 Thank you very much, Thomas, for that very warm welcome, and congratulations on your English, which is actually more beautiful than mine, because you think about each sentence and pronounce it correctly. Obviously I've now been put in a very difficult position because I know I'm talking to a largely hostile audience and I came here in the hope that you all had open minds. Perhaps your minds are open, even though your conclusions are closed. Let's hope. Thomas, just raise the question, which has apparently been discussed here, of what it is to be a European. I gather my friend Pritz Bulkastain has said that he counts himself as a European because he was born in a European Union country. That is a remarkable definition. I count myself as a European, first of all because I was born in a European country, not a European Union country, because it wasn't part of it then. But much more importantly because I'm heir to the Christian faith, the Roman law, and the civilisation of Europe embodied in its institutions, its universities, and above all in its parliaments and its political procedures, which to me is the most important fact of my own upbringing. My country embodies those European traditions as well as any other country in Europe and has done perhaps more than any other country in Europe to defend them. So inevitably therefore I don't think that whatever it is that makes the people of Britain wants to move away from the European Union, whatever it is, is really a proof that they're not European. On the contrary, I think many British people, certainly of my persuasion, would say that it's precisely our nature as Europeans that makes us move in the direction that we're moving. That we become doubtful about the European Union because it does not represent Europe. It does not represent the Europe that we know and love and which made us the civilised things that we are, or at least some of us. So let me just say why I think the British people feel so doubtful about the European Union. I think there are three big reasons which are not often put into discussion but which perhaps ought to be known by people in this room. The first is the post-war situation. We, the British, had successfully defended our sovereignty against Nazi aggression and had not been occupied. All other nations, save Spain, Portugal and Sweden which maintained a kind of neutrality, had suffered defeat and or occupation. This means there's an enormous difference in the underlying psyche of the British people, particularly my parents' generation, who had fought that war, protected our country, came away from that war with a sense of having achieved what they set out to do, which was to protect our freedom, independence and sovereignty from a major threat to which other countries had succumbed. I think this means that we start from a different premise, the premise that we have earned our freedom, we've defended our freedom and in doing so defended Europe, the European values against the most recent attempt to submerge them, which was the attempt of the Nazis, of course then there was the attempt of the communists, which is another question coming later for most of us. The motives for us, British people, to surrender our sovereignty to a transnational body politic were inevitably different, even if they existed at all. They weren't the same motives as the Germans had or the French had, who had survived occupation and the enmity between them and wanted a new kind of reconciliation. We didn't need that reconciliation because we'd never been forced to have it thrust upon us. So our parents asked the question, was the fight worth it just to give in, just to surrender that thing that we had spent our lives and fortunes on defending? And I think that question has always been in the back of the minds of the British people as one reason why they've been sceptical about attempts to take national sovereignty away. So that's the first big reason that the British are sceptical. The second big reason is that our country has enjoyed a different kind of government and a different kind of law from the rest of Europe. The rest of the Europe has largely, not all of it, but most of it has undergone the great transformation inflicted upon it by Napoleon and the imposition upon the nations of Europe of external sovereignty, written constitutions and the Napoleonic jurisdiction, the Côd Napoléon. Your country used to have a beautiful system of law, Roman Dutch law, which survives in the modern world but only in the places which were part of the British Empire because we stole them from you. That's to say Zimbabwe used to be Rhodesia and South Africa. Forget about that, the fact is that the Netherlands are governed by a Napoleonic-style jurisdiction in which law is imposed upon people from above by the decisions of the legislature and worked down into the capillaries of society. In my country law is not largely or wasn't largely imposed from above but was created in the courts and indeed to say that it was created is already to beg an important question. The British people regarded the courts of law, the courts of the common law as it's called, as discovering the law. You take your dispute to a judge and the conflict that is really troubling you, you put it before that judge and if he is impartial and proceeds according to the principles of natural justice as they're called, then he will discover the legal solution even if nobody has ever said it before. Parliament then has the business of ratifying this if it comes before Parliament but much of our law has never come before Parliament. This is an extraordinary fact that we have built up a legal system from below from the resolution of the conflicts that occur between ordinary people and only now and then with the intervention of the legislature imposing laws from above. You can understand this if you contrast the law of product liability in English law with the laws, all the laws and regulations about product liability which have been created by the European Commission and the European Court of Justice. We have one law which is not even a law, it's a decision of the courts in the case of Donahue against Stevenson which tells you that somebody who is issuing something for sale in the general public is prima facie liable for all the adverse effects that would result from consuming it. That was a decision of the common law courts and it has been sufficient to generate a fully developed system of product liability without consulting Parliament. Parliament comes in but then when there is an additional difficulty but that particular innovation saved us from all the problems that bothered European states in the interwar period. That I think is a very important point to remember that our system of law is structurally completely different from those systems of law that are applied in Europe. It has great difficulty accommodating things like the decisions of the European Court of Justice and certainly causes feelings of rebellion in the minds of ordinary people when they find themselves subject to a regime of regulation which is faster by 100 fold than anything that they've been accustomed to. That I think is important because it gives people a sense that somehow we're being governed from outside by people who don't understand us who only know how to regulate and don't know how to resolve conflicts. Regulations produce as many conflicts as they resolve. The common law only resolves things. That's the second great feature of my country which makes it so sceptical towards the European Union. The third feature I think is one which is hardly ever mentioned but is even more important than the other two which is that we speak the international language. Indeed we speak it so deeply immersed in it that we hardly speak anything else. We are a monoglot, highly ignorant community which doesn't have any ability to understand anything