 Welcome everyone and a particular welcome to Douglas Carswell, our speaker. I think as Douglas knows vast majority of us here would take a different view on European integration than you and certainly as a speaker myself I know that dealing with an audience who don't agree with you is always a tough thing to do or can be. It's more fun. It can be as well. So taking the time to come over and give us a view that we don't hear that often is welcome and we're looking forward to a good discussion. Just briefly on, most of you will know Douglas well, be familiar, but he was an MP for a very long time from 2005. In 2014 he moved from the Conservative Party to UKIP, resigned his seat and won the by-election. He didn't run again in 2017 since leaving politics. He co-founded a data analytics company. He's recently his latest book recently published progress versus parasites a brief history of the conflict that that shaped our world. And he's also involved in the Centre for Economic Education, a project which aims to educate, quote, educate wider public about social, the social value free market economics, individual, liberty and classic liberalism. Douglas. Great. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me and thank you for all coming along to listen. I first came to Dublin to give a talk about what we now call Brexit before David Cameron had even agreed to hold a referendum. And I gave a talk a few years after that at the McGill summer school talking about why I thought that the left side could win. We hadn't yet had the referendum, but talking about why I thought the left side could win a referendum and what it might mean. On both occasions they were minority opinions amongst opinion formers, certainly minority opinions amongst those in the room. But in all the years that I've been talking about why I think Britain should leave, one thing I've learnt is that it's very human to believe whatever it is that we find most congenial. And I think there's been a lot of all too human behaviour both in London, Dublin and Brussels. People have tended to believe the things that they want to be true. This tendency to find certain things about Brexit congenial and to believe them I think is quite pronounced if I may be so bold in Dublin. I think it's also quite pronounced in Brussels, but I think also rather surprisingly it's also quite pronounced in London amongst the official administrative elite and the official administrative class there too. There's this tendency to view Brexit and to view the referendum result through what I might call the Fintanotul analysis. Now I'm sure that Fintan is a very congenial chap, I've never met him, but I'm sure he's very congenial. But some people I think tend to find his analysis of Brexit very congenial and I think actually it's a profound mistake. And I think on the basis of this flawed analysis, this comfort blanket thinking, certain key players have made some pretty catastrophic mistakes, the implications of which I think we are about to see unfold. What is the Fintanotul view? If I can characterise it, forgive me if I'm mischaracterising it, he probably puts it far more eloquently than this. But it's to basically see that the vote to leave was some sort of spasm, that the vote by a majority of people in the United Kingdom to leave was beyond mere eccentricity. It wasn't simply your neighbour being a little eccentric, it was caused by some profound psychological issue. Now I think I'm right in saying that the O'Toole analysis suggests that this is some sort of English based nationalism, a post empire English unhappy at their diminished status in the world. It's somehow a reactionary phenomenon, Euroskepsism, and that it's somehow backward looking and built on a dislike of abroad. Now this idea of Brexit as heroic failure, as sadopopulism, as self-pity, as Englishness that's lost its way, it might be very amusing. But I think it's profoundly wrong. It's not just in Ireland, I think, where this analysis has taken hold. I think in Brussels, where it's widely held that the referendum, even holding the referendum was somehow an insolent impertinence and a mistake. I remember shortly after the referendum result I went to speak in a conference in Brussels where there were all sorts of grandees and ex-eurocrats. And the level of sheer hostility, the inability of many of those in the audience to retain even an assemblance of civility, I thought was really quite informative and instructing. It's an assault on their world view. But what I think is even more surprising and genuinely surprised me is the extent to which the elite in London, the May government, the UK civil service and the broadcasters and the public intellectuals in Britain also share a variant of the O'Toole analysis. It's very widespread and it's seen, I think, negotiators on both sides of the table on Brexit and a sort of erroneous elite on both sides indulge in a group think and together they've made errors. I'm not going to sort of point my finger at any one side but I think as a consequence of this the overwhelming likelihood now is that the UK will leave the European