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Red Tory: How Left and Right have Broken Britain and How we can Fix It
Conventional politics is at crossroads. Amid recession, depression, poverty, increasing violence and rising inequality, our current politics is exhausted and inadequate. In "Red Tory", Phillip Blond argues that only a radical new political settlement can tackle the problems we face. Red Toryism combines economic egalitarianism with social conservatism, calling for an end to the monopolisation of society and the private sphere by the state and the market. Decrying the legacy of both the Labour and Conservative parties, Blond proposes a genuinely progressive Conservatism that will restore social equality and revive British culture. He calls for the strengthening of local communities and economies, ending dispossession, redistribution of the tax burden and restoration the nuclear family. "Red Tory" offers a different vision for our future and asks us to question our long-held political assumptions. No political thinker has aroused more passionate debate in recent times. Phillip Blond's ideas have already been praised or attacked in every major British newspaper and journal. Challenging, stimulating and exhilarating, this is a book for our times.
309 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 2010
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January 2, 2011
Concreteness is this book's greatest strength and its greatest weakness. So is relevance. Allow me to explain.
Most books from Christian theologians these days (perhaps this term is a stretch in Blond's case, but as John Milbank himself is rumored to have been the ghost-writer for the meatier core of the book, it is probably apropos) seeking to engage the problems of modern politics and economics with a "third way" that eschews both statism and free-marketism, reasserting a holistic, mutualist, communitarian and ethical kind of human society (and such books are perhaps a dime a dozen these days) suffer from a glaring lack of concreteness. It is effortless for critics to dismiss them, labeling them pie-in-the-sky fantasies that offer no substantive engagement with real-world political realities and no plausible and concrete policy solutions. Such criticisms, I should hasten to add, are more often than not quite unfair, because such concreteness is not always possible or even desirable, at least not the kind of concreteness the critics want. Nevertheless, the critics do have a point. Blond's book, however, is ironclad against such criticism. It is nothing if not concrete. It is aimed squarely at the problems facing Britain in 2010, not "modern society" in general, and it backs up its diagnosis of the problems with an overwhelming dollop of statistics and examples on almost every page. Nor is blond content (as are so many of the books in the aforementioned genre) with a single slim chapter at the end venturing some "practical solutions" or "blueprints for change"--the whole last half of the book is dedicated to outlining a thorough and specific policy agenda to remedy the problems described in the first half. This half is even more concrete, delving into the minutia of British local-government policy and the inner workings of various bureaucracies and outlining new structures that could be created.
Needless to say, this kind of concreteness was at times rather tiresome even to an American as disenchanted with his homeland and enchanted with Britain as myself. I really had no idea how most of these branches of British government worked, and I really couldn't bring myself to care half the time, much as I tried. This is, of course, why the book took me eight months to read. The majority of that time was spent very slowly picking away at the latter half of the book, which, although they no doubt contained lessons relevant for Americans or indeed anyone aspiring to a kind of "Red Tory" persuasion, it would take someone with much more knowledge of political science than myself to draw out those points of relevance. Even the first half of the book, of more general interest inasmuch as the malaise of corporatocracy that it identifies is one that has infected the whole globe in the last three decades, was frustrating at times for the sheer volume of statistics that Blond kept pulling out of his hat. We all remember what Mark Twain said about statistics, and even if our society and our politicians are obsessed with them, I don't see that we should cater to the obsession as obsequiously as Blond does. Nonetheless, there are some fantastically compelling sections (especially in the introduction) about the ways in which more ubiquitous statism and a more liberated free market are not, as our political ideologues always tell us, contradictory, but in fact symbiotic, united in the destruction of true society.
The other great strength of this book is "relevance." Too many books in the aforementioned genre, for all their wonderful theologizing, are simply inaccessible to a world of politicians and economists that does not share the theological assumptions. Now, that's no reason to stop doing the theology, or to dumb down our thinking to the secularists' level, but we do need someone who can translate a diagnosis of the problems and a stab at some possible solutions into terms that the wider world can readily grasp and act on. Blond meets this need, and writes a book distilling many of the concerns and ideas of Radical Orthodoxy (a theological movement all about the need for explicitly theological language) into completely non-religious terms, terms accessible to average policy-makers and even average citizens.
