THATCHERISM WITH LIPSTICK:

Profile: Phillip Blond: 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 (Jonathan Derbyshire, 19 February 2009, New Statesman)

[Phillip] Blond's Red Tory thesis is that the Conservatives...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".

Just like W called his Thatcherism compassionate conservatism.

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Posted by Orrin Judd at February 19, 2009 8:22 AM