Union at the end of October or shortly thereafter without an overarching, and I choose my words very carefully, without an overarching agreement. If the purpose of all the negotiation and all the effort and all that's been done over the past three years has been to minimise the result of the referendum. If that is your criteria of success I think you've got to wake up and recognise that in fact it's produced the precise opposite. We're heading towards not only rupture but restlessness. I will talk more about this but I think something has been stirred that may not easily be put back to sleep again. Now Mrs May I think bears a lot of responsibility for this. It's hard I think to overstate the stupidity of her administration. I don't want to personalise this but the stupidity of her administration and many of the things that they've done is difficult to exaggerate. This is purely my personal point of view but I think they were foolish to accept the sequencing. She was foolish to accept that a deal could in effect be interpreted to mean that departure had to be with Brussels permission. I think it was incredibly dumb whether you agree with leaving the European Union or disagree with it to talk tough about it but to also make it clear that you are unwilling to leave with no deal. You're almost inviting your other side to impose tough terms on you if you're going to behave like that. I also think she was mistaken for accepting or being unaware of the implications of the backstop when it was put to her. The border is a real issue and it needs solving and it needs serious people with serious solutions. It is an issue. No one wants to see a restoration of the physical border. Trust me on this I've been talking in Eurosceptic circles for many, many months, many years. I have yet to meet a single person in the United Kingdom who wants a restoration of a physical border. But I think the implication is that if we're not careful the backstop can be used as a means of tethering the UK to the customs union in perpetuity. I think the failure of the May administration is more fundamental. They didn't really see the need for change. They didn't really see the vote three years ago yesterday as a wake-up call to change. So what they carried on doing was basically the same mistake that British administrations have made for the past 40 years, which is to try to reconcile the irreconcilable. You cannot go to Brussels and acquiesce to things and then come back to the UK and talk tough in front of your voters. If you're not honest on one side or the other you end up going the way of John Major, Tony Blair or David Cameron on these issues. This failure from the May administration I think ultimately stems from a failure by the key players in the May government. And there was so low energy it's quite hard to ascertain sometimes who those key players were. The lights were on but not everyone was always at home. But I think they really understood the Vote Leave case. I can't think of a single significant Vote Leave team member who was giving the government significant advice on Brexit over the past 30 months. Successive Brexit ministers were put into the Brexit department and then undermined and undercut and quit. And if you look at the actions the May government itself, it was I would say a sort of parity of the Brexit case. They refused to be generous to EU migrants living in the UK. I mean it struck me as obvious as a co-founding member of the Vote Leave campaign that the sensible thing, the right thing to do would be to make a generous unconditional unilateral offer to EU nationals living in the UK. It would have struck me as common sense. For reasons that I think owe to the fact that the May administration believed that Leave voters tended to be xenophobic anti-immigrant nativists they refused to do that, which struck me as absurd. We ended up with I think what is close to the worst outcome. We threatened to be restrictive on immigration, to not have the freedom to do what for many people Brexit was about which is to liberalise on trade and open ourselves up to the world. And this unwillingness of her administration to push strongly for mutual standard recognition even if, and this may sound slightly counterintuitive, even if the only way you end up with mutual standard recognition is to start off by having it as unilateral mutual standard recognition. There was a sort of reluctance on the part of her officials to do this. So I think May's deal ended up with the worst possible outcome. Some people, I'm not going to say this myself, but some people have compared it to a sort of treaty that a defeated power would sign if it had been defeated in war, supplicant status, no trade deals and no trade autonomy. I'm not going to, and I think it would be impolite of me to point out errors on the other side. I'm going to just touch on them, but I think if we want to be fair-minded we've got to accept that there are also failures on the Brussels side. I think encouraged by the people who write for the FT and for the Economist, encouraged by former British prime ministers telling them to push