The Incident at the Roger Scruton Foundation Conference

When Zoomers confronted the Old Guard on England's future

Earlier in the year, the Roger Scruton Foundation organised a conference that was attended by a variety of figures from right-wing and conservative circles. In attendance as speakers were Robert Jenrick, Rupert Lowe, Robert Tombs, Thomas Skinner and Danny Kruger. The audience featured Carl Benjamin and a collection of the “Based Zoomers” such as Connor Tomlinson and Charlie Downes, who are now becoming prominent features of the British right.

Many such conferences take place during the British summer now, some more public-facing than others. What marked out the Roger Scruton Foundation’s get-together, though, was the significant overlap between the younger, more edgy and online right and an older and more establishment Tory-leaning generation. The conference (which can be viewed in full here) went smoothly enough until the final segment when the audience were invited to ask questions. The questions were pointedly focused on identity, demographics, and what it means to be English in a multicultural Britain. Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad) pointed out that if anyone can claim to be English, then the authentic English could not claim to be threatened with becoming a minority in their own homeland.

Similarly, another question from a young man in the audience highlighted the futility of advocating local politics in an age of ethnic bloc voting in areas such as Rotherham. When panellist Robert Tombs responded by arguing that education, not ethnicity, is what matters, the contempt and weariness of the audience with such a tepid response are audible in the video. The dividing line is stark and clear. The younger generation of the British right wants answers from the mainstream British right to existential problems, in large part created by the mainstream British right, and they’re not getting them. However, the very fact that they’re present, suited up, and openly demanding such answers seems to rattle and scare the mainstream. And rightly.

The incident did not go unnoticed. An article appeared in The Spectator titled “Demographics is the new dividing line on the right” and more recently, Robert Tombs himself has responded with an article in The Telegraph called “Being English is not a matter of your ancestry” which is a more fleshed-out rebuttal of the remarks at the event.

What I find fascinating about all of this is that the emerging generation of young men on the British right often appears like an elite in-waiting. This, even though they’re intellectually aligned with more traditional, working-class nationalist movements. Suddenly, from the perspective of the Old Guard, the radical element is not wearing a bomber jacket outside a Greggs in Burnley, but right there in the conference room with a well-fitting suit and clipped “posh” accent.

In his Telegraph article, Tombs writes:

“You can’t teach someone to be English”, called a heckler at the end of a conference last month on How to Save England. “Of course you can,” I replied. “That’s how we all learn it.” “Rubbish,” he replied: for him, Englishness seemed to be (I couldn’t quite hear) about “ancestry”.

This brief debate was unfortunately stopped by the chair so that we could go to the pub. But the day’s discussion got huge numbers of viewers on YouTube, a longish report in The Spectator, and a rather overwrought follow-up article in The Critic magazine accusing me (along with other “self-identifying conservatives” such as Fraser Nelson and Niall Ferguson) of being a defender of multiculturalism, and by implication of mass migration.

The problem is that Nelson, Ferguson, and Robert Tombs are defenders of and advocates for multiculturalism. There’s hardly a single post on Nelson’s X timeline where he is not holding the line on behalf of mass immigration in one form or another. In a recent interview, Ferguson argued that Europe would die without African immigration. But the purpose of Tomb’s article is to respond to the points raised at the Scruton Foundation shindig, so he continues by invoking the Tory-whisperer-in-chief, Katharine Birbalsingh:

Frankly, I thought this was laughable, and have been joking with friends about being a Lefty. But in the present fraught climate, the issue needs to be addressed. I should explain that my intellectual sins had been to praise Katharine Birbalsingh (invariably though inadequately described as “Britain’s strictest headmistress”) and to have commented that to see little girls in headscarves reciting Kipling and singing the national anthem showed that “becoming English was possible”, on the condition that it was encouraged, taught, and indeed required.

