Blond: brainy, brave, but a bit too Blunkett

(Longish post alert – 2,000 words)

One of the hottest topics of debate at the moment is Phillip Blond’s influential new book ‘Red Tory‘.  Everyone out there read it?

No?  Well what are you waiting for?

Oh yes, one problem.  It’s current set for publication in January 2010, according to Amazon.

Dave Osler, in his drippingly sardonic review of Blond’s Guardian piece about Red Toryism, can be forgiven for putting it on his summer ‘09 reading list; there’s been so much coverage of this notion of Red Toryism over the last few months that, if you weren’t anal enough to check, you’d think something a bit more substantive than a strangely jumbled few hundred words to the Guardian and an an interview or two with current affairs magazines might be available.

But there, I think, is the point. 

It seems to me that Red Toryism is currently little more than a big PR exercise, and that the intellectual innovation so lauded is, if there is any at all, really very limited. 

The timing of the publication, the PR push back in late 2008/early 2009 when a 2009 election looked like it might possibly happen, and now a further push as the unofficial party manifestos get set out, all seem to point towards Blond being used, whether or not he is aware of it, as part of Cameron’s all-too-obvious makeover. 

To what extent the book is even written at the moment is open to debate.  Some of the PR stuff out there suggests that Blond still just has a mass of scattered thoughts about what might be nice to see, and that what’s finally produced in the book may be more of a reflection of how the PR has been received and commented upon than it will be based on any coherent intellectual approach.  As such, it will fit perfectly with the Conservative approach to populist policy-making.

So, given that Red Toryism currently amounts to little more than an essay in Prospect magazine and a few other scattered bits of PR machinery-at-work (I don’t deny that Mr Blond has a substantial body of theological work behind him, but that’s hardly the same as a venture into political economy), what are we to make of it so far?

What I think it is already safe to say is that, despite Blond’s claims and Jon Cruddas’s naive agreement, there is little that is genuinely radical about Red Toryism.  The kind of policies that Blond sets forth in both the Prospect essay and the Guardian piece are a mixture of the unintelligible,  the already tried and the nice-sounding0-but-utterly-ineffective.

That is not to say that Blond is always wrong about everything, or even that he is completely under the thumb of Conservative HQ when it comes to his analysis.  

I would be pleased enough to have written the introductory paragraphs of the Guardian piece myself, as they are a pretty good though now fairly standard leftish critique of how the financial crisis came about (though I take Tim Worstall’s point that the figures on rising income inequality are clumsily expressed).

Certainly, it’s good to see him speak out against the rightwing-promulgated myth that the sub prime crisis in the States was caused by the Community Reinvestment Act, and that the idea of local lending to those in low income groups should not be dismissed because of it.

Moreover, it’s good that he’s prepared to speak out in favour of quantitative easing as a cost-efficient way of borrowing, even in the knowledge that most Conservatives won’t touch the idea with a barge pole for fear of being tied into the ‘Printing Money is Like Zimbabwe) nonsense.  Here, he stands his ground with the Estimable Duncan Weldon (see this early Duncan post), and that’s good economist company to keep.

And when it comes to straight distribution, there’s also an honesty about the way he says we should take £1,670 per year off a middle-income family with two children, and give it too poorer families to match with their Child Trust Funds, even though he’s not clear where the dividing line between poor and not so poor lies, and even though the coherence between his argument for putting cash into the economy by quantitative easing and effectively taking it out by transferring it into savings must be in doubt.

Here, at least, his intentions appear good, and good enough not to have checked out that proposal with Conservative HQ, who will no doubt over the next few days get the right heebee jeebies about prospective ‘Loonie godbotherer steals hard working families cash to hand over to feckless poor’ headlines.

So fair play to him as far as that goes.

But when it comes to more substantive policy suggestions, he starts to lose it a bit.

Don Paskini (and this follow up commentfrom Sunder) deals with his ignorance of all thing social and local authority housing, as well as the basic unintelligibility of what he is suggesting.

But this is just of an array of vaguely set forth initiatives around the theme of ‘recapitalising the poor’ by allowing them to gain ‘assets’.

When he suggests Community Right to Buy as a way forward, he seems to be unaware of the £30 million Community Assets Programme, which opened for business in September 2007.  Had he been aware, he might have known that it took more than a year for the first grant to be made, and that his estimate that a ‘community’ might need six months to pull everything together is pretty fanciful, and ignorant of the real conditions and complexities of life in deprived areas.

Similarly, while his support for social enterprise as a way forward in deprived areas is laudable, it’s also rather naive.   Social enterprise thrives because people are willing and able to buy the services and good on offer, but he’s already accepted that current growing income inequalities militate against that.  Yet, as noted, his solution to this seems to involve removing ready cash from middle-income families (child benefit) who might buy these services in order that that it can be invested in stock market investments a million miles beyond the control of those same people.  Like Don Paskini, I think  ‘The kindest thing it is possible to say about this idea is that it doesn’t address any of the problems that……people….actually face.’

