The Continued Rise of Red Toryism

[Sheilbh]

CANADIANS OUT!

Profile: Phillip Blond

Jonathan Derbyshire

His "Red Tory" thesis is attracting support from left and right, and the man emerging as the Conservatives' philosopher-king is a grave threat to Labour.

Phillip Blond is sitting in his London office. "I think mine is a genuinely radical project," he says. "Lots of people on the left have said to me that if the Tories do what I'm telling them to, they'll vote for them."

He is talking about the Progressive Conservatism Project, which he runs at the think tank Demos. Launched late last month at an event addressed by David Cameron, Blond's new venture has attracted an extraordinary level of interest from across the political spectrum. He ascribes this to the moment we are living through.

"It's very clear we're in the middle of a paradigm shift," he says. "We are witnessing the end of the neoliberal project - just as 30 years ago we saw the end of Keynesianism. We're in a shift of comparable proportions. The interesting question is what comes next."

In an essay this month for Prospect magazine, "Rise of the Red Tories", Blond argues that what ought to come next is something he calls communitarian civic conservatism - or "Red Toryism". "The current political consensus", he writes, is "left-liberal in culture and right-liberal in econo­mics. And this is precisely the wrong place to be."

However, Blond thinks that Cameron and the Tories are beginning to see their way beyond the impasse. They are right, he says: we do live in a broken society. But it wasn't only the dead hand of the welfare state that caused the bonds and attachments of civil association (the "old mutualism of the working class" and so on) to give way; late-modern capitalism's "perennial gale of creative destruction" (to use Joseph Schumpeter's phrase) has played its part, too.

So far, Cameron's "progressive conservatism", with its emphasis on social and welfare reform, has told only half of this story. Indeed, as Will Hutton pointed out at the Demos launch, the idea was "built on the prosperity of the past decade", and that prosperity has now come to an abrupt end. The language of decentralisation, mutualism and voluntary association may be socially compelling, Hutton went on, but it is economically vacuous.

Blond's Red Tory thesis is that the Conservatives can, and should, meet this challenge. They need to recognise that neoliberalism, or "free-market fundamentalism", has created "private-sector monopolies" (high-street behemoths such as Tesco) that are every bit as corrosive of the "intermediary structures of a civilised life" as the state monopolies of the old, Keynesian dispensation. Blond calls for a "new communitarian settlement", involving what he terms the "relocalisation of the economy" and the "recapitalisation of the poor". To this end, he recommends, among other policy measures, an extension of the Post Office's retail banking function and the establishment of local investment trusts that would offer finance to people without assets.

Presumably this commitment to wider distribution of assets is the kind of thing that Blond's friends on the left have found attractive. Yet, as Sunder Katwala, general secretary of the Fabian Society, has noted, what is intriguing about Cameron's "patronage" of Blond's project is that a "Red Tory revolution would certainly need much blue blood to be spilled" - and it is not obvious that the Tory leader has the stamina for such a fight inside his own party. (One Conservative backbencher's promotion this month of a bill that would allow the minimum wage to people willing to work for less suggests that the battle would indeed be bloody.) Certainly, when Cameron spoke at the Progressive Conservatism launch, he preferred to repeat his party's talking points about "Labour's debt crisis", rather than draw any more far-reaching conclusions from the financial meltdown.

Blond rejects the terms of Katwala's analysis, however, when I put it to him. For one thing, Cameron is not his "patron": "I'm an independent academic at an independent think tank." Demos is, notionally at least, a left-of-centre operation and Blond is not a product of the Conservative research Establishment. Until recently, he was a lecturer in theology at the University of Cumbria. Of Demos, he says: "I wanted to put myself in an environment that was critical of my ideas. I wanted to put myself in a genuinely creative environment. And I am thoroughly independent: I've been careful to maintain that." (Later, however, Blond says he is "quite well connected with the Tory agenda", and describes how he was contacted last year by someone at the Conservative Party's policy unit after he had an article published in the Guardian.)

