Prior to IR, income came largely from land , except for merchants in City Of London. Due to the poor quality of much of the land extremely large holdings( 1000s of acres ) were required to create wealth Land ownership tended to be settled for long periods except for few periods of great upheaval- Norman Conquest, Black Death dissolution of monasteries , Civil War , Willam of Orange. The Agricultural Revolution greatly increased yields such that hardworking small to mid size( 40-300acres )/ yeoman farmers could increase their wealth and form a rural middle class . Successful farm labourers could pass on an inheritance such that the grandchildren could become farmers who owned their land.

By the end of the 18 C large fortunes had been made by industrialists such as Wedgewood who were largely Quaker/Non Conformist crafstmen without having to own land. In addition there was a large increase in the Middle Classes for whom Wedgewood made his pottery.

The IR was created by craftsmen not aristocrats, monarchs or the church and therefore reduced class divisions by increasing social mobility.

The industrial revolution enable a meritocracy to challenge the power of the Monarch, aristocracy and church, whose income depended upon land ownership.

Hmm. I’d seriously debate the validity of this analysis. What we have is most certainly not a meritocracy; how the hell could the Keens have got into power if it was? Or Alan Sugar? Or the various ex-USSR gangstersmagnates who seems to have bought up the premier league?

We are in a plutocracy, not a meritocracy. Prior to the industrial revolution we were in an aristocracy.

The fundamental difference was that being titled used to get you power, whether you were rich or not. It also used to make you rich, which was all nice and cosy if you were in the club.

Now, being rich gets you power, and being rich also makes you get richer (see earlier comments of mine on the subject of the Great Machine) and that’s also nice and cosy if you’re in the club. Bear in mind here that upward mobility in Britain is lower now than in 1970, that the wealth gap is steadily widening and that there are less people in command of a higher percentage of our species total wealth now, than at any point since Pharaonic times.

The idea that this is a meritocracy stems from the idea that money is the scorecard of merit; that only those who deserve to be are rich. To make a hollow laughing.

One could, but one would be a complete & utter moron using the sterling work of a small but highly effective charity to suggest that a far larger task is best done by an outfit that is likely to be annihilated within five years by Tory cuts anyway…

Many local action groups come into existance due to the failure of local government. Spending hours knocking on doors on wet winters evening to persuade people to attend a meeting, to complain about a local problem( -building a superstore, run down park, closing down a school,vandalism etc , etc ) is no fun.

Much of Labour ’s and the unions income comes from people working for the state. An effective voluntary sector could greatly redue labour’s power base in local government, especially in the cities and large towns.

If parents set up a school which becomes very good and therefore sought after, in an area where state run schools are poor, then this would be major undermining of left wing teaching unions and LEAs. Obama has already raised the issue of the poor quality of much of the state school system in the USA.

If the left is make the slogan “Power to the people ” a reality, it may have to take on the dominance of the unions in the state sector, especially local government.

One could say the charity “Kids Company” in s London is proof positive that the voluntary sector can be better at providing services than the state.

If Labour has effectively supported the volunatry sector since 1997 and especially stood up to local government and the unions , then Red Toryism would not exist.
If Red Toryism is to succeed , The Tories will have to stand up to the financial sector.

Red Toryism seems very similar to the belief in self help which was fundemental to the Quakers and Non Conformists who provided most of the craftsmen who developed the industrial revolution and banking from the late 16c onwards. Barclays Bank was set up by Quaker merchants in the 17 or 18 centuries. The Quakers and Non Conformist also went on to form many of the charities ( e.g Joseph Rowntree ).

It was the Quakers who set schools to educate children in mathematics, business, modern languages , rather than classics and divinity ( taught in the grammar and public schools) which gave them the scientific and technical skills required for the industrial revolution. The Quaker schools challenged the power of the church , monarchy and aristocracy as they were beyond their control. In fact many LEAs appear to behave like the church in the 16-18 centuries when it comes to controlling what is taught.

The industrial revolution enable a meritocracy to challenge the power of the Monarch, aristocracy and church, whose income depended upon land ownership.

