Yet to see things in that way is to overlook the peculiar contribution of communism to the tyranny exerted in its name. It is also to ignore the abiding relevance of a political system whose charm in Left-wing circles, as we learn from the pronouncements of Jeremy Corbyn and Seumas Milne, has been barely diminished by its enormous legacy of human suffering.

Let us go back a little further than 1989, to 1977, the year when the seeds of what became known as the Velvet Revolution were sown in the former Czechoslovakia. A group of intellectuals, among them the playwright Václav Havel, were in the habit of meeting in private apartments in Prague, where the philosopher Jan Patočka would lecture on Plato, Aristotle, Husserl and Heidegger.

Patočka had been forcibly retired from the university after 1968, and his private seminars were conducted in secret. There was a real fear that, should word of them reach the ears of the secret police, arrests would follow. After all, what business did ordinary citizens have in discussing philosophy outside the official universities?

Confined within a secure lecture hall, supervised by scholars trained in Marxist dogma, philosophy had a legitimate place in the system. But, discussed in a private apartment into the early hours of the morning, by people spurred on by the spirit of free enquiry, it was evidently a threat to the state.

The suspicion was justified. In due course there emerged from these private discussions a charter of rights, asking the state to respect the elementary freedoms granted under the Helsinki Accords to the citizens of Czechoslovakia. Charter 77 was signed by those attending Jan Patočka’s seminar, and by a widening circle of brave friends and sympathisers. Patočka himself stepped forward as the Charter’s first spokesman, was arrested and brutally interrogated, with the result that he became ill. Taken to hospital, he continued to be interrogated until he collapsed and died.

In those times, when private education was criminalised, and the universities and colleges were devoted to Marxist-Leninist dogma, the older generation of professors, the best of whom had been expelled from their positions following the Soviet invasion in 1968, had no other way of passing on their knowledge than through such secret seminars. For most of them publication was impossible, and the important books were unavailable or banned.

By the same author

Can Europe learn from communism?

By Roger Scruton

The chain of intellectual inspiration had been broken, and they were owners and curators of its last severed link. They lived at the end of an educational tradition, and their attempts to nurture that tradition and to pass it on had to be conducted underground. Do not think that this was an accidental feature of communism: it was the real political meaning of the system. Knowledge means privilege, advantage, curiosity, free enquiry, all of which were threats to the proletarian revolution and to the Party that had taken charge of it.

The Prague of those days was the perfect setting for this drama. A full stop had been put to its spiritual life, but somehow the city stood, half decrepit, above the memory of its greatness. Its dilapidated palaces looked down on the routines of a frightened people, with police on every corner, and deserted churches and civic buildings reminding the citizen that communal life had stopped.

You could be compelled to take part in the joyless May Day parades, but anything like spontaneous social life had vanished long ago. Buildings were boarded up, their crumbling facades raining down on the wooden scaffolds that protected pedestrians from these falling fragments of Heaven. A strange silence prevailed, interrupted only by the squeal of trams, and the city still held onto fragments of its former life like a beautiful statue on a tomb.

Thanks in part to that extraordinary atmosphere, the underground became a moral idea, and around that idea there congregated all the hopes of an educated class deprived of recognition, and forbidden to teach. Through my own contacts with that class, I came to understand why those attending the underground seminars were treated so severely.

What disturbed the authorities was not the fact that these peculiar people were studying Plato. After all, Plato was studied in the official universities too. The problem was that they were studying Plato together, and without asking permission. They had created a club of their own, outside the vigilance of the state, and they had united in friendship to pursue that goal. They had created a fragment of civil society, and in doing so had brought meaning into their lives beyond anything delivered by the grim routines of the communist bureaucracy.

In the Czechoslovakia of those times there was a hunger for civil society. Older people remembered the clubs, troupes, parades, pilgrimages, dances, bands, teams and regiments that were the lost heart of their nation. Younger people looked enviously at those Western societies in which pop groups, dances, festivals and protests offered a life outside the system. And the more serious the desire for those things, the more determined was the Party to forbid them.

The underground meetings and seminars opened a path back to civil society. They promised a society shaped by the free decisions of its members, in which differences of opinion, outlook and purpose would be smoothed away by the sheer joy of cooperation, and in which there would be neither top-down dictatorship nor ideological conformity.

By the same author

How identity politics drove the world mad

By Roger Scruton

The war on civil society is the essence of the communist project. Appointed as home minister after the communist takeover of Hungary in 1948, Janos Kádar abolished 5,000 associations in the space of a year, from brass bands to knitting clubs, from scout troupes to shooting parties, from church charities to private schools. He made it a criminal offence to gather money for charitable purposes, and made all schools and youth organisations into the property of the state. Similar policies were undertaken in Czechoslovakia.

