This blog is part of a series of perspectives on the EU referendum from prominent humanists on either side of the debate. Each puts forward a humanist case for the United Kingdom either remaining a member of, or leaving, the European Union. All six perspectives are linked in the image below.
Matt Ridley: Religious skeptics should be EU skeptics
My biggest reason for voting leave this month is the European Union’s democratic deficit and bureaucratic surplus, which makes it an ill-suited organization for bringing prosperity and peace in the evolving and emergent global world we increasingly inhabit. It’s too top-down in philosophy, and too parochial in mindset. My euro-scepticism is dead in line with my religious skepticism, though you certainly don’t have to be an unbeliever to vote leave: I don’t like being told what to do by a priestly class.
‘My euro-scepticism is dead in line
with my religious skepticism, though you certainly don’t have to be an unbeliever
to vote leave: I don’t like being told
what to do by a priestly class.’
There is a certain similarity between the way fans of the European Union talk about Brussels and the way believers talk about the Almighty. Benevolent, omniscient, and remote, the European Commission sees far into our hearts and knows exactly when we need to be told through a directive not to buy something, not to make something, not to build something. It’s currently trying to tell us not to vape, for instance, at the behest of the pharmaceutical industry which has a nice little earner in prescription nicotine replacement, even though it is now clear that vaping is massive life-saver.
The entire basis of the EU is that leaders know best. It was set up by people horrified by what demagogues had done in the twentieth century, and were determined to put technocrats in charge instead, and insulate them from the democratic winds. It’s a stretch to call this religious, but the parallels with the papacy in its pomp are all too clear.
In Britain we nurtured a very different tradition, broke with Rome, killed a king who thought he had a divine right to rule and gradually absorbed the message of the enlightenment that the world is not run by great men, let alone deities, but is changed by ordinary people through trade, innovation, habit, and fashion. More than any other European country we resisted the urge to worship a leader and lend him (never her) the power to tell us what to do.
It is in that tradition that the current movement to leave the European Union should be seen. We do not like the imposition of a single currency, with the acute pain it has caused to many people, just as a way of forging a united polity. We do not like the fact that more than half our laws originate in the European commission and are justiciable by the European court, neither of whom is answerable to the people. We do not trust priesthoods and never have.
In the 1950s, when central planning was in its heyday, when we in Britain also still lived under a thicket of rules about what we could eat, buy or do, it was no surprise that the fore-runner of the EU began as a centralized, top-down, dirigiste bureaucracy. That was the way of the future then, before the collapse of living standards in Russia, China, and more recently Venezuela shows just where central planning’s faults lay.
In the 1970s, it just about made sense for Britain to join this regional bloc, which was at least partly dominated by the highly liberalized and free-market German philosophy of Werner Ehrhard. But now, in an era of cheap container shipping, free Skype intercontinental phone calls, budget airlines, rock-bottom World Trade Organisation standards, and global trading rules negotiated industry by industry at the global level, the regional focus of the European Union is an irrelevance and an anachronism. It perpetually tries to dictate rules for consumers and citizens within one continent, ignoring the wider world where we all trade.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the tech sector and the digital industry. Europe has not manage to negotiate a trade deal with America despite years of trying, yet that does not stop you or me buying software and hardware from the big American digital firms all the time. The EU has a dismal track record in creating digital start-ups, throttling them at birth with petty rules, so that we have not one to compare with Apple, Google, Facebook or Amazon. (One of our best candidates, Spotify, is threatening to leave the EU for America.)
The parallel with Humanism is pretty obvious. Humanism means suspicion of superstition, but is also means respect for human beings’ wishes. People have voted for a digital world with great enthusiasm over the past few decades by buying digital products, joining digital networks and embracing egalitarian values. Into this world lumbers a bunch of highly paid, lowly taxed, richly fed Eurocrats, who never saw this coming, saying things like “we must have a minimum of boring French films on Netflix” or we insist that hyperlinks respect intellectual property, or whatever the latest wheeze big companies have breathed into their ears over a four-course meal in Brussels.
In the sixteenth century, admittedly for carnal reasons, the English got a chance to tell a wealthy and parasitic priestly class, answerable to nobody and with a top-down view of the world, to get stuffed. We have the same chance again today.
Matt Ridley is a journalist and Conservative Party peer who is a member of the All Party Parliamentary Humanist Group. He is also a patron of Conservative Humanists.