In any case, he thinks the left has got Cameron wrong. "I think he is in deadly earnest. And I don't think it's cover for another agenda. The left wants to believe it's Thatcherism Mark II, but it isn't. The left is still far too mired in the old politics, and it's the right who are making the running. The reason my article has had such an effect is that no one can doubt it's progressive. And I believe that Cameron is committed to it." He points to the Conservative leader's speech at Davos last month, in which he repudiated the "old economic orthodoxy" and argued for a "popular capitalism", or "capitalism with a conscience", to replace "markets without morality".

One left-of-centre politician who does take Cameron and Blond seriously is Jon Cruddas, the MP for Dagenham, and another speaker at Blond's coronation last month as the Conservative Party's philosopher-king. "We, Labour, ignore Blond's work at our peril," Cruddas says. "There's a fault line running through the history of conservatism, between liberal-economic conservatism and a richer, more paternalistic tradition. Phillip's trying to rehabilitate the second one. What it does is allow the Conservatives to use a different language, a discourse about our obligations to others that is much richer than the Thatcherite brutality built around a notion of atomised economic exchange."

Blond saw Thatcherite "brutality" close up. He was born 42 years ago in Liverpool into a large working-class family. His experience of growing up in the city as it was being ravaged, first by recession and then by deindustrialisation, has clearly shaped his politics, giving it an elegiac, nostalgic tone. "I lived in the city when it was being eviscerated," he says. "It was a beautiful city, one of the few in Britain to have a genuinely indigenous culture. And that whole way of life was destroyed."

He left Liverpool to go to Hull University, and then moved to Warwick to study for a Master's degree in Continental philosophy. One of his contemporaries there remembers him announcing himself as a "Catholic socialist", though Blond disputes that.

"I'm not a socialist and I'm an Anglican. But I have always been interested in Catholic social thought, which always made the argument that capitalism and communism are species of the same thing. Both are forms of disempowerment. But I also think that's a Tory insight."

A central feature of his Toryism is a critique of "liberalism", a term capacious enough in his hands to apply to the cultural libertarianism of the 1960s as well as to the great philosophers of the liberal tradition, such as Locke or Mill. According to Blond, what the post-1968 "politics of desire" shares with those liberal titans, and in fact also with the Thatcherite or neoliberal model of rational economic behaviour, is a certain idea of individual human beings.

In the liberal view, at least as Blond characterises it, the defence of individual freedom, in its most extreme form, demands of each man that "he refuse the dictates of any other". In other words, liberal autonomy entails the repudiation of society, and no vision of the common good can be derived from liberal principles. The atomised dystopia of 21st-century Britain, the "broken society" overseen by a highly centralised bureaucratic state, turns out to have been the historic bequest of Locke and Mill.

This is contentious, to say the least. Several commentators, notably the Oxford political theorist Stuart White, have criticised the history of liberalism that underpins the Red Tory thesis. White points out that the fundamental principles of justice articulated in the work of a liberal philosopher such as John Rawls amount to a vision of the "common good", and that for Rawls those principles impose just the sort of civic obligations on citizens that Blond regards as desirable, but to which he thinks liberals are fatally indifferent.

Although Blond insists that his religious commitment has little influence on his politics ("The only sense in which my religiosity comes across in my politics is that it's universal: I want a politics that cares for all"), his theological background is discernible in these arguments about the historical legacy of liberalism. As a post­graduate student and later as an academic theologian, he was closely associated with a school known as Radical Orthodoxy. The principal intellectual influences on this strain of theology are the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, and John Milbank, who supervised Blond's doctorate at Peterhouse, Cambridge in the early 1990s, and now teaches at the University of Nottingham.

Radical Orthodoxy seeks to revive a credal Christianity that was progressively obscured from the late Middle Ages onwards, and it makes that recovered Christian vision the basis of a systematic critique of modern, secular society. "Modernity," Milbank has said, "is liberalism, liberalism is capitalism and capitalism is atheism." The problem with secular liberalism, for proponents of Radical Orthodoxy, is that, in removing God, it loses any grip on the notion of objective moral truth. Secularism leads to nihilism, because it leaves "worldly phenomena" such as morality "grounded literally in nothing".

