Thin Economics; Thick Moralising: RedToryism and the Politics of Nostalgia
Roland Boer and Alex AndrewsLocality, family, moral economy, virtuous elites, commonpopular customs – these are the buzzwords of what has come to beknown as red toryism, which seeks to breath life into theconservative project in the UK. It valorises the local over the global,family over its discontents (gays, single parents, promiscuity), virtueover cynicism, common custom over bland commercial labels; inshort, a return to the progressive, communal values of conservatism. The name most usually associated with red toryism –also known as communitarian civic conservatism – is Phillip Blond.Our brief in this paper is not a treatment of the whole red torydoctrine, but a critical examination of its economic policies and howthey relate to theology, via morality.
Economics
In a nutshell, red toryism seeks to decouple conservativepolitics from its dirty little relationship with (neo-)liberal economics,an affair most successfully consummated by Margaret Thatcher andher ilk. Always an ill match, the end of the affair was bound tohappen sooner or later. But rather than make it is a bitter andrancorous separation, the Red Tories wish to make a virtue out of the break-up, seeking a return to the conservatives’ old and trustedpartner of many years hence – an ancient, well-nigh medievalcollection of economic practices that have been lost in the rush tocapitalism and industrialisation. It is a bold move, and we wouldrather listen to an intelligent conservative than a stupid liberal, even
though this conservatism has by no means convinced allconservatives of its validity or its electoral usefulness.Red tory economics may easily be organised in terms of adiagnosis of what they see as the current malaise and a prognosis of its cure. Our focus here is a relatively early piece by Blond called‘Red Tory’ (Blond 2008h). One reason for using this text is that itoutlines a fuller argument than the brief pieces Blond has beenproducing of late, which all make the same basic points but are nowgeared to the cycles of public appearances, interviews, online news,opinion fora and the flurry of facebook agitation (among many, seeBlond 2008g, 2008f, 2008b, 2009b, 2008e, 2008l, 2008a, 2008c,2008k, 2009c; Blond and Pabst 2005b). This text also provides thefirst statement of a study that, after much delay and much promise,finally appeared at the beginning of the 2010 election campaign inthe UK – a book with awkward title of
Red Tory: How Left and Right Have Broken Britain and How We Can Fix It
(2010), which hasunderwhelmed its readers, confirms the suspicions of Blond’s earlierpieces and says nothing that is not said in those pieces.
Diagnosis
In the “Red Tory” essay Blond analyses what conservativescall “broken Britain” – one of Blond’s empty and empiricallymistaken slogans taken from the conservative think tank, the Centrefor Social Justice, run by the former Tory leader Ian Duncan Smith
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As Ragan puts it: ‘Blond writes a kind of polytechnic prose in which the various jargons of philosophy, sociology, economics and theology are churned together asin a concrete mixer. His method of argument is to connect strings of unrelatedassertions with the words ‘thus’ and ‘then’ and ‘hence’ …
Red Tory
is like a 300-page Sunday sermon, preached by an autodidact country parson whose shelvesare stuffed with old blue and white Pelican books on subjects like modernpsychology, literature, sociology, government and economics, which the parson(in civilian life, Blond used to be a lecturer in theology) believes must hold the keyto the alien and ugly civilisation he encounters on his parish rounds.’ (Raban2010: 22). Blond has also been planning to complete a book on theology andperception called
The Eyes of Faith
, of which only an essay has appeared (Blond2005). But then he has not completed his PhD either, ostensibly under thesupervision of John Milbank. There is only so much a man can do; stopping tothink at length and produce some careful and patient studies laying out hisposition is not one of them.
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Beneath the bluster a rather simplepattern operates in Blond’s analysis: monolith versus fragments,monopolisation versus disintegration, centralisation versusatomisation. On the one hand we have a massive monolith – thecentralised state or monopoly capital – and on the other theatomised life of individuals. While the former suck in all power andwealth, the latter lead lives of meaningless and futile consumption. There are both unoriginal and original elements to the way Blonddeploys this schema; the catch is that the unoriginal dimensionsundo the original ones.Let us begin with what initially seems original. Blond arguesthat this opposition – both political and economic – is a result of certain developments in twentieth century UK. Apart from a brief laying of the blame at the feet of the French and AmericanRevolutions, he identifies three key moments in his own pottedhistory: the embrace (especially by the left) of the welfare stateafter 1945, the slide (again by the left) into the self-centredlibertarianism of the 1960s, and then the seduction (now of theright) by laissez-faire economics. If the first couple of betrayalsprovide the two terms of his grand opposition, the betrayal by theright is the most egregious of all, since ‘advanced capitalism’embodies this opposition within itself: it is, according to Blond, both‘individualist’ and ‘monopolist’, the latter using the rhetoric of theformer to advance its agenda.
The problem for Blond is that this relatively original narrativeis undermined by the unoriginal parts of his analysis. We restrict
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Other slogans include: the left and right are exhausted; young people these daysprefer to turn to religion rather than Marx (Blond 2008g, 2008h, 2008k; Coombs2009).
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Liberalism, the left, libertarianism and laissez-faire are among the manyenemies of the Red Tory faith. In a longer version of this study, we argue thatthese enemies include anything that starts with L (see our starting list), big thingssuch as secularism, the centralised state and the monopolised market, foreignthings such as immigration, Islam and China, and icky things like abortion andhomosexuality (Blond 2008d, 2008i; Blond and Pabst 2005a, 2006b, 2008, 2007,2006a; Derbyshire 2009).
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