The government adviser and philosopher reflects on Brexit and responds to charges of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.
It was in Paris in May 1968, as French workers and students revolted, that Roger Scruton became a conservative. “I was woken up then, I wasn’t really political until that moment,” the author and philosopher recalled when we met recently at his flat in Albany, the rarefied apartment complex opposite Fortnum & Mason in Piccadilly, London. “I thought, here is the most beautiful city in the world, with its wonderful culture, all the things that I’ve just learned to appreciate, and these wretched, spoiled brats are trying to pull it all down… I had an old-fashioned English Puritanical revolt against it.”
Since then, Scruton, now 75, has become something of a one-man think tank, writing more than 50 books on politics, philosophy, religion and culture; founding and editing The Salisbury Review (from 1982 to 2001); hosting a ten-day summer school on his Wiltshire farm (with the unintentionally comical name “Scrutopia”); and, most recently, becoming head of the government’s Building Better, Building Beautiful commission in November 2018. His sacking was unsuccessfully demanded by Labour MPs and others on account of his past remarks on Hungarian Jews (part of a “Soros empire”), Islamophobia (a “propaganda word”) and homosexuality (“not normal”).
George Eaton – The New Statesman – April 10, 2019.
Want More Investigative Content?
