UK: Allegedly Conservative government fires conservative Academic Sir Roger Scruton over frank speech

Conservative academic Sir Roger Scruton has been sacked as head of a government housing body following comments about Islam, China and George Soros.

The philosopher was appointed as the unpaid chair of the Building Beautiful architecture Commission in November.

He has now been dismissed after claiming Islamophobia was "a propaganda word" and "each Chinese person is a kind of replica of the next one".

Downing Street said the comments were "deeply offensive".

Sir Roger's appointment to head the new body was criticised at the time by Labour, who said his past comments on race and sexuality made him unsuitable to hold the post.

The author has now left his position "with immediate effect" after an interview with the New Statesman in which he questioned the definition of Islamophobia and speculated on the influence of Jewish financier, philanthropist and liberal political activist George Soros in his native Hungary.

He said he stood by comments he has made in the past that Islamophobia was a "propaganda word invented by the Muslim Brotherhood in order to stop discussion of a major issue".

He said "anybody who doesn't think that there's a Soros empire in Hungary has not observed the facts" - a statement that critics have condemned as a conspiracy theory and an anti-Semitic trope.

In a wide-ranging interview, he also said the Communist regime in China was "creating robots out of their own people" which he said was a "frightening thing".

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More details here on what Scruton actually said