No 10 sacks housing tsar over slurs against Islam and Chinese

A LEADING philosopher was sacked from his role as a Government housing adviser yesterday after making a series of controversial claims in an interview.

Sir Roger Scruton, a well-known conservative thinker, said Islamophobia was a ‘propaganda word’, spoke of a ‘Soros empire’ in Hungary and made offensive comments about the Chinese.

He has previously described homosexuality as ‘not normal’ and said sexual harassment was ‘sexual advances made by the unattractive’.

In the wake of his interview with the New Statesman yesterday, Tory MPs turned on Sir Roger, with Tom Tugendhat and Johnny Mercer among those calling for him to be sacked.

Labour accused him of ‘invoking the language of white supremacists’, while the Muslim Council of Britain and the Board of Deputies of British Jews also criticised his comments.

Within four hours of the interview being published, Communities Secretary James Brokenshire sacked him as chairman of the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission. In the interview, Sir Roger, pictured, repeated the claim that Islamophobia was a propaganda word ‘invented by the Muslim Brotherhood in order to stop discussion of a major issue’.

He said it was ‘nonsense’ for critics to accuse Hungary’s far-Right premier Viktor Orban of anti-Semitism or Islamophobia.

He said: ‘The Hungarians were extremely alarmed by the sudden invasion of huge tribes of Muslims from the Middle East.’

Referring to Jewish philanthropist George Soros, he said: ‘Anybody who doesn’t think that there’s a Soros empire in Hungary has not observed the facts.’

He also said ‘each Chinese person is a kind of replica of the next one’.

Mr Tugendhat told BuzzFeed: ‘AntiSemitism sits alongside racism, antiIslam, homophobia and sexism as a cretinous and divisive belief that has no place in our public life and particularly not in government.’ Sir Roger was contacted via his website last night but did not reply.