The battle over the treatment of Roger Scruton, the author and philosopher, following an interview with George Eaton that was published in the New Statesman magazine, rages on. To recap, for those who do not read the New Statesman, Eaton quoted Scruton on three subjects – immigration in Hungary, George Soros and China – and amid the fallout from the perceived racism of Scruton’s views as presented, he was sacked from his (unpaid) job as chair of the Building More, Building Beautiful government commission.
Scruton’s original complaint, that he was misrepresented by Eaton and his words were taken out of context, has now broadened. As he put it on the Today programme, he believes that “thought crimes are being manufactured” to hound conservatives such as him out of public life. This is plainly silly; the philosopher has been broadcasting his conservative views for years. He has long been part of an intellectual culture giving respectability to views at the farthest edges of acceptable race generalisation on the mainstream right, to no detriment at all to his standing.
Yet his more specific complaints about the interview do deserve examination. Eaton relays Scruton’s thoughts about China thus: “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.” The transcript, when it was leaked under still mysterious circumstances, shows Scruton making a point about the conformity demanded by the authoritarian Chinese government, rather than denigrating Chinese people. This should have been made clearer.
Scruton is on much thinner ice when he moves on defend his comments about “the invasion of huge tribes of Muslims from the Middle East” into Hungary. He was not, he says, calling it an invasion, or sorting anyone into a huge tribe on his own account. He was merely ventriloquising the legitimate concerns of the average Hungarian. They must feel like that, or they wouldn’t have voted for the hard-right scourge of refugees, Victor Orbán, right? This entire proposition is fabulously disingenuous.
First, when you talk about groups of people in dehumanising, “tribes”, “floods” and “swarms”, when you turn reality on its head so that the most vulnerable people on Earth become a threat or an “invasion”, that has impact. To project those thoughts, post hoc, on to some imaginary “average person” doesn’t change the fact that it was you that said them.
Second, the notion of “huge” numbers of refugees is itself a figment of Orbán’s imagination, conjured up as a scapegoating device of the kind the far right has been using for time immemorial. The total number of asylum applications to Hungary last year was under 1,000. Third, according to the Hungarian Helsinki committee, a human rights organisation working with refugees, failed asylum seekers are being placed in internment camps and systematically denied food, a state of affairs that should ring extremely loud alarm bells, not for liberals and do-gooders, who are alarmed already, but for the mainstream right, which is the first line of defence against fascism. There is nothing conservative about going in to bat for the falsehoods of a regime which gathers people into camps and starves them. This stuff is really pretty radical.
Sticking with Hungary, the Spectator magazine columnist, Douglas Murray, has defended Scruton from criticism over his observations on George Soros, the Hungarian-American billionaire who has been a target for sustained attacks by Orbán’s government and has become a target around the world for far-right antisemitic tropes. Scruton told Eaton: “Anybody who doesn’t think that there’s a Soros empire in Hungary has not observed the facts.” Murray said Eaton had wrongly failed to include in his write-up what Scruton said next: “It’s not necessarily an empire of Jews – I mean, that’s such nonsense.”
But Scruton’s telling of the “facts” is itself partial. Soros has been a hate figure for Orbán since 2018. His Open Society Foundation felt obliged to move from Budapest to Berlin. Conspiracies theories have been fabricated casting him as nefarious puppet master in chief. If Soros looms large in Hungarian society, it’s not because he has an empire, it’s because ancient antisemitic tropes are being reanimated in his name. Which isn’t to say Scruton is an antisemite, but when he plays into notions of Soros’s empire that are being used across the globe by the far right for antisemitic purposes, it doesn’t seem like the most rigid policing of thought crime to point that out.
Social media platforms, Twitter especially, tend towards overstatement. The sheer volume of umbrage being routinely taken must always feel disproportionate to those at the centre of it. Yet Scruton, transfixed by the context and reception of his own remarks, fails to consider the broader political context: refugees, Muslims in particular, are demonised, their numbers magnified and their hardships minimised for a purpose. Jews are demonised for the same purpose – the sowing of social division to serve an authoritarian agenda. It’s really nothing personal when we challenge these narratives of otherness; no malice is intended towards the bullied conservative. It’s just that the principles of universal human rights – more than that, love, fellowship, solidarity – are more important than whether or not a reactionary dude gets to keep on chairing a commission.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
