The Tories are the party of greed, Labour the party of lust

I can’t argue with any of this:

“The state has bailed out the banking system but has proved incapable of saving its own citizens from debt and servitude,” he will say. “Moreover the state has arrested social mobility and destroyed the structures of working class advancement.

“And in the absence of a common British narrative that unites all peoples and classes; proper respect for other cultures and traditions has collapsed into a state sanctioned multiculturalism that has produced antagonistic communities and licensed the return of extremism and racism.”

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.

Blond’s philosophy is heavily influenced by Christianity, and to those living in the triangle between White City, Westminster and Islington, his social conservatism is well beyond the pale. In a Sunday Times profile last month the journalist described his opposition to abortion and fatherlessness as “incendiary”, as if these views – the norm not so long ago – were comparable with denying the Holocaust or supporting apartheid.

But outside of the London media class, and the remaining band of Left-wing journalists who think social disorder has all been invented by the Daily Mail, Blond’s social conservatism may well appeal to the majority of people who cannot afford to escape societal breakdown by moving to a mega-rich enclave.

There are many people who, to paraphrase Rod Dreher, see the Conservatives as the party of greed and Labour as the party of lust, and curse both the worst excesses of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the massive inequality and unemployment that resulted from Thatcher’s reforms – with the unhappy, broken society that has resulted.

My major doubt is that Blond’s solutions seem to have been designed for 1950s Britain, not for the diverse, divided country of the 2000s, which makes it hard (almost impossible) to re-build “community values”. Hugely mixed societies like ours are not fertile ground for communitarian politics that require a strong sense of solidarity among its citizens; moreover I’m not even sure that “working-class communities” exist anymore in the sense they once did.

But whether or not these turn out to be crucial factors, Blond’s vision of a more civilised, respectful, equal and gentle society must be extremely attractive to voters on both the Left and Right.