An excellent piece on the Res Publica website reprints an interview Phillip Blond, the man who dreamed up Red Toryism, gave to Le Figaro recently about Brexit. You can read the whole thing here, but here's a bit of cut-and-paste (Blond, I need scarcely add, is a Remainer).
Blond believes that had EU leaders like Juncker and Schulz behaved a bit more sensibly after the vote there might have been no need for Brexit at all. These EU mandarins pretty much killed off the Remain campaign with their hostility, he says. He points out that the much vaunted Four Freedoms (including freedom of movement) are far from absolute, and that France and Germany "have progressively vetoed any real free movement in capital or services". Blond thinks that if the EU made an offer on migration he suspects Theresa May's government "may well put it to the vote, either in another referendum or more likely in a snap general election where the PM decides to argue to stay in the EU".
Personally I think Blond is in cloud cuckoo land here, both on the likelihood of the EU making a renewed offer on migration and of May's government having a change of heart. As I've written before, the EU leadership is too stolid to grasp that the key to the organisation's survival is flexibility. After all, they didn't budge on migration when the referendum was hanging over them. And anyway can you imagine the uproar in the Tory party if May did a volte face?
Blond writes that "whilst Europe understands the perils of external migration and what importing hostile minorities might mean, (the UK working class) experienced internal EU migration as directly threatening their . . . economic security. . . Britain has functioned as the European employer of last resort as the Euro and German austerity have destroyed the labour markets for so many young Europeans. But for working class Britons this has meant a direct threat to their . . . livelihoods, which is why low skilled low educated people voted so heavily to leave the EU. If you want evidence of this - try to get served by a Briton in London, it's virtually impossible. All the waiting staff are charming, degree level educated Europeans, no wonder the white working class thought there was no working future for them in such a Europe".
Amen to that. And then, this being an interview in a French paper, Blond proceeds to stick the boot in to France.
"French secularism has been wholly incapable of engaging with and integrating its Muslim population. . . Even after all the dreadful massacres and killings in France you still have the French state insisting that Islamic radicalism is down to economic inequality which is an idealogical fiction wholly without any evidential basis . . . this blinds France to the issues it must confront".
Britain, on the other hand, "is not in the state of incipient civil war . . . (our) mixed constitution allows difference to be expressed and welcomed into the British social compact whereas France . . . allows no place for . . . the development of integrated identities . . . all difference is suppressed in the name of a generic identity . . . France's political identity is too brittle to incorporate others . . ."
I'm not sure he's right that Britain's more accommodating outlook has been a good thing. It also means we've let in a lot of people whose ethos sits uneasily, to put it mildly, with ours, without making any effort to assimilate them.
And then, pertinently, Blond has this interesting passage on the absolutism of Islam, as a contrast to the mediated thought of European Jews and Christians.
"But far too much of modern Islam is dangerous, because much of the modern Islamic mainstream has rejected its mystical or mediated elements and is therefore committed . . . to a form of absolutism which paradoxically is exactly what French secularism is - hence you have a conflict of the absolutes. In Britain we . . . deny any absolutism to politics. In the end though . . . Europe must rediscover its Greek, Jewish and Christian heritage - all of which thought through the absolute and created intermediate thinking that believe we knew but could never completely know the absolute".
I agree that Britain is a less absolutist country than France (the cry of the French intellectual - "This may work in practice; but does it work in theory?!"), but I don't think we are any better placed to engage with fundamentalist Islam - our tendency to try and accommodate, to muddle along just means we are less likely to confront it head on. To our cost.
Blond goes on to deplore Conservatism's fixation with liberalism - the me-first culture. Globalism hasn't helped either, for "the Western working (and lower middle) classes have not seen any real terms wage rises . . . for a generation, it's the . . . developing world and the very very rich of the West who have massively benefited from the liberal settlement . . . Indeed, coupled with mass migration and the license that social liberalism gives to it - not only are people hit economically but also socially and culturally. Traditional centuries-long identities are repudiated and ignored, and sectarian communities are imported and set up with little or no effort at integration. So it is a great relief to see Conservative party draw a line of distinction between neo-liberal policies of both left and right and to try to set up a conservative offer that seeks to create an inclusive and mutually self and other enhancing capitalism and the social and cultural bonds that such a system needs in order to function . . . (I think he's much too optimistic about conservatism here). Yes the working classes have been abandoned since the ascension of Mrs Thatcher, even then before Thatcherism the working classes were not well served by their advocates . . ., who began through social liberalism to take apart stable working class communities and attack the extended and the nuclear family as patriarchal and outmoded . . .
And on to the City, which Blond says "is a massive British financial asset but it does not really serve Britain as well as it might, it has no patriotic capital, no interest except in the centralization and arbitrage of money, and it has no wish or incentive in decentralizing capital to invest in the regions . . . outside of London. So a break with that model of the City would be most welcome and will I think occur".
"In a time of deep insecurity people's identities and cultures need protection and fostering, and part of this does mean the need to limit unprecedented levels of migration, some which is deeply hostile to European values . . . globalisation was hollowing out working class lives and . . . especially on the right we needed to talk about how to re-endow ordinary people with assets and wealth. I think social conservation and economic enfranchisement is the only political offer that can now win a majority and protect us against the extremists".
I think Blond has had it with social conservatism. Its decline started with Cathy Come Home and gay marriage (which I have come round to) is the final nail in its coffin. Personally there's a lot of this kind of thing I don't mind, but I'm not so daft as to think that the stuff I don't like can be put back in its box. It can't be, and perhaps shouldn't be.
Blond goes on to talk about multiculturalism, which he thinks will work as a gambit for the Left in London, but not outside, where "it will be a huge negative for the left and will lose it elections. The left basically needs a new answer to modern capitalism that isn't welfare or taxation. There is little sign anywhere in the world of it making this intellectual leap, so . . . it is hard to see a Labour comeback (in either the long or short term).
Here I think he is bang on the money. The left's answer to our problems is tax and spend, or in Jeremy Corbyn's case tax, spend, borrow and print. My own view is that this problem is insoluble for the left, and it's not so much a case of unwillingness to make the intellectual leap Blond talks about as unawareness that the leap needs to be made at all. As it is I don't know of anyone on either left or right who has a plausible way out of the left's dilemma, which is, essentially, that we can't afford our public services in an era when people tend to live on into their 80s.
