Rally Speech made by Professor Roger Scruton
I would like to say in a nutshell what I think are the underlying issues which confront you, and in fact all English people facing the world in which we now live. First is the issue of freedom. We have been brought up to believe that freedom is the essence of our country. It is what Governments exist to protect and it is what makes us the people that we are; and I think that is what we are really campaigning for in the question of hunting. But freedom doesn't mean anything unless it leads to some kind of human happiness and satisfaction and that comes through community.
You have here a community; a community of free beings who unite around activities like hunting and farming and village life. This is a model to the rest of us; it is also what city people are jealous of and therefore want to destroy. There is another thing at stake which is even more important to us, namely the idea of a locality. We exist in a certain place. We are not people who spend our days wandering all over the world being a nuisance to others in our tourist coaches. We are people who are content to be in a certain part of God's earth and to do there those things that are natural to us which our forefathers have done, and which unite us around a common enterprise.
These three things - freedom, community and locality - are what we stand for and what all England wants, and yet which only we seem to be able to represent. What is the greatest threat to these three things? It is the ability and the desire of people who do not belong to a community to control it from the outside. The greatest threat to our freedom and to our sense of community comes from the absentee landlord. No greater example of this - a vivid example - can be had in your part of the world than the National Trust, an anonymous bureaucracy which has the impertinence to own the country where you live, and also to tell you what you can do in it, without itself having to pay the real cost of maintaining the landscape. For this cost is the cost of living in it as a community.
An example that we have all had to suffer from, of impertinent interference by ignorant city dwellers, is that of the greatest absentee landlord of all - the Parliament of Westminster. The old idea of a Parliament was of a collection of people who represented the communities of England, represented their interest and protected those interests from outside interference. The new kind of Parliament is the opposite of that. It is a place of political careerists and activists, whose desire is not to represent and protect their constituents, but to control and regulate them.
What is the problem for farmers in our country today? It is parliament and the compulsion of politicians to regulate every single activity which makes life worthwhile. It is regulations that are killing the small farmers: controls examining bodies, visits from MAFF and the health departments. We must fight for another and an older kind of Parliament, a Parliament which stops interfering with our lives and instead tries to protect them. We want a Parliament which represents us as old-fashioned but loyal Englishmen, for whom freedom, community and locality are our ideals.
Professor Roger Scruton, is an Author and Philosopher. he is the author of over twenty books and is a well-known media personality.