Wednesday, June 23, 2021

The Level of Public Debate

"The conflicts in which I became involved over the ensuing years, brought home to me just how low the level of public debate had sunk in Britain. On the left there seemed to be no response to the enormous changes introduced by mass immigration except to describe everyone who attempted to discuss the matter as a 'racist'. This crime resembled the crime of being an émigré in Revolutionary France, or a bourgeois in Lenin's Russia: the accusation was proof of guilt. And yet nobody ever told us what the crime consisted in. I was reminded of Defoe's comment, at the time of the Popery Act of 1698, that 'the streets of London are full of stout fellows prepared to fight to the death against Popery, without knowing whether it be a man or a horse'."

- Roger Scruton in How to be a Conservative

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