He even seems not to have noticed the Scottish Community Right to Buy Section of the Land Reform Act (2003).  Had he been aware, he might also have known that it’s failed to do what it was supposed to do, given that only 7 expressions of interest have gone forward from ‘crofting communities’, compared with 1000 from tenant farmers.  This is hardly surprising, when the official guidance starts with the foreboding: ‘The requirements of the crofting community right to buy in Part 3 of the Act are both complex and demanding’.

Then we come to the proposal to

‘ensure local government procurement is devolved to local bodies……. So conceived, the localities could help to reverse the dreadful centralising pull of London—which sucks all the talent and money from the rest of the country into the overheated south east, leaving everywhere else a mere backwater.’

It sounds great, both in terms of regional distribution and in terms of the green agenda, but unfortunately it’s already been tried, and failed to deliver because of the range of countervailing pressures associated with cutting costs and economies of scale in both local authorities and the NHS. 

The National Strategy for Local Government Procurement, published in 2003 and read avidly by local economic development geeks, had a whole chapter devoted to ‘Stimulating markets and achieving community benefits’ and envisaged exactly what Blond now envisages.  Sadly the final report in 2008, while basically a sales pitch for the achievements of the strategy, had to admit that only a small percentage of local authorities had bothered to do anything about the ideas in the report.

Then we come to the idea of matching the Child Trust Fund for poorer families to create a bigger asset.  David Blunkett got there first on that one, four years ago tomorrow, though seven since action started:

‘As early as 20th May, nearly half a million Child Trust Fund accounts had been opened out of 1.7 million vouchers sent out. We need to explore and exploit the potential of the Child Trust Fund to promote financial awareness and asset-building from a very young age….

… In the initial Saving Gateway pilot, established in 2002, the Government matched individual’s savings pound-for-pound up to a limit and provided tailored financial advice and education to participants. The final evaluation report confirmed that matching can encourage genuinely new savers and new saving. The evidence showed that participants doubled their saving with minimal substitution from existing savings.’

 In fact, the whole of Blunkett’s speech that day, and his whole agenda at that time, was around the development of ‘assets’, and the ‘asset-owning state’.  As such, much of what he had to say would not have looked out of place if it had been written by Blond.

And in the end I think Blond has many similarities with Blunkett, not just in terms of the asset-focused policies he now offers up, but in terms of his lack of capacity to think policies through beyond the theoretically pleasing, and on into the big, bad, complex world of policy implementation (which  I covered at length here in terms of how it differs from policy making).

David Blunkett, lest it be forgotten, started out on the left of the Labour party, and cut his political teeth as leader of the New Urban Left in Sheffield of the 1980s.  Like Blond, he’s very brainy, and his leadership was imaginative and combative in the way it introduced (as a model for the rest of the country) the idea of council-led economic development, with public funding made available for all sorts of employment creation and development programmes.

It all looked good, and for a long time Blunkett remained a hero of the intellectual left, just as Blond is now the hero of the intellectual right.  The problem was that none of what was achieved by the local authority was ’scaleable’.  While what was achieved was good, it was only ever a crop in the ocean, a straw in the wind of Thatcher era de-industrialisation storm that swept through Sheffield and elsewhere. 

All of the Local Economic Development Units set up in Labour councils across the country were a signal of resistance, but ultimately they did little or nothing to challenge the real force at work in the economy – the growing power of capital over labour.   Blunkett himself has acknowledged this in recent years (though for the life of me I can’t find the quote I put aside somewhere for just this purpose).

And this is exactly what Blond is now up to.  His ideas for social enterprise and voluntarism are simply attempts at tinkering at best, and a deliberate sop to the working classes at worst.  (As I’ve noted, I think Blond’s intentions are good enough, so I prefer the former explanation for the moment).

Dave Oslerputs it well, referencing back to the Tesco-based analogy Blond himself used in his Prospect essay.  Dave says:

‘Shopkeeper capitalism vs Tescopoly. There can be only one winner.’

Indeed. 

And it is telling that, on the very day that Blond set about tinkering withthe edges of the economy in an attempt bothto translate his theological communitarian-branded conservatism into policy-speak, and to help his think-tank suck up to Cameron a bit more, Tesco should hold their annual general meeting.

At that meeting, Tesco made clear where the power really lies, as its shareholders – those with the real financial clout – easily defeated attempts to get a living wage for the agency workers exploited by the supermarket’s suppliers.  

Those agency workers won’t be too enthusiastic about Phillip Blond’s bland plans for them to become part of a classless, asset-owning society. 

Nor, I suspect, will these exploited agency workers have too much time and energy left over to join Blond’s Time Banks (the things they still call LETS, another product of the 1980s, and another pleasing venture which failed to achieve critical mass impact).

No. They’d rather have the money.