Roger Scruton, Experiencing the Sublime in Hull. Founding editor of the Salisbury Review, established in 1982 to defend a traditional conservatism that many felt was being eroded by the Thatcherite revolution. The Salisbury Review is remembered largely for the Ray Honeyford affair, in which the Bradford headmaster was forced to resign after a furore over a 1984 article ‘critical of multiculturalism’ by promoting a eugenicist turn in traditional conservative circles. A soiled copy is lodged in the midsection of the mannequin version shown here at CLASSWAROOM. Honeyford’s polemic was, however, bland by the standards of the Review in the 80s. The first issue published a talk by John Casey on the politics of race. The presence of ‘West Indian communities’, he claimed, ‘offends… a sense of what English life should be like’ and ‘a sense of what is civilised behaviour’. Only the ‘repatriation of a proportion of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population’ could forestall ‘the possible destruction of civilised life in the centres of the big cities’. If race was one obsession, sex was another, especially gay sex. ‘A concern with social order’, Scruton wrote in an editorial, ‘prompts us to view… homosexuality as intrinsically threatening.’ Scruton was a Neo-Burkean, wherein the ideal society was built not on values such as liberty or equality but on obedience, ‘the prime virtue of political beings, the disposition that makes it possible to govern them. In the good society one accepted one’s station in life.’ No surprise. Fastforward 20 odd years and IDS’ Damascus moment in Gallowsgate founded the Centre for Social Justice in 2005. The Think tank has many links the the British Relgious Right, with Phillipa Shroud (Executive Director of CSJ & Special Adviser IDS’ DWP from 2010-2015) who is married no less to David Stroud, leader in the Newfrontiers Church. Today's £7 million from Somerset CapitalMike Royal. Mike Kelly. Shaun Bailey White saviourism - development & missionary work reaching the unsaved,,charities named after the evangelical Christian, William Wilberforce. I had Scruton Experiencing the Sublime in Hull like his favourite poet Larkin…possibly leaking out the invective poem he hid from public eye:
I want to see them starving,
The so-called working class.
Their wages weekly halving,
Their women stewing grass.
When I drive out each morning
In one of my new suits
I want to find them fawning
To clean my car and boots.
