and that is of course what happened to Adam as a moist goose country or what should have been his country of which he is a hereditary count and therefore has some kind of duty towards it that happened to his country in the post-war period the breaking down of trust among the people which led to the necessity for some kind of control from above and this bears on the migration issue when we look at his country today we see of course it's been liberated it's been liberated by people who strove to take the message of freedom to that to that place during the dark years of communism Adam himself being one of them I in my smaller way another and I was there yesterday speaking to the Foreign Minister about the migration problem and he said you know of course we welcomed the entry into the European Union and the people welcomed it why because it enabled them to get away and now we have the biggest Democratic problem that we've had in our history we can't pay the pensions that we're obliged to pay all our best young people have left a qualified middle class likewise that's what freedom of movement has done to Poland and to other countries in Eastern Europe from my experience so that this we who bear the weight of migration on our infrastructure have also caused another weight to them which is that the loss of their educated and technically competent class so you know why should we have accepted this we were never given any possibility because the the treaty under which we live was signed nearly 70 years ago by people who lived in a completely different situation and who are trying to unite four countries which didn't want to migrate into each other at all and had the same standard of living and the same general economic structure that treaty was relevant perhaps to those four countries it's not relevant to us now but we are living under this treaty it's not an ordinary treaty as Daniel himself has said it's a treaty which has lawmaking powers could impose laws from above on our common law jurisdiction without her being able to adjust them and it is these laws are reflecting decisions and thoughts and ideals of people long since dead who had a completely different conception of what Europe would be than the actuality that we face today so the in us in a sense we're being ruled by the long hand of the dead and those dead people were themselves conspirators against the idea of the nation State for Jean money that was the the cause of wars we have to get rid of the nation-state and the treaty was formulated in order to facilitate that yet we survived the last war because of our loyalty to the nation-state it's all we've got it's the thing that enables us to belong together as a collective as a we despite our differences of religion class employment ideals and so on so we have something that keeps us together and I want to retain that thing that's why I would say we should leave take your hospital

Channel: How To Academy Mindset

Views: 165,929

Keywords: Roger Scruton, Brexit, Debate, how to academy

Id: NyLJYW0_F38

Length: 9min 45sec (585 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 30 2016