All free associations were seen by the communists as places of danger, where hierarchies, distinctions, privileges and deals could challenge the role of the Vanguard Party in its fight for equality and “social justice”. Reflecting on this, I came to see why freedom of association belongs with freedom of speech in the First Amendment to the US Constitution. Those two freedoms are the foundation of civil society, and the necessary shield against the abuse of political power.

Take them away and all power ends up in the hands of the state. The result is what we know as “totalitarianism”.

Communism vanished from Europe 30 years ago — but the totalitarian impulse remains. Freedom of association has no sacrosanct status on the Left; in our country we see this in the matter of country sports which are, and will always be, the targets of leftist disapproval.

The Labour Party does not see certain laws forbidding free association as an assault on legitimate freedoms but as a moral duty of the state. After the ban on fox hunting, the Party has likewise set its sights on grouse shooting, not from any concern for the grouse, which are well cared for only because we shoot them, but out of hostility to the kind of people who congregate with guns on grouse moors.

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Cuba killed my communism

By James Bloodworth

But the associations that most need protecting, now in Britain as then in Central Europe, are not those devoted to the leisure of country people but those in which people associate for the sake of knowledge.

At the recent Labour Party conference Left-wing activists called for private education to be criminalised, as it was by the communists, and the funds of private schools to be confiscated and used for the “common good”. Meanwhile leftists in universities are mounting effective campaigns to prevent free discussion and to expel those professors whose views they dislike. Politicised subjects like Gender Studies, which forbid ideological disagreement and have doctrine and dogma as their goal, are driving free discussion from the curriculum.

It is not clear, yet, how far this will go. But the arguments given and the tactics adopted are exactly those of the communists in 1948. The state is seen as the guardian of public morality; it must therefore forbid the misuse of our freedoms.

It is surely likely that the underground university that operated in Czechoslovakia in the Eighties will be needed before long in Britain. In preparing for that moment we should be looking back, not to 1989 but to 1977, when the battle which had been fought and lost in the post-war years began again in earnest. And it is our battle today. Once again we must fight for civil society against the state, and for free association against totalitarian control.

But our situation in Western democracies today is a novel one. There is no shared religion, and the old customs have been torn asunder by a culture of repudiation, which encourages people to shape their lives according to an “identity” of their own. Socialisation no longer means joining or obeying, but “becoming who you are”, regardless of the surrounding norms. This novel situation, which advertises itself as a kind of liberation, has instead produced in my lifetime a totally new kind of censorship and intimidation.

Thirty years ago I naively assumed that, with the collapse of communism, we would no longer see the persecution of dissidents or the imposition of official doctrines, and so I have been as astonished as everyone else by the mass denunciations and targeted character assassinations that enforce prevailing orthodoxies today. They seem as frequent and comprehensive here in Britain as they ever were in the world of totalitarian government.

True, you don’t go to the Gulag for your opinions; nor are there show-trials of “deviationists”, Zionists or the running dogs of capitalism. Nevertheless, you have to be careful what you say, and the punishments for saying, thinking or implying the wrong thing, even if administered by private enterprise and social media rather than by the state, are real, serious and largely impossible to deflect.

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The truth about hate speech

By Douglas Murray

The archive of your crimes is stored in cyberspace, and however much you may have confessed to them and sworn to change, they will pursue you for the rest of your life, just as long as someone has an interest in drawing attention to them. And when the mob turns on you, it is with a pitiless intensity that bears no relation to the objective seriousness of your fault. A word out of place, a hasty judgment, a slip of the tongue — whatever the fault might be, it is sufficient, once picked upon, to put you beyond the pale of human sympathy.

As Douglas Murray shows in his impressive and lively survey, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity, the emerging world of censorship is a world without forgiveness, in which people are condemned for what they are rather than what they do, and in which the real virtues and vices that govern our conduct are ignored altogether as irrelevant.

The crimes for which we are judged are existential crimes: through speaking in the wrong way you display one of the phobias or isms that show you to be beyond acceptable humanity. You are a homophobe, an Islamophobe, a white supremacist or a racist, and no argument can refute these accusations once they have been made.

You might, in your private life, have worked for the integration and acceptance of your local Muslim community, or for a wider understanding of the roots of Islamic philosophy. This will be irrelevant when it comes to rebutting a charge of Islamophobia, just as your record in promoting minorities in the workplace will do nothing to clear you of the charge of racism, once the crucial words are out.

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Is conservatism normalising the alt-Right?

By Eric Kaufmann

For your accusers are not interested in your deeds; they are interested in you, and in the crucial fact about you, which is whether or not you are “one of us”. Your faults cannot be overcome by voluntary action, since they adhere to the kind of thing that you are. And you reveal what you are in the words that define you.

