In the autumn of 2025, as the leaves turn a desultory brown and the nation's soul follows suit, a modest tweet from one Henry George—@intothefuture45—a writer who appears in all the right places like UnHerd and The Critic, but who, one suspects, still dreams of a world where opinions don't require trigger warnings—has rippled across the digital pond like a stone thrown by a disgruntled Burkean. The tweet in question unearths a 1997 essay by Roger Scruton, that most unflappable of English conservatives, penned in the pages of The Salisbury Review under the title "The Blair Legacy."
It is, as George notes with admirable understatement, 'pretty astonishing' in its prescience. Scruton, gazing into the crystal ball of Tony Blair's impending triumph, foresaw not just the rain but the flood: a Britain reshaped not by prudence or tradition, but by the relentless drip-drip of political correctness, American imports, and the sort of egalitarian zeal that turns high culture into a therapy session for the aggrieved. One might forgive the casual observer for missing this gem amid the ceaseless scroll of X's outrage bazaar. After all, Scruton himself has been posthumously repackaged since his death in 2020, transformed from a thorn in the side of progressive pieties into a sort of Paddington Bear of conservatism—cuddly, marmalade-smeared, and utterly non-threatening. His robust views on immigration, the nation-state, and the unapologetic Englishness of the English have been quietly filed under 'problematic,' lest they offend the delicate sensibilities of those who believe history began with the Human Rights Act.
George quotes his own earlier musing on the matter: Scruton, once a forthright critic, now "turned into a cuddly, safe and non-threatening purveyor of post-liberalism," his sharper edges sanded down by the very cultural machinery he predicted. It's a lament that echoes through the thread's replies, where users marvel at the essay's foresight like archaeologists unearthing a lost prophecy. "Stupendous," tweets Ike Ijeh. "He was right about everything apart from Jews being included in the privileged minority-victim class," adds Hexagram with a dash of dark irony. And Peter McLoughlin reminds us that Scruton wasn't just a armchair oracle; he smuggled ideas into Communist Eastern Europe and ghost-wrote for dissidents under his editorship of The Salisbury Review. In short, the man was no stranger to rocking boats, even as the waters rose.
But let us turn to the essay itself, those three grainy screenshots that George has so thoughtfully exhumed, like a conservator restoring a faded fresco. Scruton writes with the calm precision of a man who knows the deluge is coming but refuses to build an ark of hysteria. "And this will be the most important effect of Mr Blair in power: the triumph of political correctness," he declares, before unleashing a cascade of predictions that read less like speculation and more like a dispatch from 2025 itself. Policies, he warns, will be chosen not for their prudence or necessity, but to advance "the culture of equality and inclusion, the culture of our universities, which is now about to break out into the world of real decision-making." Affirmative action? Inevitable, laced with the American feminist conception of women, of the family and of employment. Lawsuits for sexual and racial discrimination? They'll proliferate like rabbits in a subsidy scheme, with 'victim status' becoming the most coveted accessory since the Filofax. By the end of Blair's tenure, "everyone in Britain will be a victim, apart from the minority of hard-working, over-taxed, middle-class males who bear the cost of the remainder."
Oh, how the sarcasm bites here, dry as a G&T at closing time. Scruton, ever the aesthete, doesn't rage; he dissects with the scalpel of wit. One can almost hear him chuckling over his pipe as he envisions the traditional family crumbling under the weight of its own benevolence: in vitro fertilization on the NHS, with "preference given to lesbians"; family ties "increasingly penalised by the tax system"; and the school curriculum monopolised by "pseudo-subjects like media studies, communication studies, social studies, sports studies, women's studies, race and gender studies." Modular assessments will supplant final exams, single-subject degrees will vanish into the ether, and the tutorial system— that noble Oxbridge relic— will be abolished in favour of lowering entry standards for comprehensives while raising them for public schools, all to prove one's correctness. It's a vision of academia not as a forge for minds, but as a creche for credentials, where the only sin is excellence unapologetic.
And the culture? Ah, the culture— that fragile edifice Scruton loved like a wayward child. Honours will go to pop stars and "cultural postmodernists," the BBC surrendered to "egalitarian propaganda," high-brow and low-brow distinctions abandoned as the salon socialist establishment consolidates in every major institution. The Royal Academy remains in modernist hands, art galleries run by clones of Michael Craig-Martin and Damien Hirst (one shudders at the pickled thought), the British Academy controlled by left-liberal protégés of Isaiah Berlin. Vice-chancellors? Dull progressives from engineering or soil science, their advisory bodies stuffed with anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-nuclear activists. The ideology of equality will supplant reward and duty; European courts will extinguish individual responsibility in favour of group rights, enforced with privileges denied to any ethnic Anglo-Saxon. Titles vanish, subjects become 'citizens,' and no name but the first will be used in public discourse.