However, it should come as no surprise that a great deal is lost in such translation. The intentional absence of theological language or explicit Christian commitment in this volume (though it was readily discernible just beneath the surface at many points) gave the whole thing an air of studied vagueness, appealing to platitudinous terms like "community," "character," "empowerment," "justice," etc. Not only is that frustratingly vacuous at times, but it's just stylistically annoying too.
Of course, in the end, the gravest doubt one must express about Red Tory is whether, for all its concessions to be relevant and concrete, it achieves its goal of being realistic. Blond believes (or he claims to believe) that there is still enough residual sense of virtue and longing for community in England's green and pleasant land that, if only the government would stop trampling out the last vestiges in its idiocy, civic virtue and reciprocal community would spring up anew, bright and promising. Based on what I've seen in 15 months here, though, I think that, from a worldly perspective at least, this country is too far gone. The state and the market's ambition to atomise society into unprincipled, aimless, detached individuals has almost run its course and I'm not sure that course can be reversed, save by an act of God. Which is, of course, why theology, not politics or economics, will have to shoulder the burden.
Most books from Christian theologians these days (perhaps this term is a stretch in Blond's case, but as John Milbank himself is rumored to have been the ghost-writer for the meatier core of the book, it is probably apropos) seeking to engage the problems of modern politics and economics with a "third way" that eschews both statism and free-marketism, reasserting a holistic, mutualist, communitarian and ethical kind of human society (and such books are perhaps a dime a dozen these days) suffer from a glaring lack of concreteness. It is effortless for critics to dismiss them, labeling them pie-in-the-sky fantasies that offer no substantive engagement with real-world political realities and no plausible and concrete policy solutions. Such criticisms, I should hasten to add, are more often than not quite unfair, because such concreteness is not always possible or even desirable, at least not the kind of concreteness the critics want. Nevertheless, the critics do have a point. Blond's book, however, is ironclad against such criticism. It is nothing if not concrete. It is aimed squarely at the problems facing Britain in 2010, not "modern society" in general, and it backs up its diagnosis of the problems with an overwhelming dollop of statistics and examples on almost every page. Nor is blond content (as are so many of the books in the aforementioned genre) with a single slim chapter at the end venturing some "practical solutions" or "blueprints for change"--the whole last half of the book is dedicated to outlining a thorough and specific policy agenda to remedy the problems described in the first half. This half is even more concrete, delving into the minutia of British local-government policy and the inner workings of various bureaucracies and outlining new structures that could be created.
Needless to say, this kind of concreteness was at times rather tiresome even to an American as disenchanted with his homeland and enchanted with Britain as myself. I really had no idea how most of these branches of British government worked, and I really couldn't bring myself to care half the time, much as I tried. This is, of course, why the book took me eight months to read. The majority of that time was spent very slowly picking away at the latter half of the book, which, although they no doubt contained lessons relevant for Americans or indeed anyone aspiring to a kind of "Red Tory" persuasion, it would take someone with much more knowledge of political science than myself to draw out those points of relevance. Even the first half of the book, of more general interest inasmuch as the malaise of corporatocracy that it identifies is one that has infected the whole globe in the last three decades, was frustrating at times for the sheer volume of statistics that Blond kept pulling out of his hat. We all remember what Mark Twain said about statistics, and even if our society and our politicians are obsessed with them, I don't see that we should cater to the obsession as obsequiously as Blond does. Nonetheless, there are some fantastically compelling sections (especially in the introduction) about the ways in which more ubiquitous statism and a more liberated free market are not, as our political ideologues always tell us, contradictory, but in fact symbiotic, united in the destruction of true society.
The other great strength of this book is "relevance." Too many books in the aforementioned genre, for all their wonderful theologizing, are simply inaccessible to a world of politicians and economists that does not share the theological assumptions. Now, that's no reason to stop doing the theology, or to dumb down our thinking to the secularists' level, but we do need someone who can translate a diagnosis of the problems and a stab at some possible solutions into terms that the wider world can readily grasp and act on. Blond meets this need, and writes a book distilling many of the concerns and ideas of Radical Orthodoxy (a theological movement all about the need for explicitly theological language) into completely non-religious terms, terms accessible to average policy-makers and even average citizens.
However, it should come as no surprise that a great deal is lost in such translation. The intentional absence of theological language or explicit Christian commitment in this volume (though it was readily discernible just beneath the surface at many points) gave the whole thing an air of studied vagueness, appealing to platitudinous terms like "community," "character," "empowerment," "justice," etc. Not only is that frustratingly vacuous at times, but it's just stylistically annoying too.
