Never Been One For Blondes
TB was fairly whelmed when he saw Philip Blond speak during conference season and has been less than enthused by the sort of people who are making swooning noises about him. Good news today though is he is reducing
normally sharp critics
to dismissive desperation. TB has however just had a chance to flick through some of what was said earlier
.There is much that is right with the state and there is much that is wrong. What is right is that the state embodies in structured form a common concern – it represents the coalesced will of the people that there is a level below which you cannot fall and an undertaking that we as a body politic have a stake, a care and indeed a provision for you and every other citizen . In that sense the welfare state really does represent the best of us. In that sense the great triumph of the left is indeed the 1945 Labour government which laid the foundation of the modern welfare state. But what the working class thought would save and secure became something that gradually and over time, eventually helped to destroyed them. Why? Because the state instead of supporting society - abolished it. The welfare state nationalised society because it replaced mutual communities with passive fragmented individuals whose most sustaining relationship was not with his or her neighbor or his or her community but with a distant and determining centre. Moreover that state relationship was profoundly individuating - unilateral entitlement individuated and replaced bilateral relationship.Interesting stuff. Jury is still out somewhat at this end but one to keep an eye on.
The working class did not ask for this – they wanted something far more reciprocal, more mutual and more empowering. All existing working class welfare organisations were sidelined by a universal entitlement guaranteed by the state based upon centralised accounts of need. Local requirements, organisation or practices were simply ignored and thus rendered redundant. Thus the welfare state began the destruction of the independent life of the British working class. The populace became a supplicant citizenry dependent upon the state rather than themselves and the socialist state aborted indigenous traditions of working class self–help, reciprocality and social insurance. Rather than working with each another in order to alter their situation or change their neighbourhood or city, relying on the welfare state only to get them through a temporary rough patch, working class people increasingly became permanent passive recipients of centrally determined benefits. As such welfare ceased to function as a safety net through which people could not fall, becoming instead a ceiling through which the supplicant class – cut off from earlier working class ambition and aspiration – could not break. This ‘benefits culture’ can be tied directly to the thwarting of working class ambition by a middle class elite that formed the machinery of the welfare state yes to alleviate poverty but also to deprive the poor of their irritating habit of autonomous organisation.
Posts
6 comments:
Desperation?
Derision, rather.
When I saw a picture of this chap headed 'red tory' with a sub heading saying David Cameron had promoted the opening of his think tank - I winced, put my head in my hands and ground my teeth. I couldn't bring myself to read the articles.
Having read your post however, I am cheered somewhat.
As a working class lad I loathe what Labour have done to the working class and the under class they have created which traps people and robs them of not just aspiration for a good standard of living - but robs them of hope altogether. I firmly believe that this is the route of the 'nothing to lose' mentality behind many crimes.
If this is the kind of thing we should expect from him, then it couldn't come soon enough.
I've been reading a biography of Mark Guy Pearse, a 19th century Methodist preacher who became one of the early Christian socialists. It is truly illuminating to see what "socialism" meant to men like himself.
What he was doing was finding ways to help those in trouble in London. Those who had no friends to help, those who fell down the gaps. He raised funds from the churches to run little services to get men back on their feet. This, to him, was socialism; society helping each other. It did NOT mean armies of grey bureaucrats extorting 46% of all the earnings of the poor and bossing them around. It wasn't about hate-filled attacks on the middle-classes. It wasn't about locking up people who dared to object to fashionable vices, chosen specifically to be offensive to as many as possible. It wasn't about the bureaucrats owning everything.
It was just an extension of the principle that all decent people would want to help the unfortunate.
I suspect the distortion of socialism by Marxism has a great deal to answer for.
Surely there is room for a conservative socialism?
Has Blond been reading The Kitchen, I wonder...?
DK
TB is right not to be entirely enthused. But make no mistake about it, Blond is a genius. I think his ideas would be hard to turn into a white paper and get any paper derived from those ideas through parliament. (But I may be, and hope to be, proved wrong…) And what Blond proposes is a damn hard thing to communicate to the electorate.
Blonds is not “red” in the same way we know “red”, his ideas are mutualist rather than “state socialist”. Socialism without the state (coercion), essentially. This is significant because it is an aspect of socialism that has been neglected by the “left” for about sixty years and Blond is the first modern thinker to adapt it in any modern sense. Also, state socialism was never a true ideology of the working classes. Not by a long shot. The early “Labour Movement” (cooperatives, friendly societies etc.) was a mutualist movement. So Blond is right to proclaim himself the intellectual “heir” of the left. It was open for the steal.
What TB has just posted is Blond’s critique of the state and it is a Libertarian critique. Tim Evans, the President of the Libertarian Alliance, would agree word for word with the above as would most of the libertarians I know. There is a lot of overlap between libertarians, free market anarchists and mutualists/mutualist anarchists.
I personally do not think Blond goes far enough. For example in his healthcare plans (laid out in his publication “The Ownership State”) I think he should extend ownership or at least the responsibility of funding to patients (customers). But what is important to note is that not only are the “left” morally bankrupt but also they are intellectually bankrupt too. All the ideas, all the imaginative thinking about policy is coming from the “right” and a lot of it is not incompatible with a libertarian perspective.
I would find Blond's arguments easier to swallow were he to more frequently acknowledge his massive debt to Chesterton and Belloc's distributist programme.