The meaning of Red Toryism

The Red Tory debate, the subject of a forthcoming book by the Conservative theorist Phillip Blond, featured in a fascinating column by Madeleine Bunting in the Guardian today.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/09/madeleine-bunting-red-toryism

I’m especially interested because I have been, in a small way, trying to suggest that a very similar mixture of small enterprise, localism, voluntaryism and anti-trust legislation against big business might be the way forward for political Liberalism. Yet here we are discussing it as the new direction for Cameron, backed by a whole range of Conservative luminaries.

I’m not saying I agree with everything Blond says, and there are some worrying areas – the strictures against immigration and free trade are ambiguous. It depends very much what he means by both, and certainly in his writings that I've seen, both get favourable and unfavourable slants.

Madeleine Bunting talks about the risks of this kind of romantic brand of Toryism, anti-Thatcher, anti-corporate (public and private), and it is certainly true that there are risks. Previous incarnations of this kind of romantic politics (Populism in the 1890s, Distributism in the 1920s, Social Credit in the 1930s) all flirted – once they had worn themselves out – with ideas we would consider dangerous.

Thinking about it a little more today, and translating it into American terms, I think the risks are clearer. Because actually this agenda is a neglected corner of Jeffersonian Liberalism. When it was used by the Left it ended up with the populist gangsterism of Huey Long. When it was used by the Right it ended up with the mildly malevolent communitarianism of Pat Buchanan. These are interesting byways, but not very attractive ones.

Only when it stays where it belongs, as political Liberalism – and I accept some of Phillip Blond’s analysis of the contradictions of liberalism – is it rendered safe. Because it is put in the context, as Jefferson intended, of the Declaration of Independence, where we hold some basic humanitarian truths to be self-evident.

So that’s my thesis. Take a closer look at Red Toryism, and be aware that the contradictions of Conservatism are also lurking, and take back those vital, neglected aspects of what are actually part of the Liberal heritage. An urgent part too: it is an antidote to the deadly technocracy of Fabianism which has been a kiss of death for so much of British policy, right and left, and which also lives on in the Liberal Democrats, seeking whom it will devour.

Faceless states

I do find it extraordinary what we will put up with from government and corporate alike.

For example. I bought a ticket down to Devon on Sunday. Nobody told me that, in fact, mytrain would not run, that I would be decanted at Exeter put into a bus, told I could not take my bulky luggage. They knew this but never told me when they took my money. They do the same to tens of thousands of people every weekend. Why doesn’t someone take them to court?

And another example (do I sound like a grumpy old man?). It is now past the deadline for filing my tax return on Friday. I met it, but if I hadn’t met it, HM Revenue & Customs would have fined me £100.

But it is also the deadline when I have to pay the rest of my tax for last year, plus half of it for this year (I’m self-employed). But HMR&C haven’t managed to tell me how much I owe.

They promised they would by the deadline when I called some weeks ago, but they haven’t. I’ve just talked to them again and asked them if they will pay me £100 for their failure. I need hardly say that they won't.

Worse, they will charge me interest from February 1 on my unpaid tax which they haven’t even managed to calculate yet, at least not in a letter to me with a paying-in slip so that I can pay it across the counter in a bank. Just imagine how they would all give me the runaround if I wasn't a grumpy old man.

The big speech

OK, I've got a small revival of flu, which is my excuse for not writing this yesterday. But wasn't the Obama speech a statement of modern Liberalism you could be proud of - committed to change, internationalist, but including a call to service, and an acceptance that politicians can't do it all?

Why can't we articulate that?

A new kind of money

Vince Cable was bang on with his phrase "giving the kiss of life to a corpse". The real problem is not that the banks refuse to lend, it is that they have lost the ability to do so. They have been consolidated to the point of uselessness to the local economy.

They also have no local infrastructure, and what structure they do have points towards the discredited speculative economy, not the real one. It is time to break them up, de-merge them and rebuild a local and regional lending infrastructure like they have in Europe and North America.

But just for a moment, take a quick trip back with me to March 1933, and Roosevelt's inauguration. About 5,000 banks had closed their doors a few days before. The second greatest economist of the age (Irving Fisher) had just published a book called Stamp Scrip, which urged a new kind of local money which lost value week by week, to encourage spending rather than hoarding.

Within a few months, there were 4,000 or so of these local currency systems across the northern states of the USA, following on from the highly successful models in Austria and Switzerland, and all based on the ideas of an Argentine trader called Silvio Gesell. Money that rusts. In Worgl in Austria, the very first, people had paid their local taxes months in advance and the council was able to invest in a range of new infrastructure: the originator there rejoiced in the name of Mayor Unterguggenberger, but that's beside the point.

