The young Turks who lead Britain’s New Right

Press, 31 January 1986, Page 17

The young Turks who lead Britain’s New Right

By

ROBERT CHESSHYRE,

of the

London “Observer”

j When one considers the mess — economic and political — Britain has succeeded in making of itself in the post-war years, Professor Roger Scruton, guru of flie. New Rightists who claim to have captured the intellectual high ground of British public life, has a strange ambition for the nation. £ It is that, once the body politic is safely purged of what he sees as the unconstitutional poisons of the Left, government should be returned to the hands of “bumblers, and utterly inactive, incompetent politicians ...a leisured class of inept people.” At that point, Scruton and his fellow radical Right philosophers could "go back to our desks, reading, writing, and listening to music.” Since he had just said that the media was in the hands of the semi-educated, I kept my peace. It seemed a curious inconsistency for a professor of aesthetics (and therefore logic) to wish to entrust the helm once again to the likes of those who first steeratfthe ship pt state into the ’dangerous

waters where Britain now wallows. However eccentric some Scruton ideas may seem there is no doubt that the Right is riding high. We live in red-blooded times, the era of deregulation, tax cuts (if.we had the money), and privatisation of the Welfare State. Scruton — “there is a barrier between the educated and the semi-educated who have a greater resistance to the truth than the uneducated” — is an elitist. Britain’s problems stem from an “intellectual coarseness ...residual radical nonsense from the 19605,” which created the “soft revolution, Leftism, and all the illusions that came with them.” I had gone to see Scruton, and later a number of like-minded New Right young Turks, after discovering the gentlemanly liberal Left to be in disarray. The latter fear they are being displaced as Britain’s political establishment by people they see as ideologues seUon creating a Zeitgeist that win ensure Rightist government until the end of

the century. Routed over Britain’s membership of U.N.E;S.C.O., the old guard’s selfconfidence is in shreds, and they contemplate the New Right with something of the wary alarm of a cornered snake eyeing a mongoose. Scruton, aged 41, is the philoso-pher-king of the young Turks. As well as being a professor of Birbeck College, London, he writes polemical pamphlets, a weekly iconoclastic column in “The Times” — 12 days ago he characterised Nelson Mandela as a man stained by “an ignoble pride” — and edits the “Salisbury Review.”

By Scruton’s own cheerful admission, the “Review” is Britain’s “most widely unread journal,” selling 1000 copies quarterly, yet it has become the seedbed for incipient Rightist causes. It was in its columns that the Bradford headmaster, Ray Honeyford, first put down his thoughts on “antiracism” education, and lit the fire that eventually consumed his career.

“Why,” I asked Scj&ton, when we met in his book-lined study in

a Notting Hill Gate flat, “the Salisbury review?” “Because,” replied the editorfounder, “Lord Salisbury was Prime Minister for so long, and so little was known about him. That must be good.” (It is for similar reasons of hostility to activist government that Ronald Reagan has Calvin Coolidge’s portrait in the White House Cabinet room. When Coolidge died, Dorothy Parker asked: “How could they tell?”) The character of the “Review” can be caught from this quotation from its most recent editorial. Thatcherism is “The purging of the New Corruption, the rot of accumulated privilege that has grown in the labyrinthine channels of the Welfare State. Thatcherism constitutes a reac- ■-

tion to the political power of the parasite, and is guided by no moral principle beside the abstract law of personal responsibility.”

A correction is labelled “erratum,” and Tory MPs do not represent constituencies, but rather “sit in the Conservative interests.” The third Marquess of Salisbury, whose rather wistful, bearded portrait appears on the front cover,, would have felt at home with the style, even if the contents might have proved a little daunting. At first Scruton was modest about the “Review’s” political significance, saying: “Our influence depends entirely on the fact that people believe we have influence.” Later, he described the “Review” as the “top of the system — a small circulation magazine which may eventually change the language of millions.” That, rather than seizing control of the Conservative Party, is the task he has set himself. “Socialism,” he says, “is a permanent temptation of the human spirit it is wrong but must be accommodated. It needs

a legitimate form that avoids revolutionary hatred.” And he mourned for the “old” Labour Party. This tender concern with _ the health of a “responsible” Opposition was shared by a New Rightist of a different stamp. Dr Julian Lewis, who describes himself as an activist, runs the Coalition for Peace through Security, a coun-ter-propaganda organisation, frequently branded on the Left as McCarthyite.

Lewis,'aged 34, sat beneath a photograph of the 1917 Imperial War Cabinet, and spoke with a speed and determination that made asking questions rather like trying to cross London’s South Circular in a rush hour. His selfappointed mission is to expose Soviet propaganda fronts, and to reveal leaders of such organisations as C.N.D. in what he perceives to be their true colours. He says that his tactics are to adopt Leftist methods and to be “as committed as they are.” He sees the unilateralists of today as .. the direct descendants of the jappeasers of the 19305. “Joe McCarthy has a lot to answer for,

giving anti-communism a bad name.”

Madsen Pirie, like many of the New Right, is an unabashed admirer of the United States. He directs the Adam Smith Institute, and would, one feels, privatise the monarchy if he could.

He discovered as a very young man in America that other countries had solutions to what the British considered to be intractable problems. The institute seeks to offer the nation a la carte free enterprise in place of table d’hote big government. Pirie wants to dismantle the “cosy clubs” — in banking, the city, the law —

scrap licensing hours, and allow Sunday shopping.

Gerald Frost speaks carefully. The Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies, which he directs, is a charity precluded from lobbying. But, founded by money from the Heritage Foundation from which it still draws support, it was set up to provide background and analysis that would inject “Western valuaftinto international affairs.” The’LE.D.S.S. supplies.speakers

for TV and rhdio on request, produces lively press releases which get its work noticed, but Frost argues that the Left “attribute to us powers that alas we do not have.” He spoke of a “loose conservative network,” and indeed there appear to be connections between each of the four men I saw — and of course between them and many others. Scruton dates the networking to the period when the peace movement was trying to prevent the deployment of United States cruise missiles. Did Scruton have an inside track to the Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher, as alleged by some of his political opponents? “I have no contacts with her.” Is there a hit list of other United Nations agencies, such as the World Health Organisation, that the New Right wants to see Britain quit? W.H.0., he says, is needed to co-ordinate international action against A.1.D.5., which must be defeated, or humanity will be extinct within two generations. It may be a race, it seems, betweeskthe twin perils: A.1.D% and the'llussians.