Milbank is convinced that Blond's latest incarnation as a political thinker is continuous with his earlier identity as a theologian, and that Red Toryism is merely the "political translation" of Radical Orthodoxy. "Part of Radical Orthodoxy's argument," he tells me, "is that since the 1960s a kind of non-liberal left has faded away somehow, and what you've got now is a left that increasingly defines itself in terms of secular liberalism. We argue that if you want to criticise liberal capitalism, you've got to realise that this is the form that secularity will take. Capitalism gets rid of the sacred. If there's no sacred, everything will be commodified. We argue that you need to re-enchant the world if you are to criticise or modify capitalism."

The practical, political differences between Blond and his former teacher - Milbank identifies himself as a man of the left - are less significant than their shared commitment to this theological vision. "Phillip has always seen himself as a Tory, whereas for me the political resources lie in a Christian socialist tradition," Milbank says.

He suggests that the distinctive intellectual atmosphere of Blond's old college at Cambridge was a fertile breeding ground for Toryism. "Peterhouse always represented a kind of non-Thatcherite, communitarian right."

Although Blond never met Maurice Cowling, the conservative historian and doyen of a previous generation of "intellectual Tories", who retired from Peterhouse in 1993, he reveres many of the figures whom Cowling enlisted in the "Christian counter-revolution" against what he termed the "post-Christian consensus": for example, Thomas Carlyle, G K Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc

I'm still intrigued.

[Barrister]

First you call it Red Toryism.

Then I see the reference to:

He is talking about the Progressive Conservatism Project

And you think Canadians are going to stay out?



Your man Blund is about 65 years late to the Progressive Conservative label.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Conservative_Party_of_Canada

[saskganesh]

funnily enough, there is a politician in Ontario by the name of John Tory. He was a Red Tory. He ran for Mayor of Toronto ... and lost. He ran for the Ontario PC leadership ... and won. He ran for a byelection seat in a safe riding ... and won. Then he switched ridings to his home riding for the general election ... and lost. After over  a year out of the legislature, he ran for another seat in another safe riding... and lost.

Tory is now out of politics.

[derspiess]

I prefer this John Derbyshire: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Derbyshire 

[Sheilbh]

I prefer this John Derbyshire: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Derbyshire 
[/quote
I like him too, generally.

Though my favourite foreign-American conservative is David Frum who was, I think, the only sane right-winger on election night and is right on a number of things.  Though I think the Republicans would be mad to dump their opposition to abortion.

[Barrister]

I prefer this John Derbyshire: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Derbyshire 
[/quote
I like him too, generally.

Though my favourite foreign-American conservative is David Frum who was, I think, the only sane right-winger on election night and is right on a number of things.  Though I think the Republicans would be mad to dump their opposition to abortion.

David Frum is Canadian. :canuck:

And I agree - Republicans would be silly to drop opposition to abortion.  The country is split 50/50 on the topic - why side with the other 50%?  Now they could go about their opposition in different means...

[Sheilbh]

I agree, especially given that abortion is the only issue where young evangelicals are as 'conservative' as their parents.  I think on abortion and immigration a change of tone, or even a period of silence would help.  The problem with the Tories in 2001 and, to a lesser extent, 2005 wasn't that people disagreed with their policy in Europe: it's that the Tories wouldn't shut up about it.  The Tories now have the same policy (no to Lisbon, no to further integration, no to the Euro, try and repatriate some areas) but they're not talking about it so it sounds to people in the real world like they care about more than just that.

On others I think there's serious legwork that needs to be done.  I think in the next 30 years or so they'll change their position on gay marriage because it'll be a political fait accompli with wide social support. 

On economic issues  I think they really need to think things through because they're intellectually hidebound at the minute.  You get a suggestion as an alternative to the stimulus, as David Frum's pointed out, in the idea of a payroll tax holiday.  Every centre right commentator and economist seems to support it and yet the Republicans in congress support a cut on capital gains and corporate tax - they seem stuck in the 80s in terms of policy.  Which is a real shame.

Having said that I do wonder if the Republicans are currently in the position the Tories were in after 1997.  I think even in 2005 a poll was done that asked people whether they supported x policy on immigration/taxes/public spending/Europe/crime, a whole raft of issues.  They were Tory policies and generally some were popular some weren't.  The support for those policies dropped by about 20% whenever it was revealed it was a Tory policy.

