Scrutongate is not a means of ingress to Sir Roger Scruton’s farm in Wiltshire, England, but a digital witchhunt against the English-speaking world’s most eminent public philosopher. The mob already know where Scruton lives: The witchfinder-generals of the left have been “no platforming” him since the early 1980s. The novelty is that this time, the digital denouncers are massing at Scruton’s virtual gate because of architecture.
In early November, Britain’s Conservative government appointed Scruton the unpaid chairman of its Building Better, Building Beautiful commission. Scruton has long campaigned against Britain’s postwar penchant for building badly: throwing up hideous public housing in a cheap and unpopular pastiche of modernist styles. The problem recently has been that governments are failing to keep up with demand for homes of any style at all. In the decade between 2007 and 2017, immigration increased Britain’s population by nearly 10 perecent, from just over 60 million to just over 66 million. The cost of housing has risen by more than 5 percent in every year since 2014, and faster in desirable areas of London and the commuter belt towns protected from further development by a “Green Belt” of woods and legislation.
The Englishman increasingly struggles to buy the home that should be his castle. After the war, Labour established itself as the builder of sprawling public housing projects it called “council estates”: The socialist architecture was part of the architecture of state socialism. Later, Margaret Thatcher established the Conservatives as the patrons of the aspirant working class by allowing council tenants to buy their homes. Now, the Conservatives under Theresa May have committed to refreshing the vote-winning compact between government and affordable housing.
It is a British tradition that the arbiter of official taste in municipal construction lives in a Georgian townhouse but condemns the poor to live a hundred feet off the ground in a concrete box. So it was greatly to the credit of May’s otherwise discreditable administration that James Brokenshire, the communities secretary, picked Scruton, an advocate of indigenous architectural traditions, to advise Building Better, Building Beautiful.
The prospect of the government’s building homes that reflect the desires of the people who live in them rather than the taste of people who think they know better enraged Labour’s hard left. So its digital myrmidons assailed Scruton as a homophobe, an apologist for date rape and eugenics, and, in a touching display of interfaith harmony, as both an anti-Semite and an Islamophobe. Some of this selectively misrepresented his statements, and much of it was simply fictional.
“It’s complete nonsense,” Scruton told me when I phoned him last weekend. Sir Roger had raised the drawbridge and was taking a philosophical view from the battlements.
“It’s all fine. It’s only social media, isn’t it?” he said. “Social media has no purchase on real life, because it’s designed to replace real life. The whole purpose of it is to re-create networks of human relationships in which reality has no part, so that people can live in fantasy worlds of their own and never encounter the real things like death, starvation, and conflict on the ground.”
Still, he had not expected so vehement a volley of loathing. “I was surprised,” he admitted. “There’s obviously a big dossier kept on me.” Since when? “Probably since birth! Certainly since the early eighties. There’s a sentiment on the left that architectural modernism and revolutionary politics belong together. There’s a fear that I’m going to be putting a spoke in the wheel of the whole modernist vision of what things should look like. I’m an advance guard of the bourgeoisie.”
Anyone who has admired an Italian train station and then discovered that it was part of Mussolini’s vision for Italy, or who knows how Le Corbusier saw his designs for a new urban architecture in terms of fascist and occult solar worship, will understand that the kind of revolutionary politics associated with architectural modernism is the wrong kind of politics. Have none of Scruton’s Labour attackers considered that fighting for Le Corbusier-style council estates puts them in strange ideological company?
“They might, but that would require a level of education somewhat higher than they’ve achieved,” Scruton observes. “They’d have to know about Le Corbusier’s association with the Vichy government and what his plans for Algiers really were—essentially to eliminate the whole Islamic conception of how to build.”
Scruton, the alleged Islamophobe, is in fact a defender of Islamic architectural traditions. Similarly, Scruton. the alleged anti-Semite and supposed partisan of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, took George Soros’s side in 2016, petitioning Orbán’s government not to close the Soros-funded Central European University, whose creation Scruton considers “an initiative for which George Soros deserves credit.”
The sources of the anti-Semitism allegations are Scruton’s 2013 lecture “The Need for Nations” and his 2017 interview with Hungary Today. In the lecture, Scruton explained the Hungarian nationalism that drives Orbán’s support, and Soros’s hostility to Orbán, in an analysis touching on Hungarian history and language and the legacies of the Holocaust and the Cold War. Speaking to a Hungarian audience, Scruton specifically noted that “indigenous anti-Semitism still plays a part in Hungarian society and politics, and presents an obstacle to the emergence of a shared national loyalty among ethnic Hungarians and Jews.”
Scruton also described how historical experiences and recurring hostilities map onto Hungarian politics. Many of the “Budapest intelligentsia” are Jewish and “rightly suspicious” of Hungarian nationalism. This aligns them with the “networks around the Soros Empire.” As Scruton observed in the Hungary Today interview, Hungary’s Soros-funded NGOs function as “an unofficial opposition to the government, a compensation for the lack of opposition in parliament.” In the same interview, Scruton criticized Orbán as “an illiberal democrat.”
The Labour member of parliament Luciana Berger, who is Jewish, accuses Scruton of “peddling anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.” Yet this is a pernicious fallacy: If Scruton criticizes Soros’s politics, and Soros is Jewish by origin, then Scruton opposes Jewish politicking.
“If you take one sentence out of context, you can make it look like I’m talking about a Jewish conspiracy,” Scruton says. “That’s what they wanted to do, to accuse me of that sort of thing.”
In the curious case of Scrutongate, the fantasy architecture of social media is being abused to defend the fantasy of the union of modern architecture and socialism. It is ironic, though, to hear accusations of anti-Semitism emanating from the Labour party of Jeremy Corbyn. For no one since Oswald Mosley has done more to make anti-Semitic expression acceptable in Britain than Labour in recent years.
“There is a caricature view of what it is to be on the right now,” Scruton says. “And that view is that you’re a populist, a nationalist, you’re about closing borders, xenophobia, et cetera. Any way of putting together a picture that would fit someone like me is a way of confirming these deep prejudices on the left. The left now identifies itself as cosmopolitan, internationalist, borderless, and deeply hostile to indigenous feelings of nationhood—and therefore hostile to the indigenous working class.”
Scruton ticks off every box of the caricature. Worse even than advocating traditional architecture, he is the most prominent intellectual advocate of Brexit and shares some of the credit for it. I ask Scruton if the outcry against him fits the pattern of current British politics, in which every issue is a proxy for Brexit.
“It’s all political obviously, to embarrass the government,” he reflects. “I’m sure that has made me a target. . . . To intellectuals, I represent something dangerous, a threat to the stability of the left. So I think I’m always going to be targeted.”
