Imagine, if you will, that John McDonnell had given an interview to the Daily Mail. What might he have expected to have been the result? Well, Roger Scruton gave an interview to the New Statesman. What did he expect to be the result?
The Government set him up, of course. It knew that if it gave him any kind of position, then someone would take him down, thereby taking down criticism of George Soros, of neoliberal economic policy, of extreme identitarian social policy, and of neoconservative foreign policy. Such criticism, at least of the second and fourth parts and thus in effect of the whole package, exists barely, if at all, in or around the Conservative Party, while almost no one in or around that party has ever heard of Soros. But the Conservative Party was not the intended audience here.
The people who are now running the Labour Party, which is regularly well ahead of the Conservatives in the polls, are as critical as it is possible to be of neoliberalism and of neoconservatism. They come from the tradition with the longest and the most consistent record of at least profound ambivalence about the identity politics towards which much of Jeremy Corbyn's personal base is vigorously hostile, not shying away from pointing out the sources of the money. And one such source does rather stand out.
The Government is betting that anyone who might wish to express these views has been cowed into silence by the fall of Roger Scruton. The same hope is held in Change UK, such as it is, and in its much larger and more dangerous stay-behind network in and around the Parliamentary Labour Party. Well, dream on.
Scruton, by the way, is a complete outlier. For one thing, he is not only an academic, but a philosopher, rather than either a roaringly unbookish country squire or impersonator of such, or a net curtain twitcher whose only book in the house is Regimental Cap Badges of the British Army or some heavily illustrated hagiography of the Queen.
Moreover, Scruton is a British conservative intellectual who might actually be in, or at least vote for, a conservative rather than a liberal party on the Continent. That is almost unheard of. Usually, they are like Oliver Letwin, or David Willetts, or Nick Boles, in a tradition that goes all the way back to Burke, who was, after all, a Whig, a critic of the French Revolution only really in practice, and a supporter of the American Revolution at least in principle.
Moreover, Scruton is a British conservative intellectual who might actually be in, or at least vote for, a conservative rather than a liberal party on the Continent. That is almost unheard of. Usually, they are like Oliver Letwin, or David Willetts, or Nick Boles, in a tradition that goes all the way back to Burke, who was, after all, a Whig, a critic of the French Revolution only really in practice, and a supporter of the American Revolution at least in principle.
Now, Scruton is not Joseph de Maistre, or Charles Maurras, or Juan Donoso Cortés, or Klemens Wenzel von Metternich. He is not even where those thinkers' successors, who certainly do exist, are today. But he is that occasional curiosity, an English writer with at least some affinity with any of that. Yet even then, he is peculiar. He has a straightforwardly English background, he not only went to Oxbridge but thrived there, he is attached to the middle-of-the-road Church of England, and he has at least some sort of association with the Conservative Party.
By contrast, figures in roughly his position on the periphery of our national life have been at least one of basically foreign, academically undistinguished in any formal sense and so mostly self-taught, either fiercely Catholic (but not either Recusant or Irish) or on the extreme Anglo-Catholic fringe, and possessed of an utter contempt of the nominally Tory political project, sometimes to the point of not voting as a matter of principle.
Anyway, the Government knew that if it gave Scruton any kind of position, then someone would take him down, thereby taking down criticism of George Soros, of neoliberal economic policy, of extreme identitarian social policy, and of neoconservative foreign policy. It is betting that anyone who might wish to express those views has been cowed into silence by the fall of Roger Scruton. The same hope is held in Change UK, such as it is, and in its much larger and more dangerous stay-behind network in and around the Parliamentary Labour Party. Well, dream on.
Dream on, because another hung Parliament is coming, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. It has become a local commonplace that I am on 30-30-30 with Labour and the Conservatives here at North West Durham, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post. I will stand for this seat, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.
By contrast, figures in roughly his position on the periphery of our national life have been at least one of basically foreign, academically undistinguished in any formal sense and so mostly self-taught, either fiercely Catholic (but not either Recusant or Irish) or on the extreme Anglo-Catholic fringe, and possessed of an utter contempt of the nominally Tory political project, sometimes to the point of not voting as a matter of principle.
Anyway, the Government knew that if it gave Scruton any kind of position, then someone would take him down, thereby taking down criticism of George Soros, of neoliberal economic policy, of extreme identitarian social policy, and of neoconservative foreign policy. It is betting that anyone who might wish to express those views has been cowed into silence by the fall of Roger Scruton. The same hope is held in Change UK, such as it is, and in its much larger and more dangerous stay-behind network in and around the Parliamentary Labour Party. Well, dream on.
Dream on, because another hung Parliament is coming, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. It has become a local commonplace that I am on 30-30-30 with Labour and the Conservatives here at North West Durham, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post. I will stand for this seat, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.
The Conservatives did not hire Scruton in order to fire him (why do that?) and they had no part in arranging the New Statesman interview. That was arranged by his publisher to promote the re-issuing of three of his books. So your whole thesis is laughable nonsense.
ReplyDeleteThe Conservative Party’s fault in this,( as Peter Hitchens says) is that it ran away in cowardly fashion from a fight with the disgusting smear-mongers and character-asassinators of the Left.
The New Statesman’s interview has now been revealed as a fake hatchet-job.Yet the Labour Party called Scruton a white supremacist and fascist, (in Shadow Equalities Minister Dawn Butler’s official statement). They haven’t apologised.
Of course they knew that this would happen. They have nothing in common with him. They set him up, not even to bring him down, so much as to bring down everything he stood for, much of which is found more in the emerging Blue Corbynism than anywhere else.
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