03.27.10
“Red Tory” communitarianism??
RG mail
The crisis is an opportunity to sweep away the rotten postwar settlement
of British politics. Labour is moribund. But David Cameron has a chance to
develop a “red Tory” communitarianism, socially conservative but sceptical
of neoliberal economics
by Phillip Blond
prospectmagazine.co.uk (February 28 2009)
We live in a time of crisis. In such times humans retreat to safety, and
build bulwarks against the future. The financial emergency is having this
effect on Britain’s governing class. Labour has withdrawn to the safety of
the sheltering state, and the comforts of its first income tax rise since
the mid-1970s. Meanwhile, the Conservatives appear to be proposing a
repeat of Thatcherite austerity in the face of economic catastrophe. But
this crisis is more than an ordinary recession. It represents a
disintegration of the idea of the “market state” and makes obsolete the
political consensus of the last thirty years. A fresh analysis of the
ruling ideological orthodoxy is required. Certainly, this new thinking
isn’t going to come from the left. New Labour is intellectually dead,
while Gordon Brown promises an indebted return to a now-defunct status
quo. But, in truth, Brown’s reconversion from post-socialist free
marketeer to state interventionist is only plausible because the
Conservatives have failed to develop an alternative political economy that
explains the crisis, and charts a different future free of the now
bankrupt orthodoxies. Until this is achieved, Brown’s claim that the
Conservatives are the “do nothing” party has real traction, and makes the
result of the next election far from assured.
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2009/02/riseoftheredtories/