These words may be taken out of context, even doctored to mean the opposite of what you said — as happened recently to me in an interview given to the New Statesman — but this will not affect the verdict, since there is no objective trial, no “case for the defence”, no due process. You are accused by the mob, examined by the mob and condemned by the mob, and if you have brought this on yourself, then you have only yourself to blame. For the mob is by nature innocent: it washes its own conscience in a flow of collective indignation, and by joining it you make yourself safe.

Such is the situation that the brave Murray confronts in his latest book, the title of which (taken from a previous anatomy of human folly by Charles Mackay) implies that it is crowd hysteria, rather than ignorance, that is largely to blame. But, as Murray goes on to show, that suggestion is also too simple. With admirable attention to detail he explores the ways in which the spirit of the mob has entered not only the language of public debate but also the sources of information and the institutions of decision making.

Censorship begins in the media themselves, with the silicon valley elite introducing “machine learning fairness” designed to eliminate “hate speech”, and programmed to recognise as “hate” all those expressions of opinion that violate some norm of political correctness. What Orwell so vividly foresaw — the manipulation of language so as to make heresy inexpressible — is now routine practice.

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Broadcaster bias is destroying public trust

By Douglas Murray

The result, however, is not a culture of gentle conformity, in which “niceness” is the norm. On the contrary, the clamour for recognition involves a constant assault on those who are assumed to be preventing it. These purveyors of “hate” are given no leeway on social media, and the practice of mass denunciation on grounds of race, tribe, class or social milieu is now an accepted weapon in the identity wars.

Murray gives riveting examples of the way in which whiteness has become a moral fault in the eyes of identity warriors on the American campus. It is, for example, now legitimate to condemn people for the colour of their skin, leading some to try to apologise for being white.

Various devices facilitate the emergence of the censorship culture. Three in particular come to the surface in Murray’s carefully constructed argument. First, there is the art of taking offence. Whole sections of the university curriculum are devoted to explaining to students that words, arguments, comparisons, even questions, are “offensive”, regardless of the intention with which they are used.

Invariably, the offence is given by the old majority culture, and is taken on behalf of some privileged minority. Current concerns about Islamophobia are relevant here: it is offensive, for example, to make jokes about the burqa, but not offensive to appear in public with your face entirely covered, even though the face-to-face encounter is at the root of our shared way of life, as important in showing respect as taking off your shoes when entering a mosque.

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Why conservatism is failing

By Mary Harrington

More important, from the intellectual point of view, is the attempt to rewrite hardware as software. As Murray shows, identity politics, which insists that everything relevant to our sense of self lies within our power, so that nothing can be imposed on us without our consent, is at odds with the facts of biology. To get round this problem, sex has been re-written as gender, and gender defined as a social construct. In this way, hardware becomes software, and fate becomes choice.

And the result is the “trans” lobby, determined to make all those areas where one sex was hitherto privileged (for example, female sports or female bathrooms) available to whoever wishes to appropriate that sex as his own. The hardware/software confusion has now penetrated the culture, and Murray shows the devastating effect that it has had on our understanding of human difference.

Finally there is the new scourge of “intersectionality”, which encourages people to explore all the ways in which they have lost out in the pursuit of advantage, and to construct their identity accordingly. A kind of reverse hierarchy of privilege emerges, as you come to see that you are disadvantaged as gay man, and then as a black man, and then as a Muslim man, and so on. The result of this scramble for “virtuous disadvantages” occupies Murray over many partly amusing, partly distressing pages.

As he abundantly shows, the attempt to derive a positive philosophy from this assemblage of negatives leads to absurdity and contradiction at every turn. The problem, however, is that contradiction is not regarded by the mob as an obstacle, but merely as further proof of the great conspiracy by which we are surrounded — the conspiracy enshrined in the old majority culture, which told us that we must accept human nature, find our fulfilment within its bounds, and not engage in a futile metaphysical rebellion.

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By Roger Scruton

Murray’s comprehensive survey of the prevailing madness will not persuade every reader. But it raises the real questions of our times, which are these: can we reject the idea of a benevolent God and still hold on to our inherited morality, founded on respect for the other and the absolute authority of truth? Can we adopt the posture of forgiveness that Murray is so keen to advocate, without turning to the supreme example that was once given to us?

Can we re-learn the habits of polite disagreement, and address each other as rational beings, capable of forming real communities in which differences are respected and decencies honoured? I want to answer yes to those questions. But as someone who has suffered more than most from the prevailing madness I have my doubts.

My own solution — which is to ignore social media and to address, in my writings, only the interest in the true and the false, rather than in the permitted and the offensive — confines me within a circle that is considerably narrower than the Twittersphere. But here and there in this circle, there are people who do not merely see the point of truthful discourse, but who are also eager to engage with it. And I cling to the view that that is enough, as it was for the Irish monks who kept the lamp of learning alight during the Dark Ages. They may have thought they were losing, but they won in the end.

