The Roger Scruton row brings shame on the Tories

A friend of mine – another twenty-one year old – has resigned his membership of the Conservative party this morning over a single issue. It’s not Brexit; it is the comments made by Conservative MPs James Brokenshire, Tom Tugendhat, and Johnny Mercer about the sacking of Roger Scruton from his unpaid government advisory role following an interview he gave to the New Statesman. In a week where Conservatives have spouted platitudes about appealing to young voters, they are putting off young people by pandering to the lynch-mob mentality that has been nurtured on university campuses and Twitter, and promoted by the luminaries of the Labour party.

It is particularly disappointing to see Tugendhat and Mercer, two promising young Conservative MPs, rushing to judgement on Roger Scruton just a few hours after George Eaton, the journalist who conducted the interview, tweeted selected excerpts about Hungarian Jews and the Chinese. Tom Tugendhat initially told BuzzFeed that:

“Anti-Semitism sits alongside racism, anti-Islam, homophobia, and sexism as a cretinous and divisive belief that has no place in our public life and particularly not in government.”