Roger Scruton: Border control must be at the heart of any EU renegotiations

Roger Scruton is a writer and philospher.

The greatest difference between being governed by a national Parliament and being governed by a treaty is that, in the former case, law can be made immediately, in response to every change in the situation of those affected by it, and mistakes can be rectified before their full toll of destruction has been reaped. In the nature of things treaties forbid this. They exist to enforce a particular decision, made in particular circumstances, for a particular goal. And even if they include provisions for amending and adjusting as circumstances change, their immovable goal perpetuates the thinking from which they arose, long after circumstances have made it irrelevant.

Thus the Treaty of Rome included, among its four freedoms, the freedom of the labour force to move across national borders. This freedom, itself backed up by long-since exploded economic theories concerning the role played by the ‘factors of production’, seemed harmless at the time, when there was near full employment and parity of income in the member states. Everything began to change, partly as a result of the Treaty. And when the decision was taken, from which the people of Europe were, as ever, excluded, to extend membership to the newly liberated countries of Eastern Europe, the result was a mass migration from places devastated by communism to places where the rule of law, private property and representative institutions had kept in being the old spirit of Europe. Nothing could be done to stop this, we were told: at best it could be delayed. For a few years our government was able to postpone the influx from Romania and Bulgaria. Now, it seems this influx is to come, and our Parliament and our law can do nothing to prevent it.

Roger Scruton: When will the Conservative Party fight for England?

Roger Scruton is a writer and philospher.

We know that electoral boundaries are currently drawn in ways that disadvantage the Conservative party. There is a pressing need for reform, if the Members elected to Parliament are effectively to represent the people who vote for them. But neither the Labour Party nor the Liberal Democrats will cooperate, since both of them, in their heart of hearts, wish to marginalise the Conservative Party, and to deprive the Party of its electoral base.

In the current dispute within the coalition, there is one boundary change that is not discussed. Our government is a coalition; so too is our country. And the boundaries between our component nations are drawn in such a way as to disadvantage the people of England – in other words, the people who reliably vote for Conservative Members of Parliament. In a hundred ways the Labour Party used its spell in office to secure a long term balance of forces in its favour – and this fact has already been much commented upon in ConservativeHome. But no move that the Labour Party made was more damaging than that of creating a Scottish Parliament without removing the Scottish Members from the Parliament of Westminster.

This move has had two disastrous effects, from the Conservative point of view. First, it has given to the Scottish electorate two votes, one to govern themselves, and another to control the English. Secondly it has given a reliable block vote to the Labour Party in Westminster. The two effects are connected. For although the Scots don’t wish, on the whole, to be governed by the Labour Party – as we see from elections to the Scottish Parliament – they do want the English to be governed by the Labour Party. Hence they vote to place Labour politicians, whom they don’t want at home, in Westminster, where they can reliably pursue the interests of Scotland without imposing their censorious opinions on the Scots.

Roger Scruton: The Conservative Party is failing to define and promote its vision

Roger Scruton is a writer and philospher.

When in office the Labour Party applies itself not only to the task of government, but also to the more long-term business of developing and advancing its vision of British society. It loses no opportunity to promote its supporters to positions of influence, and invents quangos and committees to replace the old-fashioned associations of volunteers to whom the Tory party would occasionally make appeal. These quangos and committees speak not for civil society but for a new class of professionals, usually paid by the state and committed to its expansion. The Labour Party also uses all avenues of patronage (including the honours system) to create a favourable establishment, and to persuade its followers that ‘the long march through the institutions’ will benefit them just as much as it benefits the Party. As Baroness Ashton discovered, you can start off as secretary to CND, and then leap from quango to quango to become European Commissioner for foreign affairs, provided you are a member of the Labour Party. All this has proceeded apace under New Labour, with results that are everywhere visible today – a damaged constitution, universities, schools and cultural institutions wedded to a kind of soft leftism, and a civil service that has internalised the belief that it is not there to govern Britain but to change it.

In the face of this we all breathed a sigh of relief when David Cameron became Prime Minister. We naturally hoped that the Conservative Party would take the opportunity not merely to arrest the quangofication of our country, but also to define and advance a real alternative to the left-liberal orthodoxies. We know that Conservatives are reluctant to think philosophically. As Edmund Burke taught us, philosophy is dangerous, since it tends to define politics in terms of long-term goals and ideals, to the detriment of the real work of government, which is the reconciliation of individual freedom and inherited order. Nevertheless, politics requires a foundation of beliefs, values and affections, and it is to those that the Tory party has in the past made appeal. It has defined itself as the Party of the nation, representing the national interest abroad and our inherited constitution at home. It has stood for free association against bureaucratic control, and for a thriving civil society protected by a constitution that acknowledges and reconciles the conflicting ambitions of its members. From this stance it is possible to derive a philosophy; but it is the stance, not the philosophy, that matters. And it is a stance that has been radically jeopardised by the coalition.