Vale Roger Scruton, the radical Conservative

“Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.”

-          Sir Roger Scruton

The recent passing of Sir Roger Scruton signals the passing of a genuinely great Conservative thinker, philosopher, writer and speaker. His disappearance is a loss to the intellectual stream of not only the academic world, but anyone who is interested in truth, beauty, liberty and having the argument.

In a time where words have lost their meanings, to many, the label ‘Conservative’ will be automatically repugnant. But conservatives simply mean someone who wishes to conserve something about their society, their culture and their way of life, which they deem good. In this sense, everyone is a conservative about something. The late historian Robert Conquest stated very accurately that ‘Everyone is a conservative about what they know best.’

In this proper sense, the American Indians or Australian Aborigines who wish to keep their traditions alive are conservatives. The revolutionaries in America who fought against the British Empire’s unjust taxations and lack of political representation are conservatives, and said so, as they wanted to conserve their inalienable rights as English men, rights recognised at least as early as the signing of the Magna Carta.

In fact, the mainstream Anglo conservatives largely wish to conserve the Liberal principles of John Locke, John Milton, Thomas Paine, Edmund Burke, J.S. Mill and Mary Wollstonecraft. And even among the die-hard leftists, one will find few to challenge these thinkers who put down the cornerstones of what makes up a modern Liberal society that elevates the individual above the state. And it is this tradition, among other things that Scruton wished to preserve.

Sir Roger Scruton certainly knew a lot about a lot. From Kant to Hagel, about wine, music (he had composed two staged operas and was working on a third when he died), history, religion and architecture, he could write eloquently and deeply. And he was keen to conserve what he saw as good at a time when the vast majority of intellectuals are ready to happily surrender the fruits of their forbearers. In this sense, he was a radical conservative. And has always been throughout his long career.

During the cold-war, when the intellectual establishment was largely anti-Western, Scruton acted true to his beliefs, and ventured out to Eastern Europe and opened up underground universities, at great risks to himself, to teach students philosophy. As Douglas Murray wrote, ‘If Roger and his colleagues had been largely leftist thinkers infiltrating far-right regimes to teach Plato and Aristotle there would have been multiple Hollywood movies about them by now.’ Not that Scruton would have wanted that sort of recognition.

He represented the rare combination of the man of letters and the man of action. It brings to mind others like Lord Byron, who died in Greece where he was supporting the Greeks in the war of independence against the Ottoman Empire. Of George Orwell, who fought against the Fascists during the Spanish Civil War and almost died, having taken a bullet in the throat. Of Oriana Fallaci, the Italian firebrand anti-fascist journalist who interviewed most of the heavy hitters at the time, including Arafat, Deng Xiaoping, Ayatollah Khomeini and Indira Gandhi. Of Christopher Hitchens, who had reported from various dictatorships such as North Korea, and Saddam’s Iraq; had interviewed the Argentine dictator Videla and was arrested in Prague for attending a pro-Vaclav Havel meeting (and indeed one might include Havel himself, as a writer who put himself into the fold when called upon). Hitchens also got into a dustup with some fascists while putting up anti-fascist graffiti in Beirut. In other words, Scruton was a man who saw first-hand the terrible calumny when unchecked power is unleashed and was willing to do something about it.

His fantastic writings and documentaries about beauty and architecture would strike a chord with anyone who has vaguely wondered why modern art and architecture from the 50’s onwards, can be so very unsatisfying and downright ugly. This against the herd of mainstream critics who would write paragraphs of undergraduate flattery about pretentious and lazy art that require neither skill nor very much thought.

Predictably, opinion writers from the far leftist publication like The Guardian are trying to convince its readers that Scruton’s conservatism is some sort of crypto-racism.

Kenan Malik actually brought up the case of Ray Honeyford. Honeyford was a school headmaster from Bradford, where 85% of the 500 pupils in his school were Asian. Honeyfod wrote a controversial 1984 article in Salisbury Review, which Scruton was editor for. For those who don’t know of this affair, Honeyford argued in his piece that immigrant children should be taught English in schools by teachers rather than ‘celebrate linguistic diversity’ as dictated by the politically correct government, the direct consequence of which was that many British-born children grew up not being able to speak and write English to a minimal standard. For this, he was forced to resign.

Scruton wrote of Honeyford, “Ray Honeyford was branded as a racist, horribly pilloried, and eventually sacked, for saying what everyone now admits to be true.” Given Angela Merckle, David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy all stated that the multi-cultural project has failed in 2011, Honeyford has been proven to be more insightful and deep-thinking than the politicians and bureaucrats that were paid to do the thinking. About 30 years ahead. Scruton lost his professorship in 1992 for defending Honeyford from Birbeck, University of London.

