Roger Scruton’s The Disappeared, Revisited

DANIEL J. MAHONEY JANUARY 22, 2025

“It was inconceivable that in a town dedicated to prosperity, comfort and English order, a girl might simply disappear, smuggled into slavery under far distant skies. But the inconceivable would not be noticed when it finally occurred.”—Roger Scruton, The Disappeared

The late Roger Scruton’s prescience (he died five years ago this month) becomes more apparent with each passing year. Thirty or forty years before others began to come to terms with the cultural rot eating away at Western societies, Scruton took aim at a “culture of repudiation” that left the democracies spiritually gutted and at war with the civilizational inheritance that had been nobly, if imperfectly, passed on to us by our forebears. The English philosopher and man of letters dared to criticize multicultural pieties and to express gratitude for a free and decent way of life under threat from “armed doctrine” abroad (in Burke’s inimitable phrase) and the proponents of oikophobia or self-loathing at home. In the superb 2014 novel Notes from Underground, he exposed the duplicities, betrayals, and moral compromises that defined everyday life even among the small band of independent thinkers who refused to capitulate to ideological mendacity in a Czechoslovakia still under communist captivity. At the same time, he gave anti-totalitarian moral heroism its full due. 

But as Scruton’s 2015 novel The Disappeared made equally clear, ideological mendacity was alive and well in the West, too, with thousands of spiritual and physical casualties strewn along the path taken by his native Britain’s smug and oh-so-dogmatic multiculturalist and “anti-racist” elite. Long before Elon Musk reminded the world of the semi-cover-up of Britain’s mainly Pakistani and East Asian “grooming gangs,” who specialized in rape and abduction over a thirty-five-year period, Scruton had highlighted the foul deeds and insidious spiritual corruption that coursed through a society where the old verities had largely “disappeared.” Under the new dispensation of obligatory self-flagellation, the old Britain was said to be “racist” to the core and thus needed to be rebuilt on wholly new foundations.

Set in the fictional Yorkshire city of Whinmoore, and based to a large extent on the damning revelations contained in the official Jay Report about more than 1,400 victims of sexual child abuse in the city of Rotherham alone (with no doubt thousands of others elsewhere), The Disappeared exposes how the “thought police” had indeed found a home in police and social work departments. These departments habitually ignored credible reports of rape, abduction, cruelty, and torture for fear of appearing “racist” and “Islamophobic.” The most self-serving self-deception is the norm, and a fog of mendacity hangs over official responses to the most hideous crimes if the evidence is not in full public view. Official solicitude for the weak and exploited (mainly “at risk” lower-class white British girls) is practically non-existent, although a social worker named Iona Ferguson ends up seeing beyond her own ideological blinders and playing an essential role in resolving the worst of the cases.

Two young women face the worst depredations, from rape and abduction to sex slavery: Sharon Williams, a bright and spiritually sensitive sixteen-year-old high school student, and Laura Markham, a talented young professional who works for an environmental firm (all the rage among young, educated, “idealistic” but de-Christianized British twenty-somethings). Williams, who lives in horrendous public housing (“Angel Towers”), is brutalized by her foster mother’s live-in Polish “boyfriend” and two young Afghani thugs.

Stephen Haycraft, a gifted teacher of literature at St. Catherine’s Academy, sees palpable signs of abuse written all over Sharon’s wounded but profound reflections on Shakespeare’s Tempest. He loves classic literature but finds the proletarianized students he is paid to instruct to be beyond literary instruction or a modicum of spiritual elevation (with the exception of Sharon). The academy is a modern wasteland, under constant pressure from Islamic militants like the Shahin family, who defend Islamic purity, see Islamophobia everywhere, and yet treat women like things, “bitches” to be slapped, raped, and brutalized. 

Stephen is a product of his time, raised by atheist parents. Yet he is aware that something terrible was lost when the Christian inheritance of Britain was thrown aside. He befriends the Kassab family, Iraqi exiles from Basra who love the Sufi poet Rumi, see beyond a fundamentalist reading of the Koran, and welcome fellowship with Christians. The Shahins and the Kassabs represent two manifestations of Islam in a multiculturalist Britain, one decent and humane, the other hate-filled and at war with the generous society that has given them refuge.

Stephen comes to Sharon’s defense, giving her refuge when all the civil authorities have so miserably failed her. For this, he suffers like a modern-age Job: He is arrested and convicted for child abduction. Even though the evidence shows he had had no sexual relations with Sharon, he is imprisoned with sex offenders. 

Laura is accidentally abducted instead of Sharon and sexually brutalized on a ship destined for Kaliningrad. She manages to escape after wounding one of her attackers. Laura, Justin Fellowes (her boss at the environmental firm), and Iona manage to tie Sharon and Lauren’s cases together and overpower the fatal indifference of the police and social services. The two women begin to heal with each other’s help. Christian forgiveness, never separated from a righteous search for secular justice, plays a key role in finding a place for hope and renewal in their wounded souls. 

Justin, like Stephen, comes to see beyond the empty pieties—the lies—of his time. He no longer yearns for a Britain that aims to be nothing—“carbon neutral, nation neutral, religion neutral,” as he puts it. He comes to see that his “real battles were with himself. He fought against the soft and indiscriminate compassion through which he kept all commitments at bay.” Words of wisdom for believers and unbelievers alike today who largely confuse virtue—and the life of the soul—with vague and empty affirmations about compassion, multiculturalism, and humanitarianism. 

And the official lies will no longer do. Iona recognizes that what matters is not some blind commitment to ideological abstractions, but a genuine commitment to come to the rescue of young women like Sharon under assault from the darkest of forces. Human beings must come before the lies inherent in ideological platitudes and abstractions. Whether in the East or West, we must “live not by lies.” 

What precisely disappears in The Disappeared? Put simply: almost everything. Young women and their dignity and honor (although Laura and Sharon, despite everything, embody honor and dignity of the most admirable kind); the self-respect of a social order once devoted to high moral standards; civil authorities who defend the weak and threaten evil, and who put truth above reassuring falsehoods; and a Christian religion that, as Stephen recognizes, once gave spiritual strength and cultural self-confidence to an older England. But as the characters go on to demonstrate, it need not be lost for good.

Scruton does not write to merely lament or even to expose terrible new injustices. He instead calls us to take care, once again, of our individual and collective souls. One cannot do that if one continues to denounce these crimes that cry out to heaven as preoccupations of the “far right” alone, as Prime Minister Keir Starmer shamelessly continues to do. He insists that there will be no national investigation of this issue. His is just one more defensive affirmation of ideological lies that refuse to give way to righteous justice and to healing truth.