There we are, some alternative economic archaeology. What's interesting about it is that Roosevelt was persuaded by the bankers to make stamp scrip illegal, in case it undermined confidence in banks. It was almost his first executive decision.

But what's interesting about it now is the reference to the whole affair on Barack Obama's blog, which really makes you wonder what is going to happen in the next few days:

http://citizensbriefingbook.change.gov/ideas/viewIdea.apexp?id=087800000004x6w

No pasaran!

The approval of the third runway at Heathrow is an extraordinary and historic event, and I kind of think we will all look back to it (15 January 2009) as the moment when everything changed.

Of course, it is also a miserable condemnation of the Labour government, which has never stood up to anybody rich and powerful and clearly never will. They have never challenged a corporate interest. Never imagined a way the world might be different, cleaner, healthier or fairer. They are, in short, utterly pointless and borderline corrupt in their miserable failure to shift us in any way towards a future where the planet might survive. History will condemn them for the bone-headed, utterly craven fawning on power.

But it is important for other reasons too. Because this is a No Pasaran moment for the green movement, shared by an extraordinary cross-section of society who believe there has to be a limit to what we sacrifice on the altar of wrong-headed progress. That there has to be a limit to the appeasement of those corporate interests that believe with so little evidence that the decision will benefit London, the economy, the jobless or anything else. The destruction of whole villages, twelfth century churches, the peace of great swathes of London, the sight of elderly ladies bundled into police vans: it will change the way people think.

In short, they will not let it happen, and the resulting clash is going to be painful for both sides. But there comes a point in history where the powerful so misread the signs that they lose their power, and so it will prove. I betcha!

The real victims of New Labour snobbery

Tell me, was there any disquiet at all at the BBC when the chief constable covering Dewsbury condemned Karen Matthews’ neighbours, a whole class of families, because “they never go out”?

Were there any complaints, or even qualms, at this outrageous piece of New Labour snobbery? I don’t know. I hope so, but fear there wasn’t.

It’s a bit late to blog about this, but we seem to be in the grip of a moral panic led by Ed Balls, which amounts to an attack on all children and their families, and mothers in particular. In the last few days, since I thought about this rather belated post, it has been intensifying worryingly.

I’m not of course defending Karen Matthews. But pointing out that most children with young families rarely “go anywhere” is not exactly an explanation for why someone should kidnap their own child.

Worse, was there anyone pointing out just how fatuous that leaked social workers report on Karen Matthews was – the one which criticised her for a fatal “inability to successfully place the children's needs above her own”?

In practice, do you know any mothers who systematically put their children’s needs always before their own? They are ill, depressed, stressed and sleep deprived. Good mothers understand how their children depend on them to look after themselves, rather than entirely subsuming their own physical and mental needs. That is good parenting.

But no, we are in New Labour fantasy-land, where mothers have to be virginal paragons of saintliness or must risk interference from the state. But who is speaking up for parents and their children in the midst of this nonsense? Who is pointing out that this kind of moralistic disconnection from the real world is likely to damage children as much as ‘save’ them?

Before policy-makers run too far down this path, it might be worth looking at the practical implications of policies based on this kind of rhetoric:

1. Those who need public services most begin to sense that professionals are not on their side. That’s why our shiny new, well-equipped local children’s centre is almost entirely empty.

2. There will be more children removed from ordinary, loving families simply because medical professionals don’t know what’s wrong with them.

3. Because all families are suspects, child protection agencies will continue to be overwhelmed, and we’ll get another Baby P and another and another...


But I think at the heart of all this pomposity is the vilification of ordinary parents, and mothers in particular.

Another tragedy of Baby P

There is another tragedy about Baby P. Not just the fate of a child at the hands of adults, but another twist in the rise of what I can only call the child abuse industry.

It means public officials will be even more nervous dealing with children. It means that suspicion will fall on ever more innocent families, and even more vulnerable children will be mistakenly and forcibly removed from their homes, and into the un-tender mercies of local authority care.

The other Baby P tragedy is that it will now be more, not less likely, that his tragedy will be repeated.

Over the past week, a whole army of people have emerged from the woodwork who have reported teachers, doctors and other people to Haringey for suspected abuse, and been ignored. This is not evidence of Haringey’s incompetence; it is one reason why have been so ineffective: because the child abuse industry has persuaded officials that any parents are potential abusers, that every illness that they can find no obvious reason for should bring any family under suspicion.

The truth is that, if every family comes under suspicion, there is no chance at all that welfare authorities can effectively police them. That is not the only reason for the the failure to keep Baby P alive, but it is one of them.

I wouldn’t be so glib as to say that abuse is obvious. Of course it isn’t. But it is a hundred times harder to spot if the field of suspicion covers everyone with children.