Douglas Murray’s The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity is published by Bloomsbury Continuum 

During the 1970s and 1980s, anti-communists were shunned in the UK’s universities. After all, we were attacking the revolution that offered to liberate mankind from the world-wide capitalist conspiracy. Our professors admitted that the Soviet Union had gone wrong; but it was wrong in practice, not in theory. We apologists for capitalism were wrong in theory, which was far worse than the mere accident of causing 20 million deaths and the extinction of individual liberty across half the globe.

The fact that we were right in practice was barely noticed by our critics. Life was made hard for us by our nice colleagues, who repeatedly expressed their outrage at our nastiness, in order to put their own niceness on display. It was in those days that I learned just how nasty niceness can be. From the moment in 1980 when I came out as a defender of conservative values against the socialist orthodoxy, my life has been one long succession of attacks, designed to undermine my standing as a public intellectual.

Further reading

Why is the hard-Left so conservative?

By James Bloodworth

Strangely enough, my first true experience of intellectual freedom was in Poland, where I travelled to speak at conferences and private seminars, arranged by a small circle in Britain who, like me, were keen to make contact with their fellow dissidents behind the iron curtain. In Poland the universal contempt for the communist system meant that students and professors were ready to discuss all the issues of the day. Conservatism, to them, was not a sin or a heresy, but a possible worldview, all the more interesting for being condemned by the communists and despised by the Western Left.

Travelling around the countries of East and central Europe in those days, carrying the message of an alternative philosophy, was one of the most liberating experiences of my life (the dangers and privations notwithstanding.) I came to believe that I might be right in theory, and not merely right in practice.

*

We have lived through all that, but it seems to me that the lesson still needs to be learned. Before 1989 our continent was divided between totalitarian socialism and free democracy, and although the Left-wing intellectuals defended the first of those, they all lived, if they could, in the second. Today the division is not between different areas of our continent. It is a division between two conflicting outlooks.

On the one hand there is the adherence to the nation state, with its language, institutions and religious inheritance. On the other there is the cosmopolitan vision of a transnational order, a borderless economy and a universal law of human rights. Both outlooks grew from the religious conflicts of the seventeenth century – and the tension between them is enduring and unresolved.

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By Paul Embery

There is no way to understand our continent today if we do not recognize that it is an association of nation-states, each with its territory, customs, language and indigenous religions – assets that define the loyalty of its residents and their shared sense of home. But we must also recognize that the legal and political institutions of our continent have turned in a cosmopolitan direction.

This is less true in the UK, perhaps. But it is certainly true of continental Europe; and it is particularly true of the former communist states. The law and jurisprudence of the European Courts enabled the former communist countries to fill the legal vacuum created by the Communist Party. And this in turn enabled them to enter the global capitalist economy with relatively little friction, but also, alas, with far too little awareness of the social and cultural cost of it.

There is, at the heart of the European project, an agenda which was set without reference to the specific needs and values of the European nations.

*

Regardless of their social and religious inheritance, the people of Europe are being pressured to recognize rights that derive from abstract ideas of freedom and autonomy, and which defy the norms of the indigenous religions: rights to abortion, surrogate birth, euthanasia and so on, which are inevitably controversial in countries that have depended for their cohesion on their religious inheritance.

These rights form part of the worldview of the governing elite, who can legislate above the heads of sovereign governments. Moreover, the governments of the European nations have been asked to renounce the primary right of sovereign states, which is the right to determine who resides within their borders.

The freedom of movement provisions of the Treaty of Rome were conceived at a time when the signatories enjoyed a comparable standard of living, with more or less full employment and similar welfare systems. There was no temptation to move, save for the specific purposes of an existing job.

Now, however, freedom of movement means a massive one-way shift of populations, out of the former communist countries, into the West, and in particular into Britain, whose government sets a very low barrier to entry. This is one cause of the Brexit crisis.

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But it has also had a serious demographic effect on the Vyšegrad countries, which have lost many of the best and brightest of their young people, at a time when both economic take-off and defence against the Russian threat require a full cohort of the young and a full commitment to rebuilding the national economy.

Furthermore, the dissolution of borders has made it all but impossible to maintain a national immigration policy. The EU has tried to gain control of the situation by distributing migrants according to a quota system. But Mrs Merkel’s open invitation to the Syrians, the influx on the Hungarian border, and the big business of people smuggling in the Mediterranean have between them made such a policy unviable.

The situation is especially alarming for the former communist countries – for the very reason that communism made it both impossible, and in any case unattractive, to migrate into them from anywhere outside the Soviet sphere. Hence this unforeseen price of freedom has come as an enormous shock, both politically and psychologically.

