How witch-hunt was led by self-righteous Tories
IT STARTED with an inflammatory tweet and ended, just a few hours later, with a high- profile sacking and public disgrace.
The New Statesman magazine hadn’t even hit the news stands when deputy editor George Eaton took to Twitter, claiming the conservative thinker Sir Roger Scruton had made ‘a series of outrageous remarks’ in an interview to be published the next day.
Sir Roger had been racist about the Chinese, suggested Eaton. He had derided the influence of Jewish financier George Soros and dismissed Islamophobia as a convenient invention to suppress criticism. The response was immediate and angry, as Eaton no doubt intended.
Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat replied with a tweet condemning racism – seen as a demand that Sir Roger be dismissed from his unpaid post advising Ministers on the design of homes and high streets.
Another Conservative MP, Johnny Mercer, declared that sacking Sir Roger was a ‘no brainer’. George Osborne, the former Conservative Chancellor, now newspaper editor, condemned Sir Roger for his ‘bigoted remarks’.
By teatime, James Brokenshire, the Housing Secretary who appointed Sir Roger as an adviser, announced he had duly been fired. All without discussion, without investigation and without a word in Sir Roger’s defence.
Cue a tasteless social media post from Eaton – since withdrawn – showing him swigging a bottle of champagne while crowing at getting the sack for Sir Roger, the ‘Right-wing racist and homophobe’. But that was not the end of the matter. The philosopher has maintained throughout that the New Statesman manipulated his comments and distorted his views, both on Twitter and in print. Now a transcript of the interview has been published that proves he was correct. Here, we print the evidence that spells out how unjustly Sir Roger Scruton has been treated.
On the Chinese:
How it appeared in the New Statesman: ‘ 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.’ What Sir Roger actually said: ‘There is something quite frightening about the Chinese sort of mass politics and the regimentation of the ordinary being… We invent robots, and they are them. In a sense they are creating robots out of their own people by so constraining what can be done. Each Chinese person is a kind of replica of the next one. And that’s a very frightening thing. Maybe I don’t know enough about it to be confident in making that judgment, but the politics is like that, and the foreign policy is like that. And the concentration camps have come back, largely there to “re-educate” the Muslims and so on.’
On Jews and anti-Semitism:
How it appeared in the New Statesman: ‘Anyone who doesn’t think that there’s a Soros empire in Hungary has not observed the facts.’ [Jewish financier George Soros has become a target for antiSemitic criticism. The magazine implied that Sir Roger is also critical of supposed Jewish influence.] What Sir Roger actually said: ‘Anybody who doesn’t think that there’s a Soros empire in Hungary has not observed the facts. It’s not necessarily an empire of Jews – I mean that’s such nonsense.’
Scruton then laments the ‘legacy of anti-Semitism in Hungary’ and adds: ‘If you had a political movement in Hungary which excluded the Jews in some way, you’d be damned foolish because they are the ones with the minds.’
On Islamophobia:
How it appeared in the New Statesman: ‘The Hungarians were extremely alarmed by the sudden invasion of huge tribes of Muslims from the Middle East.’
Scruton told the interviewer that Islamophobia was a propaganda word ‘ invented by the Muslim Brotherhood in order to stop discussion of a major issue’. The arti-
cle accused Sir Roger of defending the Hungarian leader Viktor Orban against charges of anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim prejudice.
What Sir Roger actually said: ‘I t hi nk power has gone t o hi s [Orban’s] head. He’s made some decisions which are very popular with the Hungarian people. Because the Hungarians were extremely alarmed by this sudden invasion of huge tribes of Muslims from the Middle East. And you have to remember that their history with, their relation with Islam is not a happy one...
‘Muslims who settle into the Meccan way of life are obviously perfect citizens. They have the inner serenity that the citizen should have and we ought to learn to appreciate that and encourage it.’