Why conservatives can’t survive in government

I had mixed feelings about the sacking of Roger Scruton from the government’s Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, following comments he made to the New Statesman. On the one hand it was utterly shameful and gutless on the part of the government, although no worse than one has come to expect from members of a party that is conservative in name only.

On the other hand, I have never been a huge admirer of Roger’s aesthetic sensibilities, no matter how eloquently they are expressed. He seems to have no time for anything which has happened since about 1738. I can’t be exactly sure what he had in mind for our towns and cities, but I suspect it would either be motte and baileys plus stockades, or at best a kind of fey neo-Regency cringing.

This may be doing the man another disservice and if so I apologise — not least because on other issues, and especially politics, I agree with a lot of what Roger has to say. Yes, it’s the stuff that got him sacked for which I admire the man. Not all of it: I am not entirely convinced, for example, that the Chinese government is trying to create an army of mutant androids with which it will acquire complete dominance over the rest of the world, possibly by tunnelling all the way from Shanghai to San Francisco as was imagined in the scary 1967 film Battle Beneath the Earth. But on the other stuff, Roger seems sound enough, especially regarding Islamophobia, which is of course an absurd confection, swallowed whole by a government that has no stomach for the fight against the tirelessly intolerant intersectional warriors. Being nasty about Muslims simply because they are Muslims is unpleasant, but it should not be given the title Islamophobia.