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By Phillip Blond - 23rd December 2009
Over the festive season ePolitix.com is publishing some of the best articles and interviews of 2009 from our sister publication The House Magazine.
In March Phillip Blond, director of the Progressive Conservatism Project at Demos, set out some of the ideals of progressive Tory thinking.
Politics by its nature is debate about the common good. People divide into rival ideological camps over fundamentally different accounts of how to realise the 'good society' in ordinary life.
Politics in a democracy offers competing visions of what the good life consists of and how it might be realised in society.
Progressive Conservatism is then a re-statement of the belief that contemporary British Conservatism can fulfil or help create outcomes that people clearly identify as desirable and good.
The exciting thing about the British Conservatives is that they have developed a compelling critique of contemporary British society, and they are developing an equally forceful critique of the prevailing economic orthodoxy.
Progressive Conservatism has diagnosed two ills: a broken society and a broken economy, and in diagnosing the British social and economic body as ailing, Conservatism is committed to producing the appropriate remedies.
The thesis of the broken society is well known but no less convincing for that: the fragmentation of our society, the litany of broken families, un-parented children and a disenfranchised and trapped underclass.
The analysis of the origins and nature of this condition are multivalent but one key theme emerging from the Tory critique is an analysis of the disempowering and disenfranchising role of the state which, when accompanied with economic disadvantage and internal social dysfunction, helps to create an insurmountable barrier to human progression and fulfilment.
What is new in the Conservative approach is that a more fundamental diagnosis underpins all of the above – the lack of human relationships and a general diminution of the civic basis of British society and life.
Indeed, social anonymity and fragmentation is on the rise throughout British society – and in itself accompanies a general 'social weakening' that affects all of us in our dealings with wider society.
State centralisation has in large part helped to accelerate this process – all of our intermediate institutions that once offered ordinary people some measure of associative control over their lives have vanished.
Be they churches, voluntary groups, universities, local government, political parties, trade unions or rotary clubs, all have been steadily diminished as the power and authority they once exercised have been gradually accrued to quangos or governmental departments.
Quite clearly a widespread and radical de-centralisation of power and responsibility to individuals, communities and local government and other institutions is fundamental to fostering association and relationship.
The rebuilding of our civic life is the fundamental drive of a Conservatism that is dedicated to mending the broken society.
It will be the way that the many other factors of disadvantage - be they economic, emotional or material will be addressed – seen in this way, people will play a part in overcoming their own disadvantage.
For progressive Conservatism, just as many of our social problems stem from an over-centralised and disempowering state, so many of our economic problems derive from an over-centralised and monopolised economy.
Seventy per cent of the rise in our GDP over the last 10 years has come from the financial services, the public sector and speculation in residential housing.
We have a hugely unbalanced economy centred around the South East that essentially drains away all the wealth, expertise and innovation into one economic monoculture.
Moreover, one could quite easily analyse the entire financial crisis as stemming from the monopolisation of credit and the asset bases required to leverage it.
All the global credit flows and counterparty swaps are in the final instance secured on residential property whose asset value was securitised and globalised; this then produced more credit in the global markets to bid up the value of the original asset, and so on and so on.
Monopolised markets always monopolise supply – and so when just one group of securised debt payers are unable to make their payments, the entire system unravels.
Global trade and capital flow needs a diversified system to ensure that risk is properly recognised – paradoxically to survive, a global free market needs a diversified local market to also prosper.
As such, rebalancing and re-diversifying the British economy requires a local political economy. We need to develop a regional specified local economy that distributes innovation, excellence and prosperity across the entire country.
Alongside this 'relocalisation' of the economy comes the need to recapitalise the poor. The bottom half of our population have only one per cent of the share of the country’s liquid capital wealth, savings are at levels last seen in the late 1940s, and people have nothing to fall back on.
We must restore the asset and equity patterns of the most economically vulnerable members of our society.
We will need new methods and ways of thinking – new ways to group together those who have very little, such that they can have and earn more – we most offer them comparative advantage so as to overcome their disadvantage and all of this must be coupled with fresh models of innovation and ethos – such that a rethought social capital can produce real capital.
If ten people by themselves cannot buy an asset, then ten people together in a Conservative co-operative can buy that asset and buy fractional ownership in time or equity that they themselves can singularly trade and own.
All of this conjures up new models of innovation and extension, why not local stockmarkets, local venture capital and local ISAs that invest in the immediate surroundings and all its inhabitants.
Moreover, we must break down the barriers to market entry that prevent so many local businesses from competing in their own territory - and through recapitalisation we must once again provide ordinary people with the means to trade and exchange.
Every crisis brings with it opportunities – progressive Conservatism is not a new triangulation or another attempt to rethink a third, third way.
It is a philosophy that draws on the deepest roots of Conservatism – one that wishes to protect what we have, develop it and extend its benefit to all.
For Conservatism the social is not the sole province of socialism; in fact, they have abandoned society for the monopoly benefits of elites and centralised wealth and power – in the present political paradigm, it is only Conservatism that wishes to extend those benefits to all.
Phillip Blond is director of the Progressive Conservatism Project at think-tank Demos.
Dods Parliamentary Communications Ltd
Rudi Affolter
23rd Dec 2009 at 9:25 pm