| Red Tory: How Left and Right Have Broken Britain and How We Can Fix it |
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Phillip Blond Red Tory: How Left and Right Have Broken Britain and How We Can Fix it is Phillip Blond’s manifesto. He denies that we have genuine capitalism in the UK or the US. In the popular mind, “capitalism” implies the means of production are widely distributed and under the control of many with its attendant benefits. Following the philosophical lead of Christian thinker Hillaire Belloc’s The Servile State, Blond commands an array of statistics demonstrating the fulfillment of Belloc’s predicted merger of Business and Government. Big Government and Big Business are both monopolistic and operate in concert. Each sees itself “too big (and important) to fail.” Instead of competition and free enterprise, the UK and US became “market economies” dominated by corporate rent-seekers dependent on government-created scarcity and regulation to prevent competition and guarantee profits. Statists then depend on corporations as their “Golden Goose” to keep the system afloat. Blond stuns American Conservatives who equate “Christian economics” with libertarianism. Evangelical “Republicans” rightly reject state socialism. But then we find ourselves by default supporting the kind of politicians who welcome casinos as a sign of “economic development” while dismissing the moral consequences of their actions. Under different circumstances these same glad handing fellows would likely support the opening of a new brothel as “economic development”, then run their next campaign claiming to have provided regular work for their town’s wives and daughters! Blond argues that both the state-run enterprises behind the Iron Curtain and the “Big Box” corporate culture of the West ultimately deliver subsistence wages instead of family empowerment. Both agendas destroy community and create ruthless societies where the love of God and neighbor increasingly vanish. Blond hopes that the present global economic stress will cause us to question the “orthodoxies” of the Right and the Left. For Blond, the humane goal is “Big Society, not Big Government.” To the uninitiated, Blond sounds like a social conservative on moral and cultural issues... Blond’s work imports from a variety of historical precedents in Christian economic philosophy seen in some Anglican, Reformed, and Roman Catholic traditions. Belloc and Chesterton are best known though some modern economists like John D. Mueller hope to revive “Augustinian economics.” “Red” stands for the movement’s compassion for the poor and it’s yearning for economic justice. “Tory” describes a historic commitment to virtue, tradition, and the priority of the general good.* To the uninitiated, Blond sounds like a social conservative on moral and cultural issues. On economics, he at first seems a state socialist or enemy of the free market. State socialism, though, is the farthest thing from Blond’s mind. Instead, seeks a truly free market with widely-owned capital. To use a US example of his concern, Blond might ask us if a “market” whose political leaders have provided over a billion dollars in tax incentives for the spread of “Big Box” stores to supplant existing local competitors in the pursuit of “progress” is a “free market”? Hardly. For Blond and other Christian Distributists, corporate entities are recognized for what they are – mere creations of the state. Because corporations are not people created in God’s image, they do not have either “inalienable rights” or responsibilities before God. If they exist at all, corporations must be the servants of people – not their masters. At the present time, the monopolistic corporation has too often become mankind’s master more than it’s servant with the willing help of their political partners. Blond’s work should be attractive to Christians who want to develop an explicitly Christian economic view. In some ways though, Blond’s work is inaccessible to Americans. For now his book is most readily available via Amazon’s Kindle system. It is likewise inaccessible culturally because we do not immediately and viscerally understand the problems of the UK as we would our own. That may change - perhaps soon we will understand his concerns about the inefficiencies of the state run “National Health System”! As another example, a term like “council estate” does not immediately bring to mind our dangerous and run- down “housing projects” that are their US equivalent. Despite the cultural distance, it will be worth the effort to understand Blond’s work and watch its impact which can be monitored via the work of the “Red Tory Think Tank” Res Publica http://www.respublica.org.uk/ American evangelicals will have many questions as to its practical implementation. Readers will find in his thought the seeds of a Christian economic approach worth considering in lieu of our present subservience to Big Business under the thrall of the Baal named Libertarianism. * Red Tory, p. 35 Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites
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Red Tories have been a stable feature of Canadian politics for decades, although by now the phenomenon they represent has passed its sell-by date. I understand that Blond has been influenced by Canada's late philosopher, George Parkin Grant (1918-1988), whom I was privileged to meet on two occasions many years ago. Check out my essay, "George Grant and the Primacy of Economics," available here: http://www.cardus.ca/comment/article/214/. Grant's works are published in the US by University of Notre Dame Press and are well worth reading.
In the past decade, traditional conservatism in Canada has been largely supplanted by American-style libertarianism. Those few who still call themselves Red Tories are claiming a label that Grant, a devout Anglican Christian and an opponent of the abortion licence, would be unlikely to acknowledge.