For localism to work it must be able to effectively challenge politicians, civil servants and unions which want to maximise the influence, power and spending of government and the financial sector, especially in the City of London.

Unfortunately it appears you didn’t read what I wrote, which is that under labour the justice system has become tougher. I didn’t write that it was as tough as you’d probably like. So stating one example of what you consider to be a lenient punishment (which you described incorrectly, prisoners serving 4 years or more don’t automatically get parole after half the sentence- they have to apply for it) doesn’t challenge the statement I made.

In order to demonstrate that I am wrong about the justice system under labour becoming tougher (actually the trend towards tougher punishments was started under Michael Howard, and continued by labour, so they shouldn’t get complete credit) you’ll have to cite some pieces of legislation or policy decisions that made things more lenient.

Leftist thought was based on the 3 principles of the French revolution
Equality
Fraternity
Liberty

And the principles which sponsored the Jacobin Terror are clearly something we want to be basing our thinking on. It’s not exactly original of me to note that in practice, equality and liberty are intrinsically incompatible, or that equality of opportunity (which is a modern Leftist doctrine) is philosophically distinct from equality.

Liberty I’ll get behind. Fraternity is a bit embedding-of-the-patriarchy for me, I prefer “Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose”.

Surely the pursuit of those principles are behind leftist thought then and now.

And this is what I debate. Right-wing, in your time-frame, meant supporter of the divine right of Kings. Left-wing meant opposer of the divine right of Kings. This is clearly not an adequate description of the international Labour movement 1819-1983, now, is it?

Leftist thought may have been about Liberty, Equality and Fraternity when leftist still meant democrat/republican, but “left-wing” got comprehensively re-defined by industrialism to mean “power to the working class”, and it really did mean power to the urban working class. Rural Britain’s pastoral culture remained (and some would say remains) steadfastly conservative, and “right-wing”. The urban poor and the rural poor did not politically identify with one another until quite recently.

Sunny @27:

I think it has evolved since then – otherwise leftwing politics wouldn’t be so obsessed with women rights / minority rights and a more humanitarian foreign policy.

Labour came out of helping the working classes – but the underlying philosophy is the need for equality of opportunity and helping the marginalised gain power through joint action.

Thing is, there’s already a name for political thinking of that sort, and it’s liberal. The fact that the industrial working class were marginalised, thus meaning that Liberals wanted to give them power, and that the industrial working class were organising, meaning they created the Labour party to give themselves power, does not make either Liberalism left-wing or the Labour party liberal.

Since WWII, the idea of liberalism has become rhetorically intertwined with Leftism. This was not done by us; yes, lots of poor, newly educated people in the sixties and seventies were liberals and left-wingers at the same time, since there’s no intrinsic contradiction there. But it was the right, and particularly the US Republican party, who managed to propagandise the Western world into conflating Left with Liberal and then defined both as dirty words. This is Cold War rhetoric, it’s imperialist thinking and it’s an historical worldview. That’s where the right-wing live; why should we allow their propaganda machine from last century determine the frame of debate?

Shatterface @30:

I think what you mean by ‘progressive’ is simply what most of us here mean by ‘Left-wing’.

Yes: that’s one reason I’m still arguing with you all. The qualities of progressiveness and liberality are accidental side-effects of a Left-wing agenda, not philosophical foundations for it. They are the philosophical foundations of Liberalism. The idea that Left == Liberal is very new and quite flawed: and some (Charlotte Gore?) would argue that today, Liberal != Left.

The problem is that ‘progressive’ (moving forward) is a natural antonym for ‘reactionary’ (pushing back) and since few people self-identify as ‘reactionary’ as opposed to ‘Right-wing’ it doesn’t feel useful as a term of opposition.

This, for me, is the heart of everything I’m saying in this thread.

The reactionaries re-defined politics, using the scare-crow of imperial Russian communism to do it. They defined the terms of debate as Left vs Right == Weak vs Strong == Elite vs One of Us == Interfering vs Ruggedly Individual == Corrupt vs Moral and Upstanding. They completely redefined the connections in the political world and we went along with it. … I say ‘we’: I was 5 at most when this was happening.