Thank you for contributing to the BHA referendum debate, however there is a hole in your case – it presumes that the British political class is immune to the whispers of big corporates, when they have been shown to behave in the interest of corporates in the face of skeptical public opinion. tech liberalization, moving uk-hosted tech to the US, the race to the bottom by global firms eg. Uber and seemingly intractable issues such as the toxic combinations caused by the revolving door between Whitehall and the Global military-industrial complex.
The EU has many faults as does our own system of government.
But it exists and represents a major player in the world today and we have to live with it as we have to live with many other situations that are not ideal.
We are not alone in our feelings about the EU and by remaining we can at least influence its future direction to some extent.
Britain alone cannot in today’s world influence world events as it used to in the days of the Empire and to withdraw itself in on itself claiming to be ‘the best’ will, I am afraid , not result in the long term being the self satisfied country I would like my grandchildren to be part of. ( actually they also say that neither would they!)
Surely a Humanist wishes to seek to become engaged with others in order to understand their viewpoints and different circumstance so that he or she can then do unto them as he or she would expect to have done to him or herself? Why not start within a structure which provides a good stepping stone to bringing about change for the better in the rest of the world?
Frankly, I am horrified that any Humanist could ally itself with an overtly racist ( qv Farage’s latest poster) organisation in order to achieve his / her objective of leaving, albeit for non racist reasons.
Humanism also means being rational and respecting the evidence. There’s a distinct lack of rationality about this post.
“The entire basis of the EU is that leaders know best. ”
Are we questioning the usefulness and role of leaders now? Are we encouraging anarchy?
I really do not relate to this view at all, and I think the comparison with religion, the pope etc is laboured and very clumsy.
Not the best argument for leaving I have read. Still, worth a read I guess.
Matt Ridley confused personal autonomy with national autonomy. Leaving the EU will do nothing to increase personal autonomy. Rules will still be made in Westminster and instead of talking religiously about Brussels we will talk religiously about Westminster. That is to say if he is right in drawing this parallel. Only difference is that in our first-past-the -post electoral system we, for five years at a time, have people like him direct our lives. It does seem like a load of rhetoric and a really rather weak appeal to an athiest’s personal sense of individualism.
Methinks the noble lord Ridley just despises not being the cock of the walk anymore. We need the EU precisely to keep his ilk from running the place.
Thanks for this. I was always wondering what the chairman of the first British bank in 150 years to suffer a bank run which crashed the UK economy thought about the EU referendum.
It is really quite depressing how many people, including some commenting here, are so complacent or lacking in ambition or self-esteem, that they are content to have their country progressively submerged in a bureaucratic union, to be governed by those who are in the main a self-appointed elite rather than those we directly elect.
The idea that we need the EU to somehow keep our own elected politicians in place has to be the most egregious as well as the dumbest example of this.
Ah, the condescending attacks. I am now lacking in self-esteem… what a joke, you leavers are just a joke, I can’t think of a better word for it. If the UK leaves the EU and all goes to shits, you’ll all be quiet then, and the rest of us will be left having to pay for your recklessness and emotional nationalism.
Things you have got wrong:
1) The EU has a smaller bureaucracy than a large city in the UK. It is tiny compared to the number of people involved. Birmingham eploys more civil servants and workers.
2) The European Commission are appointed by our democratically elected governments. They do not appoint themeselves. Our MEPs are democratically elected by you. Not self-appointed.
3) The UK has far more democratic problems than the EU. A monarch, FFS. Followed by the largest parliament chamber in Europe full of peers that we can never get rid of through any sort of vote. We are the most centralised government in Europe with weak regional governments who cannot even choose to build a new school. We have first past the post which means most of our votes do not count for anything.
The EU is just one check we have on over-reaching power. A small one but given thet this government is doing its best to get rid of any authority that can challenge it some might say a vital one.
Andy Lewis – that’s the best reply I’ve seen during this entire debate.
The world faces challenges not seen before in human history because of the unprecedented advance in travel, communication, information processing and the scale of industry.
Multinational organisations are an inevitable consequence. Like all other institutions there is room for improvement but instead of resigning we should have voted to stay and work to make it better.
The UK is not and never will be independent of the rest of the world including Europe, whether we are a member state of the EU or not.
If any good comes from the vote to leave it will teach us that valuable lesson.