for hard terms. The Brussels side was encouraged to be intransigent and encouraged to revel in this take it or leave it attitude. Now, I mean, two years of Snyder marks by Donald Tusk, Juncker and Barnier. Each one of them I think has served in effect as a party election broadcast for the Brexit party, but more of that later. Actions and words do indeed have consequences. The effect of this intransigence on the other side has, I think it stemmed from a belief that if they imposed really harsh terms they could force a fragile British body politic where there was no commanding majority in the House of Commons to rethink. That's not how it's going to pan out. That really, if that was the game plan, it's more Lord North and the 13 colonies than anything else. Let's look at what this approach has achieved. The May deal has failed, emphatically failed. It's gone through or tried to go through the House of Commons on three occasions. I can't think of a single other occasion where a government has tried to push something through like this. It has been comprehensively rejected. Now, the one concession, and the chief proponent of it has left office, or is about to. I wonder what more damage she can achieve in the next 21 days, but that's another story. The one concession that might have got her deal through the House of Commons, and I think it would have, would have been to put a time limit on the backstop. I think if that had been done, it would have been possible to persuade enough people to support it. Now, there are plenty of other things that Eurosceptics like me would find very difficult to swallow. Very hard to take. The fact that we would be bound by a common rule book. The fact that we would be bound by, in effect, rules made by people that aren't accountable to us. The fact that the European Court would continue to have jurisdiction. The fact that during the transition period, we would have no means of vetoing things we don't like. The one thing that people were not prepared to compromise on was an open-ended backstop. Why? Because people believed in insufficient numbers that it was a device to tether the United Kingdom to the customs union. And I think it's quite telling that that one concession that would have got the deal through, the other side was completely unwilling to make. Since the referendum, we've had what, in effect, I think you can characterise as a very unpleasant culture war in the UK. People who got along fine and didn't really know or care that much about Europe one way or the other have now been antagonised on both sides. Civility is a precious commodity in UK politics now. I don't regret not being in the House of Commons for a moment. But let's just look at what's happened to try to explain what's happening outside the Twitter reading classes. Three years ago, a million strong majority voted to leave the European Union. It was a clear question, clear emphatic crystal clear question. There wasn't anything in there about under what terms we should leave or whether we should stay in the customs union or whether or not there would be a withdrawal agreement. It was, do you want to leave or remain? More people voted to leave than voted for anything else in UK political history. There was a general election shortly afterwards and 80% of those returned to the House of Commons were for parties that had clear manifesto commitments to honour the referendum result. And it hasn't happened. It simply hasn't happened. Three years on, it hasn't happened. Worse has been this drip, drip, drip attack on the legitimacy of the vote and an elite that broadcasters in particular actions and words have consequences. There's been this false narrative that it's led to a surge in hate crime, which it doesn't matter how often you repeat the fact, it has not. If people think that this is going to erode the view amongst the majority of the population that Britain should leave the European Union, I think they've had the opposite effect. What's happened is it's radicalised people. I was a founding member of the Vote Leave campaign and I was perfectly willing to make concessions and I'm struck by the number of Tory MPs that I come across who wouldn't lift a finger to get us a referendum, who wouldn't lift a finger to make sure that we voted to leave, who now define their political careers in terms of their intransigence to anything. There are now a significant number of people who frankly didn't pay a great deal of attention to May's deal when she first proposed it and thought on balance it was a good thing and just get on with it, who are now adamant that they don't want there to be any deal at all. This is where we're heading. We're heading to a situation where the worst kind of Eurosceptics define what it means to be Eurosceptic. I'm not sure that this is really in anyone's interests. A party that was founded 12 weeks ago, stop and think about it, 12 weeks ago, is now leading the opinion polls in the UK. I don't just mean they won the Euro election, they won the Euro election by a landslide by the way, but if you look at Westminster voting intention and if you break