Jonathan Portes: Scruton Is Part of an Intellectual Cultu...

Jonathan Portes: Scruton Is Part of an Intellectual Culture Giving Respectability to Racism: "Scruton's essay... is a defence, of sorts, of Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech. The direct political peg for Powell's speech was his opposition to the 1968 Race Relations Act, which outlawed direct discrimination in housing or employment, as exemplified by signs saying 'No blacks, no dogs, no Irish'.... Scruton's... final point... more extreme.... Immigrant integration... is logically impossible, even for the British-born children of immigrants. 'Like the White Queen in Through the Looking Glass, they [liberal politicians] practiced the art of believing six impossible propositions before breakfast, including the proposition that pious Muslims from the hinterlands of Asia would produce children loyal to a secular European state.'... Scruton's writings from the 2000s could have come straight from the BNP manifesto of the time, and legitimised those who made such claims...

#noted