I think the Republicans need to detox their image somewhat and realise that the voters punished them.  Saying 'we fucked up' and then carrying on with broadly similar politics suggests to people that they don't quite understand why they lost.

[Warspite]

It is a sad day when the next British government's philosophy is being defined by a theologian at an ex-polytechnic. 

"The current political consensus", he writes, is "left-liberal in culture and right-liberal in econo­mics. And this is precisely the wrong place to be."

How he can say this in one breath and then in the next talk about a "progressive" agenda boggles my mind. Then again, while I can understand the appeal of a left-wing economic agenda, I simply cannot fathom why social freedom is so frightening to people.

[grumbler]

"Capitalism with a concience" is one of those catchphrases that reveals the intellectual bankruptcy of the movement.  Anthropomorphisis is a cop-out.

Thisd isn't to say that I don't want to see the economic decision-makers tied more closely to the consequences of thjeir decisions, but to argue that there is something immoral about the law of economies of scale that lead to the much-bemoaned "high street monopolies" (which have, in fact, lowered the cost of goods to the consumers) is absurd.  Chains like Tescos have prospered because they are better able to give people what they want.

Personally, I shop at the small, old-fashioned hardware store here in my small town before I go to the larger and cheaper chain home improvement stores because the extra cost is more than made up for by customer service and the pleasure I get out of stepping into such a "store out of time."  I wouldn't want to legislate the survival of such stores, however.

[Sheilbh]

Personally, I shop at the small, old-fashioned hardware store here in my small town before I go to the larger and cheaper chain home improvement stores because the extra cost is more than made up for by customer service and the pleasure I get out of stepping into such a "store out of time."  I wouldn't want to legislate the survival of such stores, however.

I think it's different in the UK.  Tesco has more of a market share than Walmart in the US.  Indeed if you look at Tesco, Asda, Morrison's and Sainsbury's you've got about 75-80% of the market, other famous grocers really have very little market share.  Waitrose, for example, has 4%.  Now there are a few areas where they directly compete.  And nationally they all make some degree of a big deal about their price cuts.  Also they all have slightly different identities which means they don't necessarily have the same market to begin with.

In reality outside big cities most towns have one big supermarket on the outskirts and that's sort-of it.  In those big supermarkets the various firms tend to offer far less deals than they do where they're competing and I remember reading that prices are, on average, higher.   And, of course, there was the famous scandal when it was revealed that supermarkets often establish a shop outside a town and then buy up land that could be developed into a supermarket in the town so their competitors don't move in.

Now a lot of this is down to the shape of the British market.  We don't like travelling to do our daily shop.  The other big thing is we tend to have a lot of loyalty with our grocers.  This is really smart stuff by the shops, and Tescos is leading the way, but basically they're one of the best in the world at analysing your purchases (from the clubcard) and sending you appropriate leaflets and offers.  The next step is that they want to attach a chip to clubcards that will go off whenever you enter a Tescos and send you a text message remindin you what offers you have in things that might interest you.

Now my understanding is that this is very different from the US, where Tescos have admitted market research failures, where it's generally common to really shop around.  There'll be lots of supermarkets with a distance people are willing to travel to and they all send vouchers so consumers can choose which is cheapest for them.

So because of different shopping habits there is practically not a great deal of competition in the UK.  What Blonde suggests is why is anti-monopolist legislation applied at a national level rather than a local?

Plus I think the other ideas like Post Office retail banking and so on are far more interesting.

[grumbler]

In reality outside big cities most towns have one big supermarket on the outskirts and that's sort-of it.  In those big supermarkets the various firms tend to offer far less deals than they do where they're competing and I remember reading that prices are, on average, higher.   And, of course, there was the famous scandal when it was revealed that supermarkets often establish a shop outside a town and then buy up land that could be developed into a supermarket in the town so their competitors don't move in.