Westminster voting intention down amongst key voters in key demographic seats, if you break it down by seats, these guys are heading to be the largest party at the next general election. I think in politics you need to learn to count. Don't take my word for it, look at the maths. May's unforgivable failing, as far as I'm concerned, is that she has put back in business people that I and others spent many, many hours and years in biotechians and a great deal of sweat trying to put out of business. She's put them squarely back in business. I think that there are certain Eurosceptics who are a little bit like the Quebec Party in Canada or the Scottish National Party in Scotland, where grievance becomes their main business. I was often baffled in the run-up to the Scottish referendum and I don't want to get drawn into that too much, but it strikes me as perfectly obvious that if you want most people to vote for a particular proposition, if you make your party synonymous with that proposition, you make it almost impossible for that proposition to get majority support. It's the way our democracy works. Most people will identify with a political party, but very rarely do more than 50% of people identify with a political party. Again and again and again we see the grievance-type Eurosceptics who it's almost as if non-delivery of the referendum result is in their interests, some might say. Let's take a step back. What is Euroscepticism? What should Euroscepticism be? I have spent my entire adult life pushing for the United Kingdom to leave and I've often been called a swivelide Eurosceptic and amongst a certain group of opinion-formers in the UK being Eurosceptic and being swivelide apparently synonymous. I think it's entirely legitimate and not extreme at all that a country should want to govern its own affairs. I think it's entirely legitimate that a country that governs its own affairs should find the giantism of the EU, a mid-20th century construct with an idea of a small elite deciding things from the centre incompatible with democratic self-determination. It's not extreme at all. It's a perfectly legitimate liberal, I would say, point of view. We're told that Eurosceptics are reactionary. Again, this is comfort blanket thinking. Why is it that Britain today is a more Eurosceptic country than it was in the 1980s and 1970s? If it's a reactionary phenomenon that's on the way, why is it growing? Are you going to blame this all entirely on the Murdoch press? We're told that there's something inevitable about the levers being in a minority. That's the insinuation of demographic change and the young. Very often, and I spent a great deal of my time in politics looking at numbers amongst particular demographic groups, this idea that there is an inevitable shift by the younger generation towards a less Eurosceptic Britain is a nonsense. Compare the attitudes not of people aged 20 today to those aged 40 and 60, but people aged 20 today to those aged 20, 30 years ago. I think there's clear evidence that the giantism, one-size-fits-all, top-down approach of the EU is inconsistent with the cultural values emerging through new technology that are commonplace amongst the younger generation. I think the biggest problem with the term Brexit is it encourages us to think of Euroscepticism as a British specific phenomenon. Now, I'm very flattered in a sense by this, but I don't think this is the case at all. I think it is the top-down attempts to organise a continent of 500 million people that is ultimately the central issue here. It is a disastrous way of organising the lives of tens of millions, hundreds of millions of Europeans. It stifles innovation. Since 1992, Europe has become less innovative. Its share of key indices has fallen. Since the Lisbon agenda, which we were told was going to make Europe by 2010 the most dynamic part of the global economy, Europe has quite clearly lost out to other parts of the globe. In fact, Europe is the one continent in Europe that is in a relative, if not absolute, time's decline. I think it's also pretty disastrous for democracy. We're told that Britain is supposedly undergoing a democratic crisis and it's about to all get terribly nasty, and there's some element in that, but I can't help noticing it's not quite yet where France is. It's not quite yet where some of our European neighbours are. I personally believe that the European Union is seeing much of the continent of Europe drifting away from a liberal democratic tradition to something that is decidedly more Hapsburg. It is moving towards a technocracy with a lot of innovation-sapping implications. If Brexit was an exclusively British phenomenon, how do you account for the wider discontent that motivates the electorate throughout the western and indeed non-western world? You might call it the broadband world, the world that has broadband. I think that we're seeing a profound shift in the relationship between the governed and the governing. The democratisation of opinion-forming means that we're seeing, if you like, a reformation packed within a short space of time. A priesthood of pundits is