Paradoxically communism, although established as an international movement and claiming to abolish all sovereign boundaries, helped to preserve the nation state. For the nation was an enduring reality around which resistance could shape itself and, when combined with the powerful resurgence of Catholic faith in Poland, proved decisive in the overthrow of the communist tyranny.

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By Henry Olsen

Resistance to mass immigration has attracted the charge of  ‘racism and xenophobia’ from the EU, with moves to expel Hungary’s Fidesz Party from the EPP, and even to expel Hungary itself from the European Union. This in turn has hardened Viktor Orbán’s government in its attitude, and led to growing resistance to immigration throughout the region.

The issue has also been absorbed into the wider conflict between the national and the international perspective, itself reaching back into the past of our continent and into the dark and difficult emotions that tore the continent apart during the 20^thcentury. The result has been a sudden and radical change in the language and direction of political conflict throughout Europe, with the European elite condemning the ‘populism’ of national movements, which in turn condemn the elitism of the European political class.

*

This conflict has played itself out with increasing anger and confusion in the UK, between the proponents and the opponents of Brexit. The charge of ‘populism’ is levelled against movements for national independence and national renewal largely in order to discount the fact that they enjoy popular support: a majority voted for Brexit; but liberals discount their vote, because it is ‘populist’.

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Is there a future for English nationalism?

By Paul Mason

For there are two ways of appealing to the people – indirectly, through the institutions that safeguard the liberal voice, and directly, by asking them what they think.

Direct appeal to the people is rejected as dangerous. After all, they do not know what they think, or if they do know, it is because they think the wrong things. Only when guided and tempered by a liberal constitution can the people be trusted – and that means filtering their raw emotions though a fine mesh of liberal hesitations, so that only a harmless stream of sentiment trickles forth.

The same charge of populism is levelled at the Law and Justice Party in Poland, and at Fidesz in Hungary. Both are accused of making too direct an appeal to the sentiments of the people, and in particular to their sentiments of belonging.

But ordinary people cling to forms of membership that are local, bounded and difficult to translate into bureaucratic norms. Their values are shaped by religion, family, language and national history, and they do not necessarily recognize the force of transnational obligations, or universal codes of human rights, especially when those codes are in direct conflict with the specific obligations of family and faith.

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By Giles Fraser

It seems to me that the conflict between the Left intelligentsia and human nature has shifted from the sphere of socialism versus capitalism to this new sphere, of enlightened liberalism versus residual nationalism.

What the liberals condemn as populism is really the attempt to retain old and inherited sentiments of identity and belonging. And what the people condemn as elitism is really the enlightenment conception of a universal and borderless political order, in which conflicts supposedly vanish because their cause – which is the competitive network of national loyalties – has been swept away.

The EU was founded by people moved by that enlightenment idea – and who saw nationalism as the force that had unleashed the century of European wars. Looking back on it, however, it is just as reasonable to see the idea of a universal and borderless form of politics as underlying the imprisonment of East and Central Europe by the communists.

Nationalism of the German kind was certainly destructive; but so was internationalism of the Soviet kind. Why not recognize that, in themselves, neither is more destructive than the other, but that each can become destructive, when wound into a totalitarian project, in which dissent is not permitted and the people are no longer allowed to express their views?

*

What I find most interesting in the new confrontation, however, is that the intellectual Left has again assumed the high ground, not being prepared to concede the democratic legitimacy of the movements that it dismisses as ‘populist’, and is determined to frustrate any attempt by those movements to establish themselves in government. The same annihilating rage that was directed against conservatives like myself in the 1970s and 1980s is being directed now against the supposed populists, and – not surprisingly – there is a growing tendency for the populists to give back as good as they get.

The resulting rise in temperature is one of the factors behind a loss of confidence in the EU, which seems to have precipitated a conflict that it cannot manage. And it is a conflict that is revealed in all the rapid changes that our continent is now undergoing.

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This conflict is particularly important for the post-communist countries, since the one thing they lacked in 1989 was a clear idea of what they are, and what unites the people in a body politic.

The communists had an agenda, in which the people were conscripted to a cause that was clearly unachievable and in any case hopelessly out of date. They offered no other concept of identity, than the all-comprehending purpose of the communist millennium. All those factors that might have persuaded people to adhere to that purpose – culture, art, music, religion, history – had been driven underground, and the joyless surface of everyday life contained no promise of a future, other than this one.

Inevitably, therefore, the people were looking for a new politics of identity – something that would hold them together as a ‘we’. This was the one thing the EU was unable to provide. It gave them an avenue into the global economy, and a route away from their home, but no new way of belonging where they arrived.

As the disappointments accumulated, it was the hope of belonging that beckoned. Where is home, and who defines it?

