There is a very interesting discussion between Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution and Roger Scruton on You Tube.
In these times of Manichean witch hunts against anyone who does not sign up to a narrow left liberal agenda, it provides a breath of fresh air.
Scruton himself was the subject of a successful attempt to have him dismissed as an unpaid member of a British government housing commission. The former Northern Ireland Secretary James Brokenshire cravenly succumbed to the pressure before reappointing Scruton after it was proven that the New Statesman interview cited as evidence of Scruton’s offences against the woke had been scurrilously doctored.
I first read Scruton’s book The Meaning of Conservatism in the early 1990s. It was an interesting encounter for an Irish republican, and I suppose I read it in some part subconsciously hoping to find something that would reinforce my already crumbling faith in “scientific socialism.” Who better than an English Tory to persuade me that we ought not be on the same side on anything.
It did not. Scruton reinforced by own cohering thoughts about the nature of socialism. As the Soviet Union and its satellites in eastern and central Europe collapsed and as I read people like Solzhenitsyn and Popper, I had come to realise that socialism had not only failed as an economic system and a structure of society at the cost of millions of lives, but that it was deeply intellectually flawed.
Fundamentally it is based on the fallacy that human beings are perfectible, which is where socialism diverges from all the great religious, spiritual and philosophical traditions based on millennia of human experience.
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