no longer able to define the parameters of political opinion. The political class is coming to realise that it's actually out of touch with a country that it believed it represented. Journalism, political journalism in particular, I think in the United Kingdom, has been found to be profoundly flawed. It's full of people who start from an assumption that we're heading towards a particular destination, and they then work backwards with a narrative to see if it facts into this. It's not only wrong-headed, it explains, I think, why political journalists in Britain have been catastrophically and serially wrong at understanding what lies ahead. My closing remarks, if I may, I think Euroskepticism is about far more than the UK. I think we're going to see a broad skepticism towards those who try to run a continent from the centre without accountability. I don't think it's a reactionary thing at all. I think what you're seeing in Brexit is a sign of struggles to come. Remote elites cannot run Europe successfully, and if they do, it will not be a happy, successful continent. I think Brexit is going to happen. It could happen in the short term. Jeremy Hunt, Boris Johnson, there's a temptation to think of Jeremy Hunt as soft on Brexit and Boris Johnson as hard on Brexit. You'll hear a lot about this from the opining classes in London. I'm not sure about that. Jeremy Hunt, since I was a teenager, I've known Boris Johnson for 20 years. Despite their own personal preferences, they both face some basic realities. Parliamentary arithmetic is the same, the unrest of the electorate is the same, and the extinction of the Tory party, if they fail to deliver on this, is the same. I think it pushes them in the same direction. If either of them gets in, they're both going to ask for pretty much the same thing, and that is for better terms. The key to better terms, the minimal is a limit on the backstop. Over to you. Today in London, a group of grown-up, level-headed, serious people are presenting a paper, the Prosperity UK group, The Alternative Arrangements. It's an attempt to ensure that no one wants a physical border. It's an attempt to try and address the question and resolve it. I think it can be done if there's goodwill there, if there's generosity on both sides. But I think unless whoever's Prime Minister can come back with a time limit on the backstop, I think the UK's departure in October, or shortly thereafter, I choose my words very carefully, is a certainty, almost certainty. Now you might think, hang on, maybe we can disrupt this whole thing, a Corbyn Government. Guys, do you really think that's going to put this to bed? Imagine the government fell, imagine Corbyn got in and there was an alliance of Corbyn and the SNP. Is this going to go away? Are 17.5 million people going to stop? There is no majority for any party in the United Kingdom Parliament in any election scenario, unless you're committed to delivering the referendum result. Look at the arithmetic in Parliament. Look at the arithmetic in an election. A second referendum people talk about. Okay, is the second referendum going to be a choice between remain or stay, in which case I think it would lack legitimacy for being rigged? Is it going to be a choice between no deal departure or remain? Well, unless the winning side gets more than 17.5 million votes, I'm not going to accept the legitimacy of that, and I don't think many people in suburban Britain are. This isn't going to go away. It needs to be resolved, and I think the fundamental thing driving it is that the European Union is not going to become a more successful structure. Every European Union elite, every group of technocrats has always promised the same thing. Always promised reform, almost always promised liberalisation. It never happens. It's a top-down, derogist system. It's not going to make Europe more competitive. It's not going to work better. It is a model that I think will decline and decay. I think ultimately the question is, do you want to have good relations with the UK when the UK leaves? I hope that the answer to that would be yes. My fear, though, is that if reasonable people don't make their voices heard, you will end up where you're in effect driven into a Euroscepticism defined by the worst kind of Eurosceptics. I feared at one time that after we had voted to leave, a wily establishment in London would be clever enough to make the concessions it needed to make to ensure there was no change. I've been genuinely surprised at the sheer stupidity of many of these people at the extent to which they've overplayed their hand. I think as a consequence of them overplaying their hand, my fear is not now that we remain in name only. It is that we end up doing things that sensible, mature liberal democracies shouldn't do. I think if there was a new Prime Minister and people were willing to hear them out, to listen to their answers and to give concessions on the backstop, I think a lot could be achieved. If that's not done, you're not going to stop Brexit. You're going to stop the sort of Brexit that I think is in everyone's interests. Thank you.