Bristol Festival of Ideas

ResPublica Director Phillip Blond will be speaking at the Festival about his new book "Red Tory".

Conventional politics is at a crossroads. Amid recession, depression, poverty, increasing violence and rising inequality, current politics is exhausted and inadequate. In Red Tory, Phillip Blond argues that only a radical new political settlement can tackle these problems. Red Toryism combines economic egalitarianism with social conservatism, calling for an end to the monopolisation of society and the private sphere by the state and the market.

Decrying the legacy of both the Labour and Conservative parties, Blond proposes a progressive Conservatism that will restore social equality and revive British culture. He calls for the strengthening of local communities and economies, ending dispossession, redistribution of the tax burden and restoration of the nuclear family.

Red Tory offers a different vision for our future and asks us to question our long-held political assumptions. Phillip Blond’s ideas have already been praised or attacked in every major British newspaper and journal and this will be a session that challenges political assumptions. It takes place a month before what is likely to be one of the closest general elections for three decades.

Phillip Blond will be interviewed by John Gray, political philosopher and author of many books including Straw Dogs and, most recently, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia and Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings.

To book tickets please visit the Bristol Festival of Ideas website: http://www.ideasfestival.co.uk/?p=423