Of course, in the end, the gravest doubt one must express about Red Tory is whether, for all its concessions to be relevant and concrete, it achieves its goal of being realistic. Blond believes (or he claims to believe) that there is still enough residual sense of virtue and longing for community in England's green and pleasant land that, if only the government would stop trampling out the last vestiges in its idiocy, civic virtue and reciprocal community would spring up anew, bright and promising. Based on what I've seen in 15 months here, though, I think that, from a worldly perspective at least, this country is too far gone. The state and the market's ambition to atomise society into unprincipled, aimless, detached individuals has almost run its course and I'm not sure that course can be reversed, save by an act of God. Which is, of course, why theology, not politics or economics, will have to shoulder the burden.
December 10, 2011
We live in a broken, wretched world in which a demoralised citizenry is bullied and cajoled by the mediocre, indifferent types who run private corporations and under-performing government departments and public services. We got to this awful place because back in the 1960s a cultural revolution took place and a bunch of liberals triumphed over the older tradition of patrician Toryism which required society’s great and powerful to rule wisely and compassionately over the masses. The only way to fix this mess is get back to the state of the good, moral society in which the wise watch over us all.
In making this argument Blond leaps around the traditions of leftist and right wing thought to set out a critique of British society as it emerged from the 1960s to get to the point it is at today. Large chunks of this analysis seem to have been lifted straight from the pages of the defunct Marxism Today with Hobsbawm’s lament to the forward march of labour halted and Stuart Hall’s disaggregation of culture and market forces being, without acknowledgement, being freely drawn upon.
For a lot of people on both sides of the traditional political divide this is an analysis that more than rings true. We have, apparently, allowed and impersonal forces to take a vice-like grip on our lives and the ruling elites have been too opportunistically self-interested, or just too damned lazy, to do anything about it. Woe is Britain, to have been failed so badly by its leaders during its time of greatest need. The open-minded and eclectic nature of its argument invites readers to suspend disbelief and identify with the big chunks of its analysis which are felt intuitively to be one’s own in any event. ‘Red Toryism’ with one easy step can be transformed into ‘Blue Socialism’ and a whole new approach to radicalism seems to open out. That is exactly what has happened with the appearance of Maurice Glasman’s ‘Blue Labour’ tendency on the centre-left.
But there are flaws in Blond’s argument and they need to be scrutinised more closely. His account of ‘Broken Britain’ is one-sided and superficial. Liberalism’s impact on the governance of the nation is considered only at the cultural level, where it can be presented as bewildering and narcissistic, with much less said about its role in eroding the mind-sets which made the subjugation of women and ‘inferior’ people a feature of past forms of rule. That there is progress in the affairs of human beings – albeit often scuttling and crab-like – is a fact unacknowledged in a book that wants our attention to focus only on the wretched and debased.
The chronology outlined in Blond’s analysis says that things where okay up until world war two when the state – acting out of necessity he agrees – had to step in to organise society in the extreme circumstances of the threat to its very survival. Civil society took a hit at this moment, though not as yet a fatal one. Everything from industry to local governance past to the initiative of a political and administrative class which had to operate on the principle of ‘what works.’
The argument is weakened by its failure to consider in any depth the position of Britain immediately after the war and through ambiguous, contradictory experience of the 1950s. Strapped by debts which its war-time ally, the US, insisted on repayment, and with the task of industrial reconstruction to the forefront, UK governments nevertheless succeeded in building the remarkable NHS, largely solving a dire housing shortage, returning the country to full employment, and throughout this avoiding the slump which is supposed to come at the end of every major conflict. By someone’s standards at least, something was being done right.
Britain by the time the 1960s came along was, by today’s standards, a grim place. Reckonings where stacking up across the whole of society which needed to be settled. Women, drawn from the home into the workplace in great numbers during the war had remained there and were being paid at half the wage rates of their male counterparts. The fate of the British Empire was still being settled as colonialism evolved into Commonwealth and obligations towards former subjects had to be considered. The pacification and return to prosperity of Europe needed to be pushed forward through the instrument of the common market, requiring the habits of disdainful superiority on the part of the ruling elites in Britain to be reined-in. In short, a cultural revolution was required to bring the country to the point where it might be able to rise to the challenges of the rest of the century.