They were able to do it because the right are plutocrats. The cost of entry to the information market in 1945 was very high compared to now. It was still pretty high in the 60s and it was still pretty high in the 80s. Hearst was able to get cannabis banned in the States with only three years of saturation propaganda; it took the right wing from the 50s to the 80s to adequately redefine their political opponents as intrinsically wrong in the minds of the electorate, unless they abandoned their progressive values.

I’m proposing, and I suspected that Sunny was also suggesting, that we use the lower cost of entry to the propaganda market and screw them right back. “By changing a few words… The world may move or not by changing a few words!” [1] If we frame the debate as progressive vs. reactionary, if we frame it as the politics of compassion against the politics of greed, or of liberty against authoritarianism; if we abandon the tribal allegiances of last century and start drawing a new map, I think we might be able to beat them at their own game. There’s more of us, and we’re better at the internet.

[1] Toby Ziegler, The West Wing

‘I stated three threats to lefties from Red Toryism and pointed out how it has a deep emotional message, regardless of whether you think the policies stack up or not.’

Sorry to keep harping about Salmond, but although the approach you describe has worked well for the SNP, it is increasingly a hard act for SNP people to maintain in policy terms.

The next Glasgow by-election, for Martin’s seat, will be fascinating but I expect Jurassic Labour to win. Scotland is becoming a testing ground for British politics.

As I keep banging on about, all discussion of British politics is made weird by the disappearance of both the old, broad left, and the nuisance-value Trots.

If they don’t, fuck ‘em.

Myself, I think we should engage with the electorate as grown-ups. I despair at seeing such utter contempt of the electorate expressed on ‘Left-leaning’ site.

‘Tony Blair reneged on most of his manifesto commitments and yet he kept getting re-elected.’

So it’s just about winning elections, fuck all about changing things for the better? Did you learn nothing in the last 12 years? Mouth a few happy-clappy platitudes and hope nobody examines what you’re saying?

Red Toryism is a Trojan horse for medievalism.

It’s no fucking danger to Labour as nobody outside the blogosphere has ever heard of it; if they had, they’d recognise it as reactionary, illiberal, anti-Enlightenment garbage.

I stated three threats to lefties from Red Toryism and pointed out how it has a deep emotional message, regardless of whether you think the policies stack up or not. You think the electorate gives a crap about policy? Tony Blair reneged on most of his manifesto commitments and yet he kept getting re-elected. Please do not be under the mis-apprehension the populace cares as much about policy as we do.

Don – my problem isn’t that New Labour doesn’t do this – but it has no broader idea or narrative. If New Labour really wanted more local community power it would devolve power a lot more. It hasn’t.

I’m not saying we should follow the Tories nor am I saying Labour was great. My point was: Red Toryism, if executed properly, has the potential to hurt the left badly. It remains to be seen whether Cameron is intelligent enough to realise that.

Like some others Scots, I was absolutely amazed that Salmond could publicly endorse what he called the economic side of Thatcherism while rejecting the ’social’ side.

The balancing act of the SNP is to present itself as moderate, caring, socially aware chaps, but also open-to-business conservatives, and it’s a balancing act that is increasingly hard to maintain on the rope – like the Great Valerio. Expect to hear more of Mr Blond.

And Blond thinks grounding morality in the supernatural is something other than nothing?

Whose god do we ground morality on, the wrathful smiter of sodomites or the turn the other cheek chap?

It’s not so long ago that the Beardy One changed his mind about eating meat at all on a Friday, some still can’t eat pork at all. Ask around and he’s telling one lot not to work Saturday, another not to work Sunday; for some he created us in his image, for others he slipped up over foreskin.

Whatever happened to purgatory – are the souls out on licence?

So much for eternal truths.

Any country that starts to become more culturally or racially diverse needs a stronger sense of national identity.

Tell that to a Scottish Nationalist. But seriously, what it needs more than that is actual power in the hands of real people. Not some namby pamby ‘national narrative’ to placate the people.

