Roger Scruton has been sacked after using 'white supremacist language' in a magazine interview
Roger Scruton, a right-wing philosopher, has lost his job as a government housing adviser due to a magazine interview he conducted with the New Statesman in which he appeared to repeat antisemitic, racist and Islamophobic statements.
In the interview, Scruton said that Islamophobia was "a propaganda word invented by the Muslim Brotherhood in order to stop discussion of a major issue".
He also said that "each Chinese person is a kind of replica of the next one", before going on to defend the anti-immigration stance of Hungarian President Victor Orban, saying Hungarians were "alarmed by the sudden invasion of huge tribes of Muslims from the Middle East".
Scruton, who has been a friend of Orbàn for more than 30 years, has denied that he is an antisemite or Islamophobe.
The government also faced calls to sack him from his role as Chairman of the 'Building Better Building Beautiful' Commission last year over previous remarks he made that critics believed were antisemitic, Islamophobic and homophobic.
A spokesman for the Ministry of Housing said: “Professor Sir Roger Scruton has been dismissed as chairman of the Building Better Building Beautiful Commission with immediate effect, following his unacceptable comments.”
Labour's Shadow Secretary for Women and Equalities, Dawn Butler, said the comments were "despicable and invoke the language of white supremacists" in today's issue of the New Statesman.
She added: “His claim that Islamophobia does not exist, a few weeks after the devastating attack in Christchurch, is extremely dangerous, and his defence of the prejudice stoked by Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary is appalling.”