This is the real back-drop to the cultural tumult of the 1960s in which Blond can see nothing other than the triumph of a selfish, individualistic hedonism. He complains that a unique civil society was swept away during these years but gives us no real glimpse as to what it was he really thinks was lost. Other conservative thinkers will fill in the gaps at this point, and it begins to look like a set up in which petty-minded, self-serving gentries extracted deference from the lower orders and where given carte blanche in doling out charity to the ‘deserving poor.’
With his case made that the 1960s were a disaster Blond gives himself the space to set out what he presumably thinks is an even-handed critique of the responses of the mainstream right and left to the situation. The errors of the right were to do with their famous disparaging of ‘society’ (as in ‘There is no such thing...’). For the left it was the mistake of allowing the Thatcherite, neo-liberal settlement to remain in place whilst patching another monstrous, centralism on to it in the form of the bureaucratic state. Caught between this pincher, civil society, the hope and redeemer of us all, never stood a chance.
The sections describing the outcomes of the combined errors of Thatcher and Blair are the best part of this book. At this point Blond refuses the usual Tory counter-position of the entrepreneur to the state official, and that in actuality both where in each other’s pockets. A lock had been put in place which operated across business, public services, state administration and extending down to local government which sought to maximise the gains which would come from everyone functioning as an individualised, self-interested consumer and marginalise the interference coming from ‘special interests’.
All of this happened and the consequences have been dire. Blond’s solution is a supreme effort of will to bring back the things we apparently gave up in the 1930s and consciously strive for a return to the rule of the good and meritorious. But this is not a programme in itself and a lengthy chapter explores Fabian-style the ways in which scheme for disbursing assets more widely across society could be achieved which entails fundamental criticism of the way banking and financial services have become de-mutualised and centralised. The ‘Red’ in Red Toryism becomes most pronounced in his lengthy discussion of the changes to the ownership structure of assets and services would aid the revival of civic engagement and mutual regard for the wider good of society. Like everything in the Fabian tradition his enthusiasm for cracking good wheezes suffers from the narrowness of the good examples cited: if all the praise every offered up to the John Lewis Partnership had resulted in its model being reproduced then we would have attained the good mutualistic society a generation ago.
Whatever sense you get of a trove of good ideas that even an old-style Red Socialist might want to dip into, Blond’s analysis remains flawed by its parochial idealism and failure to get to grips with the true nature of the beast we are up against. His rooted preference for the organic and concreteness of life as it is lived leads him to deplore what he sees as the continental abstractions of grand theory. The sense that capitalism might exist as something other than a collection of practices – some good, some bad – loosely bound together by markets, private property and the ethos of entrepreneurialism, all themselves delineated and made actual by real societies, is the sort of frenchified thinking he clearly deplores.
But that is precisely the real reality we have to contend with. The original sin that lights our present-day lives was located in the late-medieval period rather than the 1960s. It was at this point that economic system of production for markets took on dimensions which grew from changes to the ways in which goods were traded and circulated and assets began to take the distinct from of capital. We have been living with the consequences of that development ever since, with the larger system evolving and adapting to the challenges of its Mediterranean, Atlantic, global British and global American environments ever since. Whilst opportunities to change the ways in which we administer markets and demand for local and national goods and services will generate much invigorating political debate, the bigger question of how capitalism changes in the years ahead as it moves from the domination of the neo-liberal American model to the modes of accumulation favoured in East Asia will provide the true frame for what will be possible in the way of a more equitable, empowered lives for ordinary people.
The communitarian discourse about the good society has its points of interest, but it remains a world dominated by arrogant disdain for what most ordinary people would count as real progress in the world they live in. Wider horizons, broader minds, a better sense of the scope for living in conditions of freedom are often viewed with contempt by the people with advantage of better education and larger reserves of cultural capital who insist on asking, ‘Yes, but has it really made you happy?’ Perhaps not exactly happy, but as sure as ever that the road to happiness lies in getting out from under the stones to which we have hitherto been confined, looking for wider scope to act as free people, and to get away from the supercilious judgment of our morally bankrupt ‘betters’.
In making this argument Blond leaps around the traditions of leftist and right wing thought to set out a critique of British society as it emerged from the 1960s to get to the point it is at today. Large chunks of this analysis seem to have been lifted straight from the pages of the defunct Marxism Today with Hobsbawm’s lament to the forward march of labour halted and Stuart Hall’s disaggregation of culture and market forces being, without acknowledgement, being freely drawn upon.
