Events | 2009.07.31
The red Tory delusion | Tom Clark
These outrider visions suit Cameron very nicely – just don\'t expect him to put them into action
Political cross-dressing is familiar, but so-called Red Tories are indulging in something more like political reassignment surgery. The leading light is Phillip Blond – who clings to David Cameron\'s coat-tails while shunning the Conservative creed of coming to terms with the world as it is. He damns Labour for failing to tame big business or close the wealth gap, suggesting the Tories can do better by developing the Cameroonian insight that "there is such a thing as society, but it\'s not the same as the state".
With spending cuts on the way, Cameron can only benefit from an intellectual outrider who promotes a Tory prescription that goes beyond the axe. So in January he spoke at the launch of Blond\'s work at Demos , a thinktank that has been courting modernising Conservatives. It has recently been announced Blond is leaving Demos , but he continues to attract sympathetic attention for his party in naturally suspicious quarters – including in the Guardian.
Blond recently proposed " recapitalising the poor ". Even putting aside the irresistible question of how much capital the poor had in the first place, the detail is easy to pick at. Instead of blowing a hole in the government\'s books, he conjectures the banking bailout will produce eventual returns for Whitehall to funnel to the dispossessed. He imagines cash-strapped councils have money to hand back to already subsidised tenants, and proposes extending means testing while railing against the poverty trap it creates.
Blond is not a policy wonk but a theologian. Treasury officials would make mincemeat of his detailed plans but, on the big ideas, he has interesting things to say. He highlights pre-1979 Tory traditions of responsibility to the community, and argues that all the main parties are beset by a narrowing liberalism, which imagines people as atomised consumers, not citizens. From that vantage point, he says, the role of small businesses simply drops out of view. He proposes rewriting competition rules, so community life can be considered alongside the price of fish in decisions about whether to license yet another Tesco.
While this policy is attractive, a Tory government would struggle to implement it, because it clashes with the big Conservative business interests. We arrive at the nub of the argument for ingesting Red Toryism with a shovel-load of salt. Clever people, of whom Blond is indubitably one, are prone to over-intellectualising politics – failing to grasp that it is a game where interests trump ideas. In the Tory party, the weightiest interest is property – not the abstract notion, but the real security of those who happen to own it.
The hold of property is not some recent aberration, dating from the Iron Lady\'s protection of "our people". Lord Salisbury saw property\'s defence as his central aim – there was "always wealth", he said. A generation later, Bonar Law promised to "leave things alone" rather than meddle in what different classes owned. Even the more conciliatory Stanley Baldwin pursued deflation, which protected rentiers at the expense of the working man. Throughout, Conservatives have stood against organised labour – which embodies the non-state mutualism that Blond is so keen on but threatens the owners of industry.
Blond ignores all of this, and so fails to comprehend what the Conservative party is – and what it is set to remain. The instinct to approach policy from the point of view of the investor means the Tories have not, as Blond urges, ditched mail privatisation. Instead it is Labour, driven by its own union interests, that has kicked privatisation into touch. Likewise, the overriding need to serve "our people" explains why the Tories remain committed to an inheritance tax cut, and why each Labour budget redistributes a little to the poor.
Inequality has remained stubbornly high despite this because forces such as de-unionisation and privatisation remain powerful. These arguably benefit consumers, but the Tories originally unleashed them at least in part because they served Conservative interests. The Red Tory idea that the party may reverse them now is delusional because – as Palmerston said – interests are eternal.
None of this means conservative intellectual attitudes lack merit – scepticism about what works, realism about human nature, and suspicion of the state have a great deal to commend them. It is also true that conservative interests can at times ally with progressive values. On personal liberty, a case can be made that the Conservatives are now the more progressive party. In the end, though, every party is hostage to its "own people", on the question of who gets what.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]rvative-red-left-phillip-blond
