The UK’s New Statesman author Jonathan Derbyshire writes that:
Phillip Blond’s ““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.”
Here are some of the details on the political theory:
“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.”
J. Derbyshire also gives details on the spiritual/religious background of these ideas:
“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.”
More articles on the ‘P2P Right’ are here.