Scruton sacked over race comments

ONE of England’s most controversial philosophers has been sacked as the Government’s housing tsar after he called the existence of Islamophobia into question.

Sir Roger Scruton was relieved of his role as chairman of the Building Better, Building Beautiful commission.

The Government said the comments were “completely unacceptable” and Sir Roger had been dismissed with “immediate effect”.

Pressure had been growing on ministers to sack the conservative academic for remarks reported in an interview with the New Statesman magazine, published yesterday.

The Government had dismissed calls to fire Sir Roger, 75, when he was appointed in November after it emerged he had said Islamophobia was a “propaganda word” and described homosexuality as “not normal”.

A spokeswoman for the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government said: “Sir Roger Scruton has been dismissed with immediate effect, following his unacceptable comments.”

Sir Roger reportedly said of the Chinese Communist party: “They’re creating robots out of their own people … each Chinese person is a kind of replica of the next one, and that is a very frightening thing.”

He also appeared to speak critically of George Soros, the investor and philanthropist who has been subjected to anti-semitic conspiracy theories.

“Anybody who doesn’t think that there’s a Soros empire in Hungary has not observed the facts,” he said. “The Hungarians were extremely alarmed by the sudden invasion of huge tribes of Muslims from the Middle East.”

The term Islamophobia had been “invented by the Muslim Brotherhood in order to stop discussion of a major issue”, Sir Roger added. It was “nonsense”, he said, to accuse Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, of antisemitism.

Downing Street described the comments as “deeply offensive and completely unacceptable”, adding that he had been appointed “because of his expertise in the built environment”.

However, some suggested Sir Roger’s comments had been misinterpreted and that his remarks about Chinese people were actually an attack on the Chinese state. Labour demanded the Government immediately sack Sir Roger after the remarks were published. “It is not the first time he has said things like this,” a party spokesman said. “Nobody in a public position who makes those kinds of remarks should be in that position.”

Andrew Gwynne, shadow communities secretary, said: “The Tories should never have handed him the job.”

Several Conservative MPS had also demanded Sir Roger be sacked.

Ben Derbyshire, president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, said: “It was right for the Government to dismiss him.”