Global capitalism is no answer, since it merely voids the world of loyalties and puts everything, human relations included, on sale. This surely is what is legitimate in those old Leftist criticisms: that the human heart has no real place in the global economy – the heart that so many of us observed in those who fought the communist tyranny in Eastern Europe and who hoped that, when the mask of dictatorship fell at last, the smiling face of the nation would be revealed beneath it.

*

My view is that this situation should be seen as an opportunity and not as a crisis. After 30 years of confusion, the people of Eastern and central Europe are beginning to understand that they are heirs to two great achievements: on the one hand, the nation state as a form of social and political identity; on the other hand the Enlightenment conception of citizenship, in which each assumes the full responsibilities of social membership under a shared rule of law.

The two achievements are forced into conflict with each other, in part because the EU wishes to dampen or even destroy the national idea. But properly understood they are two sides of the same coin.

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How I overcame my class stigma

By Roger Scruton

We must recognize that, without national identity and the loyalty that stems from it, there is no way to build a society of citizens. Democracy and the rule of law are realities only if opposing sides can live with each other on terms.

The great error of the communists was to eliminate opposition, to conscript the people into a ‘unity’ that they had not chosen and were not allowed to question. The great benefit of democracy is that it makes opposition possible and also legitimate. But this has the consequence that, in a democracy, more than half the people at any moment might be living under a government that they did not choose, maybe a government that they hate.

What makes that possible? Why do democracies not break down, under the pressure of popular dissent?

The answer is simple: they don’t break down because the loyalty of the citizen is not towards the government, but towards something higher, something that is shared between all the citizens, regardless of their political beliefs and inclinations. This higher thing is the nation, the entity to which we all belong, and which defines the first-person plural of democratic politics.

Without this shared ‘we’, it is impossible for democracies to endure – and it is precisely by destroying this ‘we’ that the communists were able to retain their grip on power, ruling as a pure ‘they’ of dictatorship.

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By Tim Parks

It seems to me therefore that the so-called populists are right to emphasise the nation state as the fount of loyalty, and that their enlightened liberal opponents should acknowledge this, and cease to use the European institutions as a way to punish the governments that lean in this direction.

And reciprocally those who wish to revive the national ideal, and to affirm the rights of national sovereignty, should listen to the voice of the liberal enlightenment – and accept that national sentiments must always be tempered by the recognition of others out there, who do not and cannot share them.

The need to affirm national sovereignty, and the need to conform to the universal standards of citizenship are the two great gifts of the European political inheritance. They are mutually dependent. We should stand against those who wish to prize them apart, so as to condemn one or the other of them as an offense against the people.

After all, it is the people who have most to lose from any conflict between them, and the job of the politician is not to stir up conflict but to soothe it. It is my hope that we have arrived at the point when this will be possible. Then, at last, the poison administered by the communists will have been flushed from the system.

This article is an edited version of the speech Sir Roger Scruton gave as keynote speaker at the 4th Summit of Speakers of Central and Eastern European Parliaments. 

Marx saw class as an economic category: your class was determined by your place in the system of production. But Marx also believed that there is more to class than your economic role. He distinguished the class ‘in itself’ from the class ‘for itself’, and this ‘for itself’ makes its own special addition to the ‘class struggle’. The proletarian who builds identity, culture, politics and relationships around a working-class status becomes an additional, and decisive, danger to the ruling bourgeoisie.

Just such a class-conscious proletarian was my father, who, having been brought up in great hardship in the Manchester slums, never lost his deep attachment to the community into which he had been born. But it was not a community that could include him. He hated his drunken father, who forced him to leave Manchester High School at the minimum age (then 14) lest he get above himself; he lost his one beloved sibling (Jenny, who died from TB aged 16), and he did nothing to sign up to the kind of job that his family expected. He had only one ambition, which was to get out.

He achieved this, aged 16, by joining the RAF, moving south in the war with Bomber Command, and eventually becoming a primary school teacher, having been hastily educated in the post-war teacher shortage. His life illustrated a feature that has characterised English society since the Middle Ages, which is radical social mobility. No sooner had he reached for a life of his own than he had left the working class. Within a few years he was respectably married, with a semi-detached house and a mortgage, and three children at local grammar schools. He had joined the middle class, even if only the lower echelons, a long way from the demonised bourgeoisie of the Marxist narrative.

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But that’s not how he saw himself. He retained the class-consciousness into which he had been born. As far as he was concerned, he was working class through and through. He spoke with a Manchester accent, supported Manchester United, was a paid-up member of the Labour Party, and also secretary of his local branch of the National Union of Teachers. In all political conflicts, he was on the side of the Trades Union Congress, whatever it decided.