By this criterion, my mother would not be English, but a ten-year-old girl from Somalia who had had lines from Kipling drummed into her would be. Yet the question that is never answered is, should we deport all the children and families of those who fail to meet the educational standards of the Birbalsingh model?

Tomb’s article is infused with a sense of urgency that would, perhaps, be lacking in a more left-leaning essay covering the same issues. He writes:

But the question of integration and eventual assimilation is no less urgent. There are now, and in the future will be, many children in England who were born elsewhere, or who are descended from a foreign-born parent. Many will have darker skin than mine. We have a very clear choice. Either we do everything possible to make them and their eventual descendants part of our nation. Or we treat them as perpetual outsiders, “ethnic minorities” in a tribalised England.

None of these arguments are new, and have been the centre ground of British politics for nigh-on thirty years, at least fourteen of which were under a Conservative government. Usually I’d make arguments rooted in the ethnic interests of the English people. However, let us consider what exactly is being touted here as the more “humane” course of action. The people we think of as “English” are simply expected to fritter themselves away in the bottomless oceans of the Third World. Indeed, this is insisted upon as part of the integration process.

Moreover, despite the lip-service paid to conservative bromides such as individualism and limited governance, when scaled up, the Birbalsingh model would amount to a colossal technocratic beast engaged in brainwashing up to 30-40% of the population, with that percentage increasing over time. The desired outcome, as stated by Tombs, is a process of replicating Englishness through social engineering. Leaving aside the obvious problem that such a scheme could simply be voted away, the final vainglorious cope for the centre-right is to create a vegi-burger incarnation of the English, a “Beyond English” identity akin to Quorn or Uncle Bill’s Franken sausages made out of 3-D printed slurry.

Fundamentally, the problem is that the entire multicultural enterprise is based on lies and coercion, and any corrective will by necessity appear authoritarian and unpleasant. Take, for example, the trend of inserting non-white people into historical roles or period dramas. Yes, that is a “woke” manoeuvre to unmoor the majority population from their rightful claim to their own history and identity, but it also serves to make newcomers feel “at home”. Presumably, under the Tombs/Birbalsingh scheme, the children of foreigners will be told that their ancestors are not represented in the Dickens and Shakespeare they’re being forced to learn by rote. In most cases, their connection to England does not even precede Tony Blair’s Millennium Dome or Coldplay’s Yellow being in the charts. None of this is anything more than a lazy attempt to peddle water and do nothing while Enoch’s funeral pyre grows ever larger.

It is complete nonsense.

It is not my purpose today to rehash all of the arguments against Civic Nationalism, but rather to engage in a rare bout of optimism. In a post last month, I wrote:

Race-thinking is thus an inevitability. The question then returns to the discourse surrounding the swiftly changing demographic situation in the UK, and the question must be addressed now, with all of its awkwardness and potential minefields, or it will take place later, when the situation and any remedies become even more draconian or unfeasible.

This, then, is what is beginning to take place - not on the streets with placards, not just in the pubs or online, but in person and straight to the faces of the right-wing establishment. What’s more, the editors and MPs, focus groups, and think-tanks are also aware that something has changed.

Demographics Discourse Heads for the Mainstream

The gates, finally, are being breached, and the keepers are going to have to adopt new tactics.

Tombs finishes his piece with:

England has long balanced change and continuity. But several times it has changed suddenly and uncontrollably. The Norman Conquest destroyed its society and eclipsed its culture. The Reformation overturned its beliefs. The Industrial Revolution made it a different place. We may be facing comparable transformation today. A future government – led by people with “a sense of gratitude” towards their home country – will need unprecedented means to bring us together. Ancestry is not enough.

To which I would say, on the contrary, ancestry, or rather kinship and ethnicity as the basis for forming bonds and brotherhood, is precisely why his convoluted technocracy of indoctrination will fail, whether by the hand of the immigrants or ourselves.

The demise of his worldview was staring him in the face in that conference room. If he can’t convince them, then he can’t convince anyone else.