Scruton saves his sharpest barb for the educational apocalypse: culture and education increasingly "regarded as dangerous," with efforts to ensure the genuinely educated never teach. As national affairs are transferred to foreign bureaucrats, fewer Brits will read or speak any language but their own, imperfect grammar acquiring the status of "legitimate alternatives." Sexual laxity becomes official policy— condoms and abortions free to children at any age, sex advisers prowling schools to destroy innocence, new ethics codes privileging no marriage or heterosexual union over "equally legitimate alternatives." Young offenders? Placed in the hands of leftist probation officers who'll help them back on their feet and into the pockets of middle-class victims, while joyriding is legitimised as "authentic expression of the frustrations of the young."
Prophetic? One might say so, if one were inclined to understatement. Consider the evidence, sifted from the sands of surveys and statutes like a latter-day Schliemann unearthing Tory Troy. Scruton's forewarning of identity politics' rise and traditional values' decline finds grim corroboration in the British Social Attitudes survey, where over the decades since 1997, the proportion viewing birth or ancestry as essential to "truly British" identity has steadily eroded, a decline accelerated in the last decade alone as national pride frays like an over-washed Union Jack. It's not quite the 20% plunge one might poetically posit, but the trajectory is inexorable: from robust self-conception to a watery cosmopolitanism where 'British' means little more than queueing politely for halal coffee.
His critique of individual responsibility yielding to group rights? It aligns neatly with the explosion in discrimination litigation, claims registered at employment tribunals surging from a trickle in the late 1990s to over 34,000 by 2012/13 alone, a testament to victimhood's allure in a legal landscape ever more attuned to collective grievance. Hard-working middle-class males, take a bow: you're still footing the bill, though now with added paperwork from the Equality and Human Rights Commission. And that insidious American liberalism seeping across the Atlantic? Scruton's warning rings truer than a Trump tweet. Post-1997, New Labour's cultural policies— neo-liberal in thrust, egalitarian in veneer— mirrored U.S. progressive trends with alarming fidelity, from equity frameworks in arts funding to the importation of cultural democracy laced with affirmative orthodoxies. Sixty percent? Perhaps a touch hyperbolic, but the echo is unmistakable: Blair's "Cool Britannia" was less a reinvention than a Yank-inflected remix, turning the BBC from Reithian beacon to Oprah's outpost, and universities from Humboldtian groves to grievance seminars.
One reads this in 2025, five years after Scruton's passing, and the heart— that stubborn English organ— aches with a sarcasm too bitter for tears. Here was a man who saw the script before the cameras rolled: the victim Olympics, the rainbow curricula, the endless lawsuits like confetti at a grievance wedding. He lamented not with the shrillness of a tabloid hack, but with the quiet despair of one who loved his country enough to mourn its self-sabotage. Since his death, the void has filled with echoes— podcasters aping his erudition without his elegance, Twitter sages firing salvos sans his subtlety. Common sense? It's been rebranded as "hate speech," and the voices that might reclaim it are drowned in the deluge he predicted.
Imagine Scruton now, pipe in hand, surveying the scene from some Elysian porch: the King (no longer "Your Majesty," perhaps just "Charles" to avoid hierarchy) knighting influencers; Oxford tutorials replaced by TikTok tutorials; joyriders not in the dock but on diversity panels, explaining their "lived experience." He'd sigh, that dry, sardonic sigh, and murmur something about the folly of mistaking inclusion for immortality. "They thought equality meant levelling up," he'd say, "but it's just levelling down— to the lowest common denominator, with mandatory pronouns." And we'd laugh, because what else is there? But beneath the wit, the lament: for a Britain that once knew its worth, and for the lost voice that reminded us.
In the end, Scruton's essay isn't just prophecy; it's obit. For the England he cherished— stoic, sceptical, unbowed by fads— Blair's legacy was the beginning of the end, a slow submersion in the tide of therapeutic tyranny. We, the over-taxed remnants, bob along, clutching our victim cards like life-rafts. If only he'd lived to see it all, to skewer it one last time with that inimitable Scrutonian bite, for who else could make the apocalypse sound like afternoon tea? Alas, the teapot's cold, the cake's gone stale, and the common sense he embodied is as rare as a straight answer from Kier Starmer. God rest his prophetic soul; may we yet salvage our nation from the wreckage he so presciently mapped.