Now a lot of this is down to the shape of the British market.  We don't like travelling to do our daily shop.  The other big thing is we tend to have a lot of loyalty with our grocers.  This is really smart stuff by the shops, and Tescos is leading the way, but basically they're one of the best in the world at analysing your purchases (from the clubcard) and sending you appropriate leaflets and offers.  The next step is that they want to attach a chip to clubcards that will go off whenever you enter a Tescos and send you a text message remindin you what offers you have in things that might interest you.

So because of different shopping habits there is practically not a great deal of competition in the UK.  What Blonde suggests is why is anti-monopolist legislation applied at a national level rather than a local?

I must admit that, if this is true, then I don't understand the purpose of the legislation.  Is it to ensure that the one shop where people will go in their town will be arbitrarily determined by the government?  That people who really would prefer a Tescos will get a "Brand X" supermarket because Tescos has reached its mandated "quota" and isn't allowed to open any more shops?

If it is true that the reason there is only one shop per town is because the British shopper prefers it that way, then I don't understand what the legislation is supposed to produce.  If, on the other hand, the reason that there is only one shop per town is because Tescos, Sainsbury, etc are colluding to divvy up the arket, then isn't there already legislation to cover such?

I always get antsy when theology enters politics by another name, whether it is "Red Toryism" or "Creation Science."

[Sheilbh]

If it is true that the reason there is only one shop per town is because the British shopper prefers it that way, then I don't understand what the legislation is supposed to produce.  If, on the other hand, the reason that there is only one shop per town is because Tescos, Sainsbury, etc are colluding to divvy up the arket, then isn't there already legislation to cover such?

I think the legislation Blond's proposed, that I've read, is far less radical than you think.  What he wants is for councils to have tougher commercial planning laws and to be able to use the fear of a local monopoly as a reason for rejecting applications for planning permissions.  He's also suggested changing tax plans so it's more locally, communally directed.  As he points out the UK has the lowest rate of small and medium-sized businesses in the OECD.  He argues that part of the reason for that is that too often the national government concerned with preventing a national monopoly haven't noticed local ones.

He's not really that anti-capitalist.  He wants to redistribute wealth, sure.  But not through the tax system and he thinks welfare generally doesn't work and actually provides a ceiling for social mobility rather than a floor.  He wants a relocalisation of business and a recapitalisation of the poor - whatever those terms mean.

From the 4 articles I've read by or about him and the two speeches that's as much as I've gleaned.  He's got a book coming out that will probably provide more concrete policy discussion.

I always get antsy when theology enters politics by another name, whether it is "Red Toryism" or "Creation Science."

I don't know, it doesn't tend to concern me.  I don't object to Blond's Anglican informed views, or the Archbishop of Canterbury, or the Chief Rabbi (both of whom have been criticising things that everyone's now angry about for years) getting involved in politics.  I don't think they're that powerful and most people aren't religious but I think it's a useful and an interesting perspective.  And I think this is very different than the Christian right in the US or things like that.

In terms of religiousity I find Tim Montgomerie's style more worrying.  He blogs at ConservativeHome and is considered one of the party's rising stars.  But he envisions very much a sort of movement conservatism and is far more socially conservative than I think Blond, Cameron or the CofE seem to be.  And he comes at that from a religious perspective.  I think he's come close to trying to politicise the abortion debate, for example, which is, in my opinion, despicable.

[grumbler]

I think the legislation Blond's proposed, that I've read, is far less radical than you think.  What he wants is for councils to have tougher commercial planning laws and to be able to use the fear of a local monopoly as a reason for rejecting applications for planning permissions.  He's also suggested changing tax plans so it's more locally, communally directed.  As he points out the UK has the lowest rate of small and medium-sized businesses in the OECD.  He argues that part of the reason for that is that too often the national government concerned with preventing a national monopoly haven't noticed local ones. 

This sounds much like the kind of anti-WalMart legislation we have seen enacted here in the US.  Local businesses fear the arrival of a walMart, and since they have a greater voice in local government than the typical citizen who would be saving money if a WalMart is built, the town votes against it.  That happpened about ten years ago in the town were I work.  WalMart just built its store just outside down - whereupon the town changed its boundaries to include that site so as to get the tax revenue!

The main impact of the effort was to make it harder for the elderly and the poor to get to the WalMart.  Government intervention at its finest!

