Principles And Perseverance In Roger Scruton

British conservatism in the shadow of Blair’s revolution: the enduring witness of Sir Roger Scruton and The Salisbury Review.

Lars Møller | July 25, 2026

From Wikimedia Commons: Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, birthplace, primary home and lifelong estate of Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (Francis Orpen Morris, 1880)

The premiership of Tony Blair (1997–2007) marked a watershed in British political and cultural life. What presented itself as pragmatic modernization was, in reality, an institutional revolution: the entrenchment of supranational legal norms, the aggressive promotion of multiculturalism as state ideology, the reshaping of education and public institutions around egalitarian and diversity imperatives, and the acceleration of demographic transformation through historically unprecedented levels of immigration. Britain’s population changed rapidly in both scale and composition, with profound consequences for social cohesion, cultural continuity, and the lived experience of national identity. In this environment, traditional conservatism found itself marginalized—squeezed between the managerial liberalism of New Labour and the market fundamentalism that had dominated the preceding Conservative administration.

Into this ideological fray, Sir Roger Scruton and The Salisbury Review, which he founded in 1982, introduced a philosophically grounded, culturally attuned conservatism. Far from the thin gruel of neoliberalism, he championed a “rich” conservatism rooted in tradition, place, beauty, and organic social bonds. His was a lonely, heroic intellectual stand.

Persecuted, vilified, and professionally harassed by the left until his death in 2020, Scruton exemplified a courage that few public intellectuals on either side of the Atlantic have matched. Supporting dissidents behind the Iron Curtain while facing domestic character assassination, he stood as a bulwark against the dissolution of British nationhood. In the light of subsequent developments, however, his legacy appears less as a triumphant counter-revolution than as a noble, perhaps quixotic, act of cultural preservation amid inexorable decline.

Scruton’s founding of The Salisbury Review was an explicit rejection of the narrow economism that characterized much of Thatcherite thought. While Margaret Thatcher’s government rightly confronted union power and inflationary socialism, its philosophical undercarriage reduced society to atomized individuals and market transactions. By contrast, Scruton, drawing on Hegel, Burke, and the English conservative tradition, insisted that a viable conservatism must defend the “little platoons” of family, locality, church, and........

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