http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/09/madeleine-bunting-red-toryismA young postman launched a new political party in France last week. Between his mail rounds, this political newcomer is leading the New Anticapitalist party, an eclectic coalition of former communists and climate change activists. Nicolas Sarkozy dismisses him as a rabble-rousing extremist but Olivier Besancenot is gaining substantial support for his critique of unbridled capitalism and the need for collective ownership and redistribution.
This is the kind of politics we should be watching very closely: not the Elysée or Westminster, but what is happening on the fringes of mainstream politics where new ideas and new people are emerging in response to the spectacular collapse of an economic model. In times of such disorientation - policies that were madness only months ago are now part of the consensus - there is a scrabbling around for fresh ideas and new faces. The anxiety and loss of self-confidence now gaining hold across the developed world is feeding disillusionment with those who have presided over the mess and fuels the need for leaders who can describe a vision to put things right. Barack Obama is likely to be only the first beneficiary of a political world in which the impossible becomes possible. Both for good and bad.
That's the background to why mavericks such as the "red Tory" Phillip Blond deserve a careful hearing. A few months ago, Blond was a theology lecturer at the University of Cumbria writing a book on Thomas Aquinas; now he is giving David Cameron advice on progressive Conservatism. It was his ideas which peppered Cameron's speech at Davos; Simon Heffer was apoplectic with fury last week as he lambasted it as terrifying, meaningless, obtuse and infantile. Yes, all four adjectives were necessary.
Blond may provoke fury and incomprehension on the Tory blogs, but party thinkers such as Oliver Letwin and David Willetts are intrigued. As are the more thoughtful on the Labour backbenches such as Jon Cruddas. Close watchers on the left acknowledge that Blond is opening up "potent political territory" - territory that could go to the Tories but equally could be captured by another, or even a new, party.
The key to understanding Blond's thinking is that he is reviving a long-neglected tradition of English radical conservatism that goes back to William Cobbett and John Ruskin and which last flourished before the second world war in the thinking of GK Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. If you are thinking that this kind of stuff can hardly be relevant to our current predicament, think again. From this tradition emerged a passionate attack on both the power of the state and the power of big business. Belloc's argument in The Servile State was that both capitalism and socialism enslaved the masses to their dictates.
Blond picks up these strands of conservative communitarianism and links them to two current critiques. The first is an attack on his own party's hallowed faith in Thatcherite economics: it's bust, argues Blond, and led to a form of monopoly capitalism which enriched only a tiny oligarchy. The second is an attack on the managerial technocratic welfare state which has destroyed the mutualism of the working class - and here, he owes much to Ferdinand Mount's thoughtful Mind the Gap. Third, he attacks liberalism for promoting atomised individualism and moral relativism (which will go down very well with the Daily Mail constituency).
It sounds like a big bag of tricks, and it is; some new, some old, some borrowed, and only some blue. Part of why Blond has prompted such animosity is because, like any maverick, he doesn't select his enemies; he simply issues salvoes in every direction. He is well aware that he is no politician. But he has achieved that rare feat of producing a set of linked ideas which are historically rooted and yet have a real contemporary resonance. A rightwing critique of big business has been long overdue and is particularly apt now. There is profound weariness with a technocratic, utilitarian New Labour-managed welfare state. There is growing anxiety about liberalism's promotion of "excessive individualism" (the Good Childhood Inquiry published last week was a trumpet blast to this tune) and its manifest failures in promoting forms of social solidarity.
There are several possible outcomes for this kind of thinking. Jon Cruddas, who is now rereading RH Tawney, Richard Titmuss and Arnold Toynbee, argues the most positive would be if Blond's emphasis on social justice and relocalisation of the economy opened up space for Labour to rediscover its own ethical radical tradition. He acknowledges the Blond critique of New Labour managerialism and talks of the need for a "re-enchantment of politics" which offers hope and a sense of meaning.
Another intriguing possibility is that Blond's ideas prompt a schism in the Tory party because they amount to an outing of Thatcherism as essentially a cuckoo liberal project. She was never really a Conservative and the free market principles she let rip destroyed the traditions, social relationships and communities that are the core of Conservative values. Cameron has rehabilitated some of these in his "broken society" speeches and now has the unenviable task of persuading his largely Thatcherite party to see the error of its ways in adopting economic liberalism so enthusiastically. Already, there are some on the left licking their lips with anticipation at how this row might develop.
On the other hand, Cameron's flirtation with Blond's ideas might be just a phase, rather like when his mentor Tony Blair dallied with communitarianism in the mid-90s and was wont to quote the Quaker philosopher John Macmurray. In the pressure of office and the need to get results for public sector reform, all such rhetoric about devolving to community groups disappeared. Communitarianism could be just one of those steps to power by which new leaders, answering the widespread nostalgia for community, build up a claim to moral legitimacy.
And there is another possibility which, without being panicky, has to be put on the table from the start. Blond is resurrecting a conservative tradition which developed some ugly features. Both Chesterton and Belloc were admiring of Mussolini (though not of Hitler) and both were anti-semites. The emphasis on the community and the need for the individual to subordinate their own ends to the greater good is a theme which Blond asserts unapologetically; it also fed authoritarianism in the 1930s depression. Fascism was precisely about the offer of a third way between the big state of communism and the corruption and instability of corporate capitalism. To my mind, Blond is not nearly careful enough to head off such possible development of his own thinking.
At a recent event, John Gray described the kind of progressive Conservatism Blond espouses as offering "the most lively and fundamental conversation" at a "very interesting moment in British politics". Of course, there are gaps in the thinking and some of the thesis on localising capitalism is still half-baked - Blond's impending book, Red Toryism, may remedy some of that - but politics is not about intellectual coherence. It's about articulating raw responses such as fear, hope, desire, particularly at a time like now. Those who are feeling bewildered, buffeted and bossed about by powerful elites could find the central themes of red Toryism very seductive. If Cameron handles it carefully, he could use it to swell the ranks of Tory voters handsomely. You have been warned.
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