I can actually see the point of what some social conservatives are getting at, as much as my policy solutions differ from theirs. But the impression I always get of Blond on studying his statements is that he essentially rejects liberalism, individualism, Enlightement thinking & what have you. I suppose we took different paths after the Glorious Revolution, so I am physically incapable of joining forces with him even if I share his views on a given matter.

I really do think he is trying to mussy the waters & add some nasty shite. It just feels wrong.

‘The problem with secular liberalism, for proponents of Radical Orthodoxy, is that, in removing God, it loses any grip on the notion of objective moral truth. Secularism leads to nihilism, because it leaves “worldly phenomena” such as morality “grounded literally in nothing”.’

One tries to be polite, but clearly anyone who denies atheists a grasp of objective moral truth is, erm, a twat.

Is ‘Radical Orthodoxy’ – me being completely new to the term – some sort of evolutionary (right-wing) version of that vanished thing, liberation theology?

I’ve had to wade through enough fucking shite in the “liberal” media from Eagleton, Bunting, Koran Armstrong, some fuckwit called Paul Vallely, not to mention right-wing knobs on the blogosphere taking every chance they can get to slag Richard Dawkins & them off, despite having no idea what their views are.

I have arrived at the conclusion that he is a twat.

In the end his Virasami got ‘four years’, which actually means two years because the sentences are automatically halved. During the short time Virasami is inside, he will addressed politely by powerless warders, allowed to watch TV and make phone calls, given a food menu, will not be made to do work and will have easy access to drugs.

Sorry, you were saying we have a ‘tough’ criminal justice system?

Obviously reading the wrong newspapers then.

Of course the perception of criminals counts as an authoritative source on the legislative direction of criminal justice policy. I’m sure the one off example of a criminal behaving in a hard man manner supercedes all other kinds of evidence, like looking at actual legislation and policy.

Sounds more like someone who’s going to get a bit of a shock when he meets his first real hard men.

Really? The criminals certainly don’t seem to have got the message. The killer of Robert Knox thought that going to Belmarsh prison was ’sweet.’ “Take me to fucking Belmarsh” he said: ‘I’m going down anyway. I don’t mind. I get gym every day, meals, just take me there.’

Of course, sounds just like someone shaking with uncontrollable fear from our ‘tough’ criminal justice system.

This is just another attempt to convince floating voters and moderate liberals that ‘call me Dave’ has changed the Tory party for good. He hasn’t, they are just the same as they ever were. There is no such thing as compassionate conservatism. 8 years of Bush should show what a sack of shit that was. The only people he was compassionate for were billionaires, millionaires, corporate lobbyists, and holy rollers. The usual base of the Conservative movement.

Call me Dave is in a very strong position at the moment because the shadowy figures behind the tory party believe he is going to win, and therefore they don’t want to rock the boat. But once he has won, if he tries to peddle a more easy going Conservatism he will be out on his ear. The Tory party in now controlled by the far right, and will not yield to any compassionate agenda.

How does Red toryism fit with the kind of psychos and weird nuts that Cameron has aligned himself with in Europe? No, it doesn’t quite fit.

I don’t. But the Tories are blatantly and obviously going to suck up to big business and are not going to curb their powers, whatever Philip Blond may want.

“What the red tories are saying is they want civic orgs to do the work they might previously have wanted corporations to do. That, to me, is an attractive philosophy.”

New Labour also says that it wants civic organisations to have a bigger role in, for example, housing, welfare, schools, local services, preventing violent extremism, (the list is almost endless) – and Labour, locally and nationally, has a track record of massively expanding funding for civic / community organisations, while the Tories cut funding for these groups wherever and whenever they get the chance.

If the results of this are sometimes disappointing, it highlights the fact that this stuff is not a panacea, even if it is kind of nice that the Tories are prepared to pay lip service to it (though not pay for it).

“What do we have in response? More statism?”

If only

I don’t think we’re really in disagreement – I’ve run and won elections by drawing heavily on “the emotional language of community and belonging” and helped develop community groups and local activism to take on special interests which were damaging the community. It’s definitely got its strengths, but also limitations.