The boring Tory

John Milbank, the man behind both Red Tory and Blue Labour

“Red Tory” is a book by Phillip Blond, an Anglican theologian of the Radical Orthodox variety. This particular work doesn't deal with religion, however, but with British politics. Blond heads a conservative think tank called ResPublica, which at least previously supported British Prime Minister David Cameron.

The odd designation Red Tory stands for a (supposed) combination of social egalitarianism and anti-capitalism on the one hand, and traditional moral values on the other. The claim that Blond stands for egalitarianism is something of a stretch, since he explicitly sees Benjamin Disraeli, the Primrose League and various High Tories such as John Ruskin as his ideological forebears. Less visible, but always lurking in the background, is the Distributism of “Chesterbelloc”. Now, Hilaire Belloc wasn't what anyone would call an egalitarian! Indeed, Blond explicitly says in “Red Tory” that society needs a hierarchy based on virtue, and opposes high taxes on inheritance, making it possible for property-owners to pass on their property through the family line. He even says that such people need certain privileges…

That being said, “Red Tory” is nevertheless an interesting read, since Blond attempts – with varied degrees of success, to be sure – to apply a Distributist and communitarian form of conservatism to contemporary British conditions. Being equally critical of both the welfare state and the neo-liberal market (which, paradoxically, also breeds a strong state), Blond proposes to remake Britain in a more Distributist image by decentralization, the scrapping of repressive laws, a public sector controlled by the employees and users, more employee-owned businesses (“John Lewis” is his favorite), and various government-sponsored schemes to increase the savings of the poor. The author is pragmatic, and his concrete proposals are often less radical than his more theoretical positions, which seem to envisage the creation of a kind of Jeffersonian-Aristotelian elite within a relatively homogenous democratic polity (the American version of “Red Tory” is titled “Radical Republic”). As already mentioned, Blond's strategy is to act as a ginger group on the Conservative Party of David Cameron. Interestingly, Blond has connections to a kind of mirror image on the “left”, Blue Labour, which wants to transform the British Labour Party into a party simultaneously opposed to neo-liberalism and “liberal” social values. Both Red Tory and Blue Labour have been associated with Radical Orthodoxy.

Some contentious issues are studiously avoided in “Red Tory”. While the author explicitly opposes the Iraqi War and sees the War on Terror mostly as an excuse to repress civil liberties at home, it's not entirely clear *why* he does so. Isolationism? Or some other reason? The question of Islam isn't mentioned at all (sic), yet Britain has a sizable Muslim population which attempts to gain political influence and/or create independent communities ruled by the sharia. How does a conservative Christian communitarian look at this? Blond implies at several points that he opposes mass non-European immigration, since he bemoans the destruction of “White working class communities” by authorities which gave foreigners access to public housing, but this UKIP-sounding theme is never developed. (A colleague who saw me reading “Red Tory” actually wondered whether it was a UKIP book, which may tell us something about who is *really* seen as the opposition these days.)

The book also strikes me as contradictory and even unrealistic at some points. There is a tension between the longing for a morally and politically virtuous elite, and the more liberal idea that we are finite beings who can't know everything, and hence need to negotiate our respective truths with other citizens on the basis of individual human rights (rather than, presumably, natural law). Leo Strauss? There is also a tension between constant attacks on the super-rich and how they monopolize most wealth in society, and the absence of any concrete proposals how to remedy *this* situation. Does Blond imagine that a Distributist society could be created while the super-rich are still super-rich? The calls to decentralize the state sound more consistent with a Distributist perspective, but are unrealistic (unless the state simply collapses, at which point localization will take place automatically). In reality, a strong state is needed to redistribute property from the neo-liberal elites to the poor, the workers and the lower middle class. Belloc must have realized this at some point, since his later writings sound less libertarian than his earlier ones. Blond's proposals, while not without some interest, run the risk of becoming new poverty traps: the super-rich can live with “devolution” and cooperatives for the poor, as long as it doesn't affect their own hallowed property rights… Blond would have to come up with much more than this, to really become a “Red” Tory!

Final complaint. The book was immensely boring to read, so perhaps one shouldn't let a theologian write political pamphlets…