How to be a Conservative summary

How do you go from a lower-middle-class childhood in inner-city Manchester, to a salubrious career in national journalism, and a life-long support of conservatism? It’s not the most predictable of journeys. For the author, Roger Scruton, it began when he saw his father – a lifelong Labour voter – campaign against the suburban sprawl.

He’d always been a socialist; he believed that the working class had been enslaved by the aristocracy, and that it was necessary to wage a class war. But he also had a deep fondness for the English countryside, the country’s historical architecture, and the old ways of living and working. Modern housing – he thought – threatened all of that.

This side of his father’s character influenced Scruton’s thinking. He came to see that it was always better to conserve things, especially when the proposed alternatives were so much worse. 

The key message here is: Scruton grew up in a Labour-voting family, but twentieth-century events made him a conservative. 

The second factor that turned the author into a conservative was the May 1968 rioting in Paris. Scruton was in the French capital at the time of the protests. As he watched students smash shop windows and attack the police, he felt a surge of anger. In his view, these middle-class intellectuals were railing against the very society that allowed them their privileged lives.

Scruton’s conservatism grew even stronger after Margaret Thatcher became the British prime minister in 1979. The 1970s had been a period of decline in the UK. To Scruton, it seemed as if the country, especially its institutions and universities, had succumbed to a self-hating leftism; a philosophy that denigrated all the good things that Britain had achieved.

But, with Thatcher, the nation found a new confidence. She stood proudly for free enterprise and for freedom of the individual. While Scruton didn’t agree entirely with Thatcher’s rhetoric, he did sympathize with her basic philosophy: that people had to take responsibility for their own lives, rather than blindly trust the state.

The fourth influence over Scruton’s politics also came in 1979, when he visited what was then Communist Czechoslovakia. Scruton was there to give a talk; and when he examined his audience, he saw firsthand where the policies of radical leftism led.

There to listen to him were former lecturers, rabbis, novelists, and psychoanalysts. But now the Communist regime employed all these people as coal stokers. Each one of them had had their potential snuffed out by authoritarians who sought to control all aspects of human life.

From that moment on, Scruton was firmly committed to the cause of freedom – something, he believed, that was worth conserving at any cost.