Blond v blonde: why the Iron Lady will defeat the Red Tory

The Labour movement column

By Anthony Painter / @anthonypainter

Phillip Blond has electrified politics with his Red Toryism. There is nothing in political discourse that is more exciting, intellectually challenging, and politically intriguing than this combination of pre-industrial values and modern conservatism. It would be glib to accuse Conservatives of living in the past. If they do, then Phillip Blond makes it a virtue and agitates for a different society on that basis. This is the ‘red’ in him.

However, listening to Blond’s speech at the launch of his new think tank Respublica last Thursday, a vague sense of unease set in. His most ferocious attacks were reserved for the welfare state:

“…welfare ceased to function as a safety net through which people could not fall, becoming instead a ceiling through which the supplicant class – cut off from earlier working class ambition and aspiration – could not break.”

And yet, this is palpably ridiculous. Free education, quality social housing, free and universal healthcare, income support when bad times hit, have not imprisoned the working classes. Am I arguing that welfare dependency doesn’t exist? No. People in difficult situations can become demotivated. Some individuals will freeride and even break the law. But to characterise the entire welfare state in this way is to ignore history – a strange tactic for someone who is asking us to re-read our history and consider what we may have lost.

The reason that the welfare state was introduced and subsequently expanded – most particularly by the Clement Attlee’s Government – wasn’t because charitable and voluntaristic welfare was working. It was because such welfare was patchy, parsimonious, sporadic, and largely demeaning. No civilised and wealthy society could tolerate the unnecessary suffering of so many. To claim that the welfare state was about “a middle class elite [forming] the machinery of the welfare state, yes to alleviate poverty, but also to deprive the poor of their irritating habit of autonomous organisation” is just perverse.

What’s more, the greatest increase in working class distress has come when the welfare state has been withdrawn not expanded. Relative poverty soared in the 1980s. Welfare in all its forms became less generous, and at a time that rapid industrial change was flattening entire communities economically and socially. Dependency was greater when the welfare was withdrawn. Why? It was a toxic mixture of industrial change and policy decisions to move claimants onto incapacity benefit rather than unemployment benefits. The fact that countries with stronger welfare systems demonstrate a greater degree of social mobility is also something that seems to have escaped the Red Tories.

They would argue that this is to erect straw men; they want a more civil state not an elimination of welfare. If that’s the case, why attack the fundamental notion of welfare? Why adopt a vernacular and (erroneous) historical analysis that attempts to de-legitimise the welfare state?

If we are simply talking about different ways of delivering welfare – more personal, with a variety of different types of providers, and an active rather than passive focus – then fine. But isn’t that where the government is at already? And how do they think that by attacking the historical evolution of the welfare state – and in a completely misleading fashion – that will help to maintain popular legitimacy for welfare? Such legitimacy is essential to its maintenance.

The reality is that it won’t, and this is the key point. We are still bearing the consequences of a decade and a half of Tory romanticism (to be generous), 30 years after Margaret Thatcher came into office. This conservative ethos is something that the Red Blond and the Blue Blonde share. She too knew her Edmund Burke and told us how those famous little platoons could save us:

“We believe that every human being is unique, endowed with dignity and talents and possessed of the right to strive, within the limits of law and decency, to fulfill those talents. A fulfilment which can only be achieved within the communities which nurture us. We realise, with Edmund Burke, that “to be attached to the sub-division, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affection. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind.”

Thatcher continued:

“Free individuals making choices in free markets aren’t the enemy of responsible communities: they’re the heart of them.”

Phillip Blond quotes Edmund Burke in the same sense: all will be alright if we just get the state off of our back, unleash real human freedom, grounded in communities, bound by the ties of human sympathy and association. Only we know that is not the case. As soon as you lift the protection of state, communities are devastated rather than rejuvenated. Just go to a poor neighbourhood in any American city to see the evidence. Or simply look at what has happened to the quality of public housing, and ghettoized estates in the UK; as we have failed to invest, society segregates and the relatively wealthy move on. That’s where sole reliance on the ‘little platoons’ gets you.

Because the anti-welfare state rhetoric is more politically juicy, that’s the agenda that will be advanced in way that the Red Tories’ economic agenda won’t be. The more politically responsible and historically honest approach is to acknowledge the tremendous contribution that the welfare state has made in alleviating poverty, improving quality of life, and expanding autonomy, but also to acknowledge its short-comings and accept there are often better ways of doing things. By attacking the fundamental notion you strengthen the case for withdrawal rather than reform.

Actually, there is a sense that Phillip Blond does approach things in a different way to Margaret Thatcher. Though his economics are riddled with contradictions – the state has to remove barriers to market entry while simultaneously removing itself from an interventionist role being an obvious example – he is not a neo-liberal in the way that Margaret Thatcher was. Again, though, he challenges the legitimacy of the state while wanting to re-moralise our economy. He wills the ends but disables one of the means. Besides, for Conservatives, this agenda will just be too politically difficult. That’s why it’s the welfare agenda that will attract them most.

The Red Tory encourages political forces that could very soon mean that they lose control of the argument. In ethos the Red Blond and the blue blonde share much. Ideologically, they differ in significant ways. But they share a language so, in reality, they are likely to end up in the same place: rather than a re-moralised Britain, we would be left with a demoralised one instead.