The United Kingdom and the EU: Inevitably Drifting Apart?: The 2014 Mackenzie-Stuart Lecture

The CELS Mackenzie-Stuart Lecture Podcast

Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge

Business, News, Government

5.0 • 4 Ratings

🗓️ 17 February 2014

⏱️ 42 minutes

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Summary

The Centre for European Legal Studies (CELS) hosts an annual public lecture in honour of Lord Mackenzie-Stuart, the first British Judge to be President of the Court of Justice. Among the eminent scholars of European legal studies invited to give the lecture are Professor Joseph Weiler, former Judge David Edwards of the European Court of Justice, and Advocate-General Francis Jacobs of the European Court of Justice. The texts of the Mackenzie-Stuart Lectures are published in the Cambridge Yearbook of European Legal Studies. The 2014 Mackenzie-Stuart Lecture was delivered by EU Commission Vice-President Viviane Reding on Monday 17 February 2014, and was entitled "The United Kingdom and the EU: Inevitably Drifting Apart?". More information about this lecture, including photographs from the event, is available from the Centre for European Legal Studies website at http://www.cels.law.cam.ac.uk/mackenzie_stuart_lectures/ This entry provides an audio source for iTunes U.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Ladies and gentlemen, good evening.
0:05.0	I'm Roger Mosy, Master of Selwyn College.
0:08.0	And a pretty obvious thing to say tonight is that Britain and Europe is one of the great
0:14.0	unresolved stories of our time.
0:17.0	Our destiny did appear to be settled in 1973 when we enter the Common Market and two years later our membership was confirmed in a referendum with an overwhelming vote to stay in.
0:28.6	These lectures commemorate Lord Mackenzie Stewart who was the first judge from the United Kingdom to sit at the Court of Justice in Luxembourg following the UK's admission to the EEC, and he later
0:40.3	became president of that court. Now, I do defer to the many lawyers here tonight, but my sense is
0:46.9	that whether or not you think this should work, in practice, the integration has generally
0:52.3	worked, despite the diversity in the legal systems involved.
0:56.4	But now, in 2014, we may be just three years away from a referendum about whether the UK
1:03.1	should leave the European Union. Europe remains a heated subject for politicians,
1:09.2	even though it's still relatively low on the list
1:11.6	of public concerns. I will confess that as a journalist myself for many years, we sought to enliven
1:17.6	many a quiet morning on the BBC Today programme by the tactic of bringing together a Eurosceptic
1:23.6	and a pro-European and lighting the blue touch paper, though I sometimes confess I wish we'd
1:29.6	generated less heat and more light. However, our guest tonight can't complain too much
1:36.2	about journalists because she was one herself on the Luxembourg Award. I would also confess
1:41.7	that if I was still editor of the Today program, I would be booking her as often as I could because she's a very feisty and interesting guest on the program.
1:51.0	Vivian Reading is one of the most likely contributors to the European debate, and she does not pull her punches.
1:58.0	She recently chastised David Cameron. What is leadership?
2:02.3	She asked, if you just try with populistic movements and populistic speech to gain votes.
2:08.4	You are just destroying the future of your people. But she was then rebuked herself by a conservative
	...

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