He's not really that anti-capitalist.  He wants to redistribute wealth, sure.  But not through the tax system and he thinks welfare generally doesn't work and actually provides a ceiling for social mobility rather than a floor.  He wants a relocalisation of business and a recapitalisation of the poor - whatever those terms mean.

I think you can have a relocalization of business without government intervention.  In fact, that is what liberalism is all about (Blond, if the story hs it right, either doesn't understand liberalism or ignores what he knows for polemical reasons).  Liberals (the Euro style liberals, that is) don't like big business, big government, or big church.  Blond appears to just dislike big business.

I don't know, it doesn't tend to concern me.  I don't object to Blond's Anglican informed views, or the Archbishop of Canterbury, or the Chief Rabbi (both of whom have been criticising things that everyone's now angry about for years) getting involved in politics.  I don't think they're that powerful and most people aren't religious but I think it's a useful and an interesting perspective.  And I think this is very different than the Christian right in the US or things like that.

The Chief rabbi Archbishop of Canterbury don't really hew to any party, do they?  Blond is different.  He seems to be explicitly seeking political influenec, which the AoC and CR do not do.  Like Blond, and unlike the AoC and CR, the RR in the US wants to shape not just ends, but means.

But perhaps it is better to wait, as you say, for the book.  All I know about the man is what is in this article, and that isn't really a fair basis for slagging on him (though that didn't stop me, did it?  )

[Sheilbh]

I think you can have a relocalization of business without government intervention.  In fact, that is what liberalism is all about (Blond, if the story hs it right, either doesn't understand liberalism or ignores what he knows for polemical reasons).  Liberals (the Euro style liberals, that is) don't like big business, big government, or big church.  Blond appears to just dislike big business.

Oh no he's very critical of the state.  His argument is that liberalism basically destroyed communal, local politics and social networks because it argued from the perspective of the individual alone, something Blond dislikes.  He also thinks that basically Marx and Madoff are both different failures of the same liberal system.  His argument is that the welfare state destroys people (in his view it imposes a ceiling on social mobility for the poor rather than a floor for everyone else) and that the 'big government' monopoly he thinks held sway in the post-war consensus enforced poverty and 'proletarianisation' on the working class and the poor.

He believes, however, that in place of the big government monopoly the Thatcherite settlement that's held sway for 30 years basically allowed big business to replace big government with similarly detrimental effects.  And that government needs to restrain big business but not through the more impersonal, bureaucratic, national state but from extreme localism.

This does, I think, stem from his theology.  He was one of the founders of an Anglican school called radical orthodoxy that was basically a mixture of post-Marxist and Medieval theology.  They were apparently really influential in their day and, from what I can gather, Rowan Williams played much the same role for them as Newman did for the Tractarians.

Part of what appeals to me about Blond is that he's very involved in the Tory political elite right now, they are apparently very interested in what he has to say.  But he's also got the interest of Labour's ideological and intellectual elite, backbenchers like Frank Field and Jon Cruddas and a few dissident Fabians.  They think, and I agree, that he's dangerous to the Left, if he influences the Right.  If not, then there are things I think we can learn from him and his writings.  I think it's especially interesting that Cruddas who is famous for being very angry about the failure of the state, which he believes is letting the BNP sneak up (and in his constituency it is) and Field who is Labour's conscience on certain issues to do with the poor are listening.

The Chief rabbi Archbishop of Canterbury don't really hew to any party, do they?  Blond is different.  He seems to be explicitly seeking political influenec, which the AoC and CR do not do.  Like Blond, and unlike the AoC and CR, the RR in the US wants to shape not just ends, but means.

The difference is the Chief Rabbi, the AofC and the Religious Right actually have an audience who are listening to them and who they can, to differing degrees, influence.  But I take your point.  The best example I can think of for Blond is someone like Neuhaus, perhaps?  He's a figure who comes from a religious background (though Blond's is far less than Neuhaus's, and I believe he's been primarily a philosopher for some years) and is trying to influence the ideology of people with political power, the elite as it were.

[MadImmortalMan]

Sounds like the worst of both worlds to me.