For a lot of people on both sides of the traditional political divide this is an analysis that more than rings true. We have, apparently, allowed and impersonal forces to take a vice-like grip on our lives and the ruling elites have been too opportunistically self-interested, or just too damned lazy, to do anything about it. Woe is Britain, to have been failed so badly by its leaders during its time of greatest need. The open-minded and eclectic nature of its argument invites readers to suspend disbelief and identify with the big chunks of its analysis which are felt intuitively to be one’s own in any event. ‘Red Toryism’ with one easy step can be transformed into ‘Blue Socialism’ and a whole new approach to radicalism seems to open out. That is exactly what has happened with the appearance of Maurice Glasman’s ‘Blue Labour’ tendency on the centre-left.
But there are flaws in Blond’s argument and they need to be scrutinised more closely. His account of ‘Broken Britain’ is one-sided and superficial. Liberalism’s impact on the governance of the nation is considered only at the cultural level, where it can be presented as bewildering and narcissistic, with much less said about its role in eroding the mind-sets which made the subjugation of women and ‘inferior’ people a feature of past forms of rule. That there is progress in the affairs of human beings – albeit often scuttling and crab-like – is a fact unacknowledged in a book that wants our attention to focus only on the wretched and debased.
The chronology outlined in Blond’s analysis says that things where okay up until world war two when the state – acting out of necessity he agrees – had to step in to organise society in the extreme circumstances of the threat to its very survival. Civil society took a hit at this moment, though not as yet a fatal one. Everything from industry to local governance past to the initiative of a political and administrative class which had to operate on the principle of ‘what works.’
The argument is weakened by its failure to consider in any depth the position of Britain immediately after the war and through ambiguous, contradictory experience of the 1950s. Strapped by debts which its war-time ally, the US, insisted on repayment, and with the task of industrial reconstruction to the forefront, UK governments nevertheless succeeded in building the remarkable NHS, largely solving a dire housing shortage, returning the country to full employment, and throughout this avoiding the slump which is supposed to come at the end of every major conflict. By someone’s standards at least, something was being done right.
Britain by the time the 1960s came along was, by today’s standards, a grim place. Reckonings where stacking up across the whole of society which needed to be settled. Women, drawn from the home into the workplace in great numbers during the war had remained there and were being paid at half the wage rates of their male counterparts. The fate of the British Empire was still being settled as colonialism evolved into Commonwealth and obligations towards former subjects had to be considered. The pacification and return to prosperity of Europe needed to be pushed forward through the instrument of the common market, requiring the habits of disdainful superiority on the part of the ruling elites in Britain to be reined-in. In short, a cultural revolution was required to bring the country to the point where it might be able to rise to the challenges of the rest of the century.
This is the real back-drop to the cultural tumult of the 1960s in which Blond can see nothing other than the triumph of a selfish, individualistic hedonism. He complains that a unique civil society was swept away during these years but gives us no real glimpse as to what it was he really thinks was lost. Other conservative thinkers will fill in the gaps at this point, and it begins to look like a set up in which petty-minded, self-serving gentries extracted deference from the lower orders and where given carte blanche in doling out charity to the ‘deserving poor.’
With his case made that the 1960s were a disaster Blond gives himself the space to set out what he presumably thinks is an even-handed critique of the responses of the mainstream right and left to the situation. The errors of the right were to do with their famous disparaging of ‘society’ (as in ‘There is no such thing...’). For the left it was the mistake of allowing the Thatcherite, neo-liberal settlement to remain in place whilst patching another monstrous, centralism on to it in the form of the bureaucratic state. Caught between this pincher, civil society, the hope and redeemer of us all, never stood a chance.
The sections describing the outcomes of the combined errors of Thatcher and Blair are the best part of this book. At this point Blond refuses the usual Tory counter-position of the entrepreneur to the state official, and that in actuality both where in each other’s pockets. A lock had been put in place which operated across business, public services, state administration and extending down to local government which sought to maximise the gains which would come from everyone functioning as an individualised, self-interested consumer and marginalise the interference coming from ‘special interests’.
