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The dismissal of Sir Roger Scruton by Housing Secretary James Brokenshire from the chairmanship of the government’s Building Better Building Beautiful Commission is the latest victory for the forces of “liberal” totalitarian groupthink. Scruton was accused of having offended against politically correct taboos in an interview he gave to the New Statesman’s deputy editor George Eaton.
The only startling aspect of l’affaire Scruton was not his sacking, but his appointment. That an authentic, traditionalist Tory and genuine intellectual should have been recruited as an adviser, even on so abstruse a topic as aesthetics, by the modernised faux-conservative party of Theresa May smacked of a clerical error or confusion of identities (“Shurely shome mishtake?”).
It certainly startled the watchdogs of cultural Marxist orthodoxy, who demanded Scruton’s sacking as soon as his appointment was announced last November. When a reliably liberal, consensual, politically correct post-Cameron Conservative Party was seen to have been infiltrated by a Tory, the fear that this heralded an outbreak of entryism alarmed the establishment. Unfortunately, all the supposedly damning quotes that Scruton’s critics dredged up from the past failed to secure his dismissal.
Nothing daunted, the New Statesman’s deputy editor obtained an interview with Scruton, “on the assumption that, as the magazine’s former wine critic I would be treated with respect, and that the journalist, George Eaton, was sincere in wanting to talk to me about my intellectual life”, as the philosopher naively explained afterwards.
Eaton secured several quotes that he believed would damage Scruton, sharpened up one of them by using an ellipsis to omit a qualifying clause, then posted a photograph on social media of himself swigging champagne from a bottle to celebrate having engineered the dismissal of one of Britain’s finest minds from the government. That tells you everything you need to know about the journalistic standards prevailing at the New Statesman.
But of course the blame does not lie with the bigoted magazine, but with the cowardly James Brokenshire, the late Conservative Party (realism dictates it should be referred to in the past tense) and the whole bogus “centre-right” establishment whose knee-jerk reaction is to yield invariably to every demand of the PC militants and the enforcers of the Twitter lynch mob.
Scruton’s remarks were characterised by a Downing Street representative as “deeply offensive and completely unacceptable”. The vocabulary, though fatuous, is eloquent. “Unacceptable” along with “inappropriate” is one of the two principal buzzwords of the thought police. Unacceptable to whom? To those who wish to impose a uniform, unchallengeable ideology on the entire population, is the answer.
What were Scruton’s “offensive” views? He stood by his previously stated opinion that “Islamophobia” was a “propaganda word”: “Absolutely. It was invented by the Muslim Brotherhood in order to stop discussion of a major issue.” Where is the outrage in that? If someone can prove the inventors of that contrived neologism were people other than the Muslim Brotherhood, that would not alter the essential fact that the term is employed daily to deter any criticism, however reasoned, of Islamism.
Sir Roger also said: “The Hungarians were extremely alarmed by the sudden invasion of huge tribes of Muslims from the Middle East.” A purist might suggest that “tribes” is not a strictly accurate term, but it was the word “invasion” that provoked criticism. In 2015 Hungary, a nation of 9.6 million people, was entered by 391,384 illegal immigrants, mainly of Middle Eastern origin. News footage showed them tearing down barriers and fighting with police. If the term “invasion” is not appropriate to describe that experience, what is?
The other “unacceptable” remark was inaccurately quoted by Eaton: “They are creating robots out of their own people [by so constraining what can be done.] Each Chinese person is a kind of replica of the next one and that is a very frightening thing.” By omitting the words in parenthesis the meaning was altered.
Eaton claimed in a self-justificatory article: “The omitted words ‘by so constraining what can be done’ do not change the meaning of the sentence.” But they do: they make it clear that Scruton is not disparaging the Chinese people as clones, but condemning their Communist rulers. “That may be open to interpretation,” Eaton responded to Douglas Murray when he pointed this out. In fact it is the only interpretation, once the integrity of the quote is restored.
This was a hit job by the New Statesman, in pursuit of the leftist ambition to exclude all true conservatives from office and even from the public square. If the government had had the slightest courage it would contemptuously have repelled the trumped-up charges against Scruton. But the Conservative Party’s instinct to surrender to the demands of liberal orthodoxy – because it no longer has a philosophy of its own – as usual prevailed
This is by no means Sir Roger Scruton’s first collision with the forces of censorship and ideological monopoly. He had plenty of experience of such intolerance while editing the Salisbury Review, the journal that kept the flame of Tory philosophy burning during years when the Conservative Party divested itself of intellectual thought.
After Ray Honeyford, a Bradford headmaster, had questioned multicultural education in its pages in 1984, Glasgow University’s philosophy department boycotted a talk Scruton had been invited to give. So much for the two-and-a-half millennia tradition of philosophical debate. Sir Roger’s role in supporting underground education in Communist Czechoslovakia throughout the 1980s, at considerable personal risk, considering the toxic character of the Soviet satellite regimes, demonstrated his commitment to freedom, both intellectual and political.
Among the pygmies in public life today Scruton stands out as a giant. His formidable intellect and the remarkable eclecticism of his writings mark him out as one of the few towering figures in British thought. In his case that thought is conservative, which makes him a pariah. In a society where minds have progressively been closed, culminating in the snowflake phenomenon whereby universities are the most uniform, conformist and thought-averse places in the country, true intellectual discourse is experiencing a nuclear winter.
That is the distinguishing feature of Marxism, whether Soviet or cultural: a blight that corrodes the mind, as Newspeak removes the potential for communication of dissident ideas. The vandals, too, rejoice at Scruton’s fall: the headline in Global Construction Review reads: “UK architects celebrate sacking of Roger Scruton as housing design champion.” RIBA president Ben Derbyshire was quoted as saying: “Time and effort has been wasted and we should now move on from stylistic obsessions to the issues that lie at the heart of solving the housing crisis.”
It’s business as usual, building the monstrosities that will require demolition by controlled explosions in thirty years’ time. Scruton’s mistake was to have anything to do with the now effectively defunct, principles-free Conservative Party. So far from repining at his dismissal, a glance at the media should reassure him that it is a very good party not to be part of.
The whole point of a Conservative Party is to provide effective resistance to the received orthodoxies of liberal-left intolerance. The Tories, instead, have surrendered and their cowardice has doomed them to extinction.
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Iain Martin and the team make sense of the news, providing commentary and analysis on the stories that matter in politics, geopolitics, economics and culture.