IT is now exactly five years since the death of the English writer and philosopher, Roger Scruton. Whilst he was clearly no Anarchist, his Thinkers of the New Left (1985) certainly made some crucial observations about the authoritarian nature of those who have tried to ingratiate themselves with the youth element from the 1960s onwards. He said some very good things about the decline of aesthetics, too, and in that respect was greatly influenced by the likes of John Ruskin, T.S. Eliot and others.

On the other hand, many of those who contributed to his Salisbury Review were pretty awful and these included the likes of Margaret Thatcher and Enoch Powell. The problem, from my perspective, was his mistaken belief that cultural conservatism can in any way be related to political conservatism. To ignore the fundamentally economic designs of Conservative politicians, for example, is to ignore the threat they pose to some of the things Scruton loved most: art, music and England itself. I had better elaborate – possibly to Scruton’s great annoyance – how some of his observations can be related to National-Anarchism. By ‘cultural conservatism,’ I mean the kind of values that we may also wish to retain in our decentralised communities. Take this well-known Scrutonian quote, for example:

“I suddenly realized I was on the other side. What I saw was an unruly mob of self-indulgent middle-class hooligans. When I asked my friends what they wanted, what were they trying to achieve, all I got back was this ludicrous Marxist gobbledegook. I was disgusted by it, and thought there must be a way back to the defence of western civilization against these things. That’s when I became a conservative. I knew I wanted to conserve things rather than pull them down.”

I think it’s perfectly acceptable for people to wish to ‘conserve’ their own local customs and traditions, be it one-legged morris dancing or synchronised hedge-trimming, but unlike Scruton we do not wish to retain the existing authoritarian structures that frame such ‘conservatism’ within the boundaries of parliamentary politics or the endless misdeeds of Conservatives themselves. Some of us may wish to remove, even destroy, those things which threaten our way of life, but unlike the Marxists that Scruton loathed so much we do not wish to eradicate everything for the sake of it and there is much of culture that is worth saving.