All of this happened and the consequences have been dire. Blond’s solution is a supreme effort of will to bring back the things we apparently gave up in the 1930s and consciously strive for a return to the rule of the good and meritorious. But this is not a programme in itself and a lengthy chapter explores Fabian-style the ways in which scheme for disbursing assets more widely across society could be achieved which entails fundamental criticism of the way banking and financial services have become de-mutualised and centralised. The ‘Red’ in Red Toryism becomes most pronounced in his lengthy discussion of the changes to the ownership structure of assets and services would aid the revival of civic engagement and mutual regard for the wider good of society. Like everything in the Fabian tradition his enthusiasm for cracking good wheezes suffers from the narrowness of the good examples cited: if all the praise every offered up to the John Lewis Partnership had resulted in its model being reproduced then we would have attained the good mutualistic society a generation ago.
Whatever sense you get of a trove of good ideas that even an old-style Red Socialist might want to dip into, Blond’s analysis remains flawed by its parochial idealism and failure to get to grips with the true nature of the beast we are up against. His rooted preference for the organic and concreteness of life as it is lived leads him to deplore what he sees as the continental abstractions of grand theory. The sense that capitalism might exist as something other than a collection of practices – some good, some bad – loosely bound together by markets, private property and the ethos of entrepreneurialism, all themselves delineated and made actual by real societies, is the sort of frenchified thinking he clearly deplores.
But that is precisely the real reality we have to contend with. The original sin that lights our present-day lives was located in the late-medieval period rather than the 1960s. It was at this point that economic system of production for markets took on dimensions which grew from changes to the ways in which goods were traded and circulated and assets began to take the distinct from of capital. We have been living with the consequences of that development ever since, with the larger system evolving and adapting to the challenges of its Mediterranean, Atlantic, global British and global American environments ever since. Whilst opportunities to change the ways in which we administer markets and demand for local and national goods and services will generate much invigorating political debate, the bigger question of how capitalism changes in the years ahead as it moves from the domination of the neo-liberal American model to the modes of accumulation favoured in East Asia will provide the true frame for what will be possible in the way of a more equitable, empowered lives for ordinary people.
The communitarian discourse about the good society has its points of interest, but it remains a world dominated by arrogant disdain for what most ordinary people would count as real progress in the world they live in. Wider horizons, broader minds, a better sense of the scope for living in conditions of freedom are often viewed with contempt by the people with advantage of better education and larger reserves of cultural capital who insist on asking, ‘Yes, but has it really made you happy?’ Perhaps not exactly happy, but as sure as ever that the road to happiness lies in getting out from under the stones to which we have hitherto been confined, looking for wider scope to act as free people, and to get away from the supercilious judgment of our morally bankrupt ‘betters’.
January 22, 2023
An interesting analysis of the economic crisis in modern Britain and the West. Philip Blond shows how both socialism and liberal capitalism have led to the destruction of community and an economy that truly benefits all classes of society. His book was written in 2010 and anticipated many of the debates now raging on the right in the wake of Brexit and Donald Trump. He doesn't explicitly mention the role of religion, which I think is crucial to any return to order, but nevertheless adresses many social and economic problems brought on by both the center left and center right.
January 4, 2021
In "Red Tory", Phillip Blond authors an essential work in the "post-liberal" (broadly speaking) canon. Blond forcefully criticizes liberalism for atomizing people by stripping them of their communities while simultaneously expanding the state's reach. When people become "empty carriers of rights", they need "external authority to police them" (125). Radical individualism is the bedfellow of excessive centralization, a claim that struck me as ironic when I first really pondered it with "Why Liberalism Failed" (145). Simultaneously, unchained liberalism has hollowed out social capital and the family itself, that most mutual of structures (91). These critiques aren't totally new, but they're well-phrased and explained. By deregulating and privatizing, the right created instability and harmed the vulnerable without building social capital. The left, on the other hand, professing to stand for all, settled for neoliberalism, the pernicious pairing of liberalisms. Neither was able to "constitute a free, diverse, and propertied society" (122).
