Scrutopia – our vision for society

Jan 18, 2020 by

by Kathy Gyngell, The Conservative Woman:

EARLIER this week the Prime Minister tweeted: ‘RIP Sir Roger Scruton. We have lost the greatest modern conservative thinker – who not only had the guts to say what he thought but said it beautifully.’

So great that he was all but ignored by the current Tory Party establishment. Do us a favour and forget the cliches, Boris. This is the man you chose not to heed while he was alive though he was the only conservative with a philosophy. You chose not only studiously to disregard him but your erstwhile colleagues sacked him from the only advisory post (on building and architecture) your party ever gave him, not even bothering to check that he’d been grievously misrepresented and traduced, making him the target of the very witch-hunt culture he warned against. 

‘The reaction to his death speaks to his profound influence on conservative thought and British politics’, wrote someone for Bloomberg. Really? In their dreams maybe. Is it guilt speaking? Possibly. The most truthful tributes speak to the tragedy of Scruton’s lack of influence.

Outside the most marginal of intellectual conservative circles his influence was negligible, despite Danny Kruger’s heroic attempt to attribute Boris’s election win to it. Conservatism Scruton himself explained is the losing side with intellectuals and in the media too ‘because instincts are hard to discuss and even harder to defend. If you are in the business of repudiating. . . of declaring your emancipation from your past you get an audience but if you’re in the business of trying to defend what is your basic sense of belonging words quickly run out . . . but nevertheless when it comes to voting . . . the instinct prevails. This is why in the intellectual word the left is always in the ascendent but in the real world . . . the right is always the solid basis on which people stand’.

[…]  Now this great thinker, this humane and modest man is gone. It is down to us to take advantage of the resurgence of interest in his thinking that his death has afforded. We are fortunate to have his body of work to inform us, to challenge the Conservative In Name Only Party with, to help us continue his mission of conserving a free society, calling out oikophobia and those would repudiate their own culture whenever we can. 

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