in any language other than its own. But the language that we speak is the first language that everybody else learns. So anybody who is remotely educated from any part of Europe can move into our country and establish himself or herself in our territory. At the same time our territory is small, very small. It's much loved too because we fought for it in two world wars and this was the great propaganda message that we had this beautiful country which must be saved. Anybody who's travelled in the British countryside knows what I mean. It's much loved and protected by long standing institutions and initiatives which I'm going to talk about tomorrow in Amsterdam at a meeting organised by the European Union. It's a small territory. Our territory is even more densely populated, this territory of England at least, than that of the Netherlands. Yet you wouldn't think so to look at it. So we are effectively under siege due to the European Union's freedom of movement provisions which bring half a million people each year into our tiny country. And those provisions are part of the treaty deeply embedded in the treaty, almost impossible to change. And they are the things which are most objectionable to the British, who see that they have lost control of their borders. And are now hosts to vast number of people from the former communist countries in Eastern Europe who compete for jobs of course. And most of all compete for houses and in effect causing an enormous housing crisis which we don't know how to resolve. So again this goes back to the first big reason, the fact that we defended our sovereignty in a time of great emergency. And people ask themselves how can there be such a thing as national sovereignty if you have lost the right to control your borders. If you can't exclude those whom you don't want in the country or invite or give special privileges to those whom you do. So those three great features of my country's position which are not duplicated elsewhere in Europe are the real underlying cause as to why British people feel so dissatisfied. You may object to them feeling dissatisfied on these grounds. You may think that this is primitive or in some way involves the kind of nationalistic consciousness from which the rest of the world has released itself. But I think that it probably is not really fair because these feelings come from a deep sense of a political order that has endured for a thousand years. We are not nationalists as is proved by the fact that we don't have a single nation. There are four nations wrapped together in the United Kingdom none of which except possibly the Scots have recently expressed their national feelings in belligerent terms. All of whom think that they share this great political tradition and the land in which it has established itself. And they share also the law that I was referring to. We have to add to these three facts two very basic observations. First that the European Union has in its enthusiasm for dissolving borders left itself unprotected against mass migrations. German guilt feelings of course make this worse. And there's no point in hiding from the fact that we're all extremely worried about what is going to be the consequences of Angela Merkel's gestures in recent weeks. Is there no limit to the people that we're going to welcome? And if so are we forced to accept however crowded we are have a little few resources we have to offer. Are we forced to accept a complete transfer of population into a country which has fought to protect itself from just that very thing from the labours realm ambitions of its neighbors. Are we to ignore factors like knowledge, religion, adaptability, culture in incorporating new communities in our midst. That's a huge question that the European Union has fudged and forbidden us in fact in many ways from discussing. The second observation is that to be governed by a treaty is to put yourself in a situation where you can't adapt to change. Each nation can localize its problems and solve them or adapt to them if it can take legislative initiatives on its own. And that's the normal way in which countries face their problems, try to adapt to changing circumstances and to go on into the future. They pass laws or create institutions, initiate discussions which enable them to take a decision for themselves. But if they can't take that decision, how are they going to adapt? The treaty needs the signature of all its members to change in any very basic respect. But it was a treaty signed over 50 years ago by people who are dead in a situation that has vanished. Why should we be still governed by that rather than by our own decisions taken in our own parliaments according to our own sense of what our problems are? Surely this is irrational. When Lenin imposed communism on what became the Soviet Union, he destroyed all the institutions in which opposition could take shape. Not just the parliamentary institutions, but the legal institutions too, abolishing the courts and the legal profession and all the rest, so that there was no reverse gear. And the Soviet Union went on for 70 years until it finally met the brick wall which had been there all along. Building a political order without a reverse gear or without an ability to change in accordance with the needs of the moment is the greatest political mistake. It's the mistake of making a political order which won't recognize mistakes. And that's what I think the European Union has done by attaching all of its procedures to a treaty signed in a situation that has vanished. So out of this there has arisen a strong sense that there's not just a democratic deficit in the European process, which many countries admit that there is, but a deficit of legitimacy in the whole thing. The European process has confiscated national sovereignty but offered nothing in exchange bread. And now of course here people give lots of economic arguments and of course they're very complicated economic arguments to which I give two replies before stopping because I know that you won't accept anything that I've said so far. So I might as well get the whole lot down so you can have some more things not to accept. First of all the economic arguments don't tend in one direction. A customs union of course amplifies trade and therefore prosperity but the European Union regime of regulations cuts against that giving a competitive edge to countries on the Pacific Rim and controlling hours of work and conditions of labour in ways that make the European Union nations uncompetitive in the modern global economy. Now these matters are complex and I've discovered that no expert agrees with any other. The evidence of history in my view is that all economists are self-appointed authorities and that all their judgments are wrong but that's only my view. The second reply to this is that the argument is not about economics anyway. It's about identity. Who are we? Imagine persuading people to share their house and their land with a family whose manners and values they cannot accept on the grounds that they will be twice as wealthy if they do so. Their response would be you know okay that's great that we would be twice as wealthy but we wouldn't have what we really want which is our love for each other, our attachment to this place and our ability to govern ourselves according to our own way of life. And you know that seems a perfectly reasonable response and one of the great questions that this whole debate raises is whether there are not other values than economic ones. In the world in which we live politicians as soon as they're given a question to answer they collapse the question into economics say we'll be worse off if we do this better off if we do that and so on. Even though economic questions only come after all the other questions, the questions of our integrity, sovereignty and freedom and that's what it is all about. Thank you.