He believed that his country was ruled by a conspiracy of public school boys, and that there would not be social justice in Britain until the privileges that enabled such undeserving and treacherous characters to advance were finally abolished. He saw in the House of Lords, in the established Church and in the Monarchy, branches of this long-standing conspiracy and he understood all of our history in terms of it – as a never-ending confiscation of England from its rightful owners by a class of privileged usurpers. Normans against Saxons, Anglicans against Puritans, Cavaliers against Roundheads, Factory owners against the industrial working class – all such conflicts, for my father, illustrated the one great truth about England, which is that it has been, is and will always be a society riven by the great division between upper and lower class.

Interestingly, he did not subscribe to the Marxist worldview. Indeed, he was, in his special way, a patriot, who believed (rightly as it happened) that Marxism was nothing but a conspiracy to betray our country to Stalin. For him class was a moral rather than an economic category. It was the ‘class for itself’ that contained the true story of people like himself, who carried the flickering light of the oppressed proletariat in the catacombs to which the upper class had banished them.

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Too posh to fail

By James Kirkup

And the members of the upper class – although, of course, they owned everything and stole everything – were not, primarily, defined by their economic status. Far more important were accent, dress, manners and sociolect. They said ‘lunch’ when we said ‘dinner’, and ‘dinner’ when we said ‘tea’. They had salaries while we earned wages; they went out to dinner in restaurants, while we stood rounds of drinks in the pub (but only on Friday, after the wage packet). They watched rugby and cricket rather than football, and – most important of all – they voted Conservative, while we voted Labour.

The great divide between them and us showed itself in everything that mattered: taste in art, literature and music, ways of getting about (car versus bus), religion (Church versus Chapel), recreation (hunting and shooting versus picnics and zoos) and of course education (Oxford and Cambridge versus whatever else you could scrape).

This conception of class, as a moral rather than an economic category, has survived the very many changes that have wiped away the England of those days. We still live in a society in which class resentment is a major social and political force, and in which people strive to make sense of all that happens to them in terms of the great ‘us’ and ‘them’ divide.

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Brexit has exposed our education apartheid

By Matthew Goodwin

Tell educated Americans that the question of whether or not to ban hunting with hounds occupied 240 hours of Parliamentary time, while the decision to go to war in Iraq took only 18 hours, and they will be entirely non-plussed – especially when you add that virtually nothing else was discussed by the ruling Labour Party during the two or three years that it devoted to this topic. But when you explain that the aim was not to protect foxes but to punish the upper class, a light will dawn. For they will know, as we all know, that class in this country is not only a matter of moral status, but a matter of highly developed and inexhaustible social drama.

This theatrical side retains its appeal, and its comic possibilities – exploited so brilliantly by Oscar Wilde, Noel Coward, Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh – have made an unforgettable contribution to our knowledge of, and I would also say compassion for, the human condition. But it was not the theatrical side of the class war that obsessed my father. For him it was a matter, not of life or death exactly, but of faith versus betrayal.

I longed to breathe some other air than the ‘for itself’ that made such a fug in our living room (not drawing room, note, since that was what they said). I gathered around myself arty friends and exotic drop-outs. My father began to react with intense and vigilant hostility. He had been deeply opposed to grammar school, though I had no choice but to attend it. He strongly suspected (and rightly) that our school wanted to make us all into Etonians. He hoped against hope that I would not get into Cambridge, and was never reconciled to the fact that I did so – though to be honest it was unavoidable at the time. All in all I passed through adolescence bearing the stigmata of a class traitor, even though all I was doing was what my father had done, in escaping from the tyranny of Capel Street, Ancoats, into the meadows of Old England.

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The secrets of the ruling class

By Alex Renton

Having embarked on this path it is very hard to turn back. Our grammar schools – mine for boys and the one for girls that my sisters attended – imparted a kind of bland, proper, middle England accent which identified us with no specific class. We found ourselves advancing in whatever sphere was open to us, not because we were particularly adept or ambitious but because that is the nature of life: lean against a door and it opens, unless someone is pushing from the other side.

At Cambridge I advanced as far as an ordinary lower-class heterosexual can manage – which in those days was not very far. But, as the years have gone by, I have made up for the social disabilities of those days (though not the one mentioned), and managed to make an independent life in which class plays no significant role. Social mobility, for me, was the escape route from resentment and the way of looking on the world with acceptance and love. And that is how it should be.

But this very social mobility, which ought to undermine the distinctions between classes, as it does in America, is here in Britain dismissed as a fiction. The great us/them divide remains untouched by it, as it was untouched for my father.

Something about class resentment appeals to us – we cling to it, sustain it with fictions and dramas, and allow it to colour our social contacts and our political beliefs. Why is this? Perhaps, in the end, there is a kind of consolation contained in it. Perhaps, by self-identifying as working class, we join the heroic story of the English people, whose rightful inheritance was once stolen, we don’t quite know how, by people from elsewhere. Maybe some vestige of this narrative can be perceived in the drama of our country now.