Ray Honeyford with some of his students

Jonathan Portes trotted out the tired and increasingly discredited ‘Islamophobia’ argument, conflating it with racism (Islam is an ideology, not a race), in the assured and unlearned way only a leftist can. This shallow thinker, a professor of economics and public policy at King’s College London no less, apparently is unwilling to scrutinise a question as big and profound as mass immigration any deeper than leftist slogans. He fails to notice that he lives in a country where none of the holders of the Great Offices of State of The United Kingdom, that is, the Prime Minister, the Home Secretary, the Foreign Secretary and the Chancellor, under the Conservative Party, are ‘white-men’ by the left’s own standard.

He mentions Douglas Murray’s thoughtful book The Strange Death of Europe, but seems to have not read it. Portes still cannot notice any of the myriad of negative consequences of the unprecedented mass migration of peoples into Europe, as Murray’s book documents, and as I have attempted to review here.

Tying it up with the Honeyford affair – the recent disclosures find that the now estimated hundreds of thousands of young English girls drugged, raped and ‘groomed’ by largely Pakistani men were allowed to do so by the police, for decades, free from consequences. One chief reason being that the English police were afraid of being perceived as ‘racists’. Scruton’s 2014 article adumbrates well the ridiculousness of the situation. Scruton further wrote a novel entitled The Disappeared in 2015, where he combined the elements of the Honeyford affair with details of the Oxford sex gang. Truth has become stranger than fiction.

This incredible epidemic is not purely due to Islam, or immigration, or political-correctness gone mad, or failure of integration. But it would be foolish to say that these forces do not contribute to it. Hard questions about the intersection of religions, ‘racism’ (the rapists only rape English and some Sikh girls, but not Muslims girls), the amount and the type of immigration a country can withstand, and how immigrants are integrated into a society with certain expectations and norms, need to be at least asked.

Or that at the very least to have the people making all the noises on TV and twitter know at a minimum something about the difference between Sunni and Shia, Salafism and Sufi, and the difference between Arabs, Kurds, Persians and Turks. Or even where the capital of Iraq or Iran is.  

The left’s answer to the rape, torture and humiliation of these countless working class English girls (as young as 11), is to refuse to address it while smearing anyone who would dare point to the failure of their utopian policies as racists or Islamophobes. Like Sarah Champion, the Labour MP for Rotherham, who was forced to resign by Jeremy Corbyn after she dared to point out that it is largely Pakistani men who are raping and grooming young white girls, and that religion and culture had something to do with it. The same smear had been tried on Ann Cryer, who for decades tried to raise the issue of lack of female rights in certain districts with heavy ethnic group presence, as well as Pakistani rape gangs. Scruton got his fair share too.

As Christopher Hitchens warned his audience at an event many years ago: “The barbarians never take a city until someone holds the gates open to them. And it's your own multicultural authorities who will do it for you.” This has sadly proven to be true.

Anne Applebaum quoted from a letter she received from Scruton, contemplating the decline of ideologies: “Facts no longer made contact with the theory, which had risen above the facts on clouds of nonsense, rather like in a theological system. The point was not to believe the theory but to repeat it ritualistically and in such a way that belief and truth become irrelevant.” While this can apply to both wings of politics, this seems to be an exceedingly accurate diagnosis of the leftists in many Western countries.

For those who don’t know Scruton other than from The Guardian or its ilk, it might surprise them to know the range of friends this Conservative thinker has: He was close friends with the gay writer Douglas Murray, who valiantly fought on his behalf when George Eaton from the magazine New Statesmen deliberately and clumsily misrepresented Scruton in an attempt to paint him as a racist. He was friends with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the brave Somali woman who is fighting against Islamic fundamentalism for women’s rights at the risk of her life and who is never supported by the so called main stream ‘feminists’. He was friend with Ed Husain, a co-founder of Quilliam, an anti-extremist organisation aiming to de-radicalize Muslims from the most literal, violent and backward versions offered up by Salafists. Husain recalls Scruton in his last days re-reading the Quran in Arabic. Scruton could also read Farsi. This was a man who wished to conserve all that was good from all over the world, the antithesis of a racist or a fundamentalist.

These are individuals who are labelled as ‘Neo-Conservatives’, or ‘radicals’, or ‘Islamophobes’. But what they have in common with Scruton, as did others who had strong and clear principles, rather than relativists, is that they see the classic Liberal tradition as good and wish to conserve it and to export it to places where these values do not exist so that others may enjoy the fruits of these ideas.

Conservatives like Scruton understands intuitively that a society largely free from bigotry and where people enjoy the most degree of freedom and rights, like Britain, is akin to what Tennessee Williams wrote in his Glass Menagerie: “How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken.”

There is one less genuine knight who is willing to step into the fray to defend what he believes to be good. And the world is less good for it.

“Whatever our religion and our private convictions, we are the collective inheritors of things both excellent and rare, and political life, for us, ought to have one overriding goal, which is to hold fast to those things, in order to pass them on to our children.”

                                                                        Roger Scruton, How to Be a Conservative