free market

Those are the words of Phillip Blond, the 43-year-old Liverpudlian philosopher nicknamed “the Red Tory” for his socially conservative, anti-Thatcherite views. Blond is best described as a Chestertonian or a Hitchensite (Peter, not Christopher), and argues that leaving things entirely to the free market destroys everything of value to conservatives: namely tradition, family life and society. On the other hand, the welfare state, that great untouchable sacred cow of socialism, has totally ruined working-class communities, taking away people’s mutual dependency, causing atomisation and destroying aspiration, making people selfish, apathetic and lazy.