Click here to read the rest of our series, Class Wars, in which we asked contributors to address what is often a vexed question: what does class mean to you?

Some of us, myself included, had come to know each other prior to 1989, in the long battle to affirm the shared civilisation of Europe against the obliterating tyranny of communism. Others, much younger, had been drawn to our circle in search of another philosophy than the empty cosmopolitanism of the new European elite. Over the years we have tried in our various ways to define what Europe really stands for, and to reaffirm our links with the European diaspora and with Western civilisation as a whole.

The statement is a response to a deep crisis in the culture and self-image of European society. No thinking person can doubt the existence of this crisis, or its connection to the dominant liberal orthodoxies of the EU institutions. Europe is defined by its inheritance. This inheritance includes the Christian religion, secular jurisdiction, and the idea of citizenship. Thanks to those inheritances Europe has enjoyed a distinctive political culture: one of mutual responsibility among people who define their identity in national terms and who make their laws by a process of democratic consultation. To defend that inheritance, however, is to invite the charge of populism, nationalism, racism and xenophobia: terms of abuse that are thrown thoughtlessly at all who believe that national identity and customary loyalties are the sine qua non of peaceful settlement.

Our statement is in part an attempt to define the areas where the true idea of Europe is in conflict with the false idea that is being imposed upon us. According to the false idea Europe is a ‘multicultural’ society, with no special allegiance to the religious inheritance or national identities of the European people. It is a society without borders, in which national sovereignty is to be eroded or discarded in favour of government by a bureaucratic elite. The false Europe extends a welcome to globalism in all its forms. It is to open its borders to immigrants without concern for their culture, their values or their capacity for the kind of territorial loyalty that has defined the history of our nation states. And it is to install an abstract conception of ‘human rights’ at every place where custom and loyalty have shaped our way of life. This false Europe is conceived as a background to the rootless and self-indulgent lifestyle of the sixties. And in order to advance that lifestyle, for which no positive argument has ever been given, its advocates hurl insults at the ordinary law-abiding citizens for whom marriage and the family, neighbourhood, custom and an inherited sense of belonging are the foundations of their way of life.

For many years I have been struck by the way in which those on whom the future of society most depends – the ‘marrying classes’ as Lytton Strachey contemptuously described them, or les salauds as Sartre put it, yet more contemptuously – are also first to be singled out as targets by the apostles of liberation. But freedom of the kind that we all enjoy is made possible by social trust, and social trust depends on a shared sense of belonging, and a shared national culture. To dismiss those things as ‘racism and xenophobia’, as is the norm among opinionated Europeans today, is to undermine the social stability on which the elites depend for their freedoms. Equally destructive has been the habit – in France especially – of dividing political postures into the ‘progressive’ and the ‘reactionary’, and thereby preparing a welcome for every innovation, however destructive, and a contemptuous dismissal for all attempts, however nuanced and reasonable, to defend what we have.

One of the most important assets that we have is the protection of free speech. In European countries differences of opinion have been not only permitted but encouraged. We are heirs to a tradition of public debate in which rational argument prevails over crowd emotions. Our opponents who defend the false Europe are entitled to do so and we expect them to work by peaceful means for their goals, opposed by our arguments but free from our abuse. But in drafting the Paris statement we were acutely aware that this tradition of public debate is no longer respected on the left. Those who defend the European inheritance are regularly sneered at or silenced, and while legitimate criticisms of Islam and its adherents are vilified as ‘Islamophobia’ and ‘hate speech’, no equivalent punishment is meted out to the critics of Christianity. The disappearance of free speech from our universities has gone hand in hand with draconian legislation enforcing invented ‘human rights’ in areas where Europeans are by no means of one mind – areas such as abortion, gay marriage, adoption, and the maintenance of religious symbols and festivals. In all these matters the culture of repudiation has seized the advantage, imposing multicultural orthodoxies in advance of the discussion and reflection of which our continent stands so greatly in need.

It is my firm belief that young people can be made aware not only that our spiritual and cultural inheritance is worth preserving but that it is the source of all the freedoms that they enjoy – including the freedom publicly to repudiate it, a freedom that Islamic civilisation has never extended to its adherents. It is my hope too that young people will begin to think clearly about the likely outcome of the repudiation to which they are being encouraged, and will come to see that the result will not be a tolerant and open society, but, in all likelihood, a condition of social fragmentation and ethnic strife. But our statement is not addressed only to the young; it is addressed also to politicians, writers, intellectuals and cultural figures who have the opportunity to give voice to the ideals that have shaped our continent, and to begin the defence of what is most precious to us all.