
Roger Scruton’s Case for Brexit
Despite recently becoming a Brexiteer, I admittedly found myself on quite unsure footing when asked to lay out a convincing case for why Britain should leave the EU.
I had a few unstructured thoughts around the supremacy of anglo economic and political philosophy and the need to protect the British identity, but nothing cohesive. I then came across a talk from Roger Scruton outlining his case. I found it the neatest encapsulation of ‘Leave’ arguments I had heard and one which aligned closely with my own, admittedly far less synthesized, view.
I shared it with a Remainer friend, got challenged and was unhappy with my rebuttal — so I’d like to give Scruton’s arguments a proper evaluation and see where I end up.
The Roger Scruton Case for Brexit (as I understand it)
Human beings need a sense of belonging. Up until now, we have found this in the nation-state.
The nation-state comprises of a people and a defined territory, which helps define where the nation-state ends and thus who ‘we’ are.
This clear sense of who we are creates trust, and trust is what makes self-government possible. It enables nation-states to give birth to institutions whose authority is accepted by the people. Liberal democracy follows from this.
The EU undermines this in a harmful way by making us obey laws made by people we did not vote for, and from institutions which didn’t emerge from our nation-state.
This is a problem in principle, as illustrated — and compounded — by the fact that the laws made in the EU originate from a completely different conception of law: not the English common law which has created the laws in the UK for centuries and moves bottom-up but a more top-down system which is derived from the code napoleon (a difference which has further important implications which I won’t go in to).
With the UK people being governed by EU laws, this link between organically-formed and trusted institutions and the people thus breaks down.
As a practical example of the issue with this, we have immigration — perhaps the central most important factor in Brexit-voting sentiment.
Many British communities have experienced large-scale immigration to the extent that their children are in schools where English is not the first language for a significant amount of pupils.
As we know, this has caused a lot of friction amongst large pockets of British society.
But this policy was decided outside of the UK and there is no clear democratic mechanism of reverting it. So we find ourselves in a situation where the British people feel aggrieved about something and can do little about it, causing an erosion of trust in our democracy.
Indeed, immigration also damages the level of trust in society in another way: it changes the demographics of communities — often economically challenged communities — swiftly in a short-space of time, causing any sense of community to whither.
If we do not have a sense of belonging, or trust in the democratic process governing our nation, we have nothing. Thus any economic arguments, which do not factor this in and focus largely on the short-term, lose relevance.
No one should be in any doubt that the EU is an attack on the nation-state — indeed it was in its conception and attack on the nation-state, which its founders saw as being the cause of war.
We should therefore leave in order to protect the nation-state.
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