Refreshingly, Blond provides a litany of fleshed-out solutions. Education, for instance, must be reoriented towards cultivating virtue and culture (168), a point similar to one I've heard from Harvard Historian James Hankins. In the economic sphere, Blond wants to make various policy tweaks to create a new economic culture "in which more was at stake in the making of contracts" (188). The economy must not be reduced to a set of numbers, but understood as embedded in our ways of life. It must be oriented towards the Common Good. To this end, Blond proposes guild structures, devolution of public service to locally run units, democratizing access to credit, supporting community land trusts, socially useful capital requirements, and more. Many are ideas that have crossed my mind, so it's nice to see them compiled and justified by an appeal to a broader viewpoint. As an American unfamiliar with British local government, some of the particular ideas were lost on me, but most could be reoriented for the US, especially those seeking to re-localize politics and boost diversified property holdings. Encouraging a genuine (not just debt-and-spend based) sense of ownership in public and private sectors would provide a distributist(ish) path beyond "the tired statism of the left and an arid free-market alternative proposed by the right", both of which result in "the marginalization of society itself" (81). Blond is correct to bemoan the corrosive effects of unconstrained liberalism, and I appreciate the solution-oriented agenda he lays out here, even if it falls short of discussing key issues like immigration. It's often easier to criticize without providing solutions, so I respect this effort, even if it's incomplete. I encourage those with a similar political outlook to my own to pick up a copy of this book and get inspired to make a positive case for your politics.
Refreshingly, Blond provides a litany of fleshed-out solutions. Education, for instance, must be reoriented towards cultivating virtue and culture (168), a point similar to one I've heard from Harvard Historian James Hankins. In the economic sphere, Blond wants to make various policy tweaks to create a new economic culture "in which more was at stake in the making of contracts" (188). The economy must not be reduced to a set of numbers, but understood as embedded in our ways of life. It must be oriented towards the Common Good. To this end, Blond proposes guild structures, devolution of public service to locally run units, democratizing access to credit, supporting community land trusts, socially useful capital requirements, and more. Many are ideas that have crossed my mind, so it's nice to see them compiled and justified by an appeal to a broader viewpoint. As an American unfamiliar with British local government, some of the particular ideas were lost on me, but most could be reoriented for the US, especially those seeking to re-localize politics and boost diversified property holdings. Encouraging a genuine (not just debt-and-spend based) sense of ownership in public and private sectors would provide a distributist(ish) path beyond "the tired statism of the left and an arid free-market alternative proposed by the right", both of which result in "the marginalization of society itself" (81). Blond is correct to bemoan the corrosive effects of unconstrained liberalism, and I appreciate the solution-oriented agenda he lays out here, even if it falls short of discussing key issues like immigration. It's often easier to criticize without providing solutions, so I respect this effort, even if it's incomplete. I encourage those with a similar political outlook to my own to pick up a copy of this book and get inspired to make a positive case for your politics.
July 29, 2024
I had been recommended this book and had been putting off reading it for a time and am now glad to have read it. This book is one of the few that has aged well - it is a great pity that this advice has not really been listened to. The only bit missing from I feel is in the areas of culture and education which have become more pressing since this was written. If you are interested in issues in the UK economy that are still relevant this is worth your time!
September 5, 2012
The basic premise behind Blond's now infamous book - put simply, both the left and the right have failed Britain - is undeniably appealing. Here we have an author who attempts find a via media between the normally dogmatic world of political ideology.
And overall he does a good job - up to a point. The more you read Red Tory, the more Blond show his true colours with his repeated assertions on the ‘family’ (read: heterosexual) and single parents. It doesn’t lapse into Daily Mail territory (Blond is far too smart for that) but it’s a bit too Conservative for my taste.
It is worth a read. The introduction is a fine example of well executed (and researched) political writing but after a while you can only take so much of ‘valour’ and his yearning for an Athenian model of democracy.
And overall he does a good job - up to a point. The more you read Red Tory, the more Blond show his true colours with his repeated assertions on the ‘family’ (read: heterosexual) and single parents. It doesn’t lapse into Daily Mail territory (Blond is far too smart for that) but it’s a bit too Conservative for my taste.
It is worth a read. The introduction is a fine example of well executed (and researched) political writing but after a while you can only take so much of ‘valour’ and his yearning for an Athenian model of democracy.
November 2, 2022
As one of the thinkers who contributed to the development of Cameron's political philosophy, this like Nick Timothy's Remaking One Nation shows what could have been. This book even though was written 11 years ago like Burke's Reflection on the revolution in France' and like the work of Roger Scruton, Douglas Murray and Disraeli is contributing to a foundational and important discussion of what Conservatism is. Whilst I may disagree with some of what is said in this book, I highly reccomend reading to see an alternative to the neoliberal market-state.
June 20, 2012
An excellent perspective on the political, social and economic crisis of the UK
March 26, 2013
utter shite
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