Well said. And this is one of the reasons why the FPTP voting system needs to be got rid off, because until we do the voters will never get real choice on real ideological alternatives.

Alcohol, anger or embarassment?

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/andrew-grice/andrew-grice-enough-of-the-highflown-philosophy-mr-cameron-where-are-the-policies-1829867.html

I know that Dickens believed in sentences that lasted for pages, but in these modern times we read and think differently: sentences these days are shorter and punchier. So why is it that “Red-Tories” write in a way that seems to have gone out of style a century ago? Does the relevance of their prose to a modern world indicate the relevance of their politics?

I don’t see that it’s fundamental at all. If he is advocating giving a representative body an institutional role in governmental decision making, then insisting that that body is non-state strikes me as an exercise in sophistry.

At uni, we were told to critique Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge. That question, why is it such waffle, was the basis of my critique, much to the annoyance of my tutor.

Never trust an argument that can’t be made clearly.

Saying that I like Blonde and he’s good for the tories. In the modern age parties are election winning machines and most else is secondary to that. So you need some contrasting intellectualism behind the election fighting bit. The tories have plenty neo liberalist ideas people, so something different is good.

The state is supposed to have your interests at heart (or the aggregated interest of its citizens anyway) but it is much harder to provide competition in government services and one consequence is that state provided services are sometimes not all they could be. Sometimes, they’re wonderful and sometimes they’re awful.

One way to create a form of competition that might have a beneficial effect on all services is to create the presumption that, if citizens don’t like what the state is doing on their behalf, they can take over the service and do it themselves. If, having done it for a while, they feel they have made their point, they can hand it back.

The important point is not the moment at which the citizens’ group becomes a branch of the state, the point is that responsibility delivery can pass between the state and its citizens. However, as with any competition, it is important to ensure that the competition is fair. This is the reason that Mike’s putative TMO would be kept on a short leash.

Imagine if the properties on the estate were transferred to a Co-op owned by the tenants. Assuming that rents on the estate generate a surplus, the co-op would have to buy the properties off the current landlord at a price which reflects the capital value of the rent surplus. If the co-op paid less than that, it would be depriving the former landlord of a revenue stream that it would have used to maintain other homes that were in disrepair or providing new affordable housing or whatever. The co-op would need to service a loan to pay that capital price and this would need to be met from rents. That would prevent the rents from being lowered much. Of course, if the Co-op could borrow money cheaply and could manage, repair and maintain the properties more efficiently than the previous landlord then it would indeed be able to lower rents.

As to the question of what to do about the allocation of vacancies, the co-op would certainly be required to sign an undertaking that the properties would be made available on the basis of need – just as other subsidised properties are. It would, for example, be outrageous if a group of tenants were to take control of a group of heavily subsidised homes and then refuse to accept statutorily homeless households when one of those homes fell vacant.

Council run, ALMO, RSL, TMO, Co-op – it doesn’t matter whether they are the state or not, it matters that they are all doing the same job and that they are all doing it on an equal footing. That allows a degree of competition (albeit within limits) and both services and cost-effectiveness should be improved.

Because it’s got an intriguing, paradoxical name.

Well, I can’t speak for all ‘nice soft lefties’ but speaking for myself I have expressed persistent doubts over at Next Left about the reality of ‘progressive conservatism’ on everything from poverty and inequality to political reform. My own interest in Red Toryism certainly doesn’t reflect any expectation that it will actually mean that a future Tory government is in any way progressive or a need to believe in the reality of a progressive Toryism. I agree with Sunder Katwala’s analysis that the Tories will likely ignore the economic, anti-free market side of Red Toryism and pick up selectively on its anti-state side, harnessing it to what will really be a neo-Thatcherite agenda.

As I said, the reason to engage with Red Toryism is because it is actually, in some respects (by no means all), a peculiar reflection of concerns that ought properly to be those of the left.

“I hate going to seminars and lectures and so on. I start squirming uncomfortably in my seat when people ask a question of more than two sentences in length. On top of that, I usually think I’m better than the person giving the talk or on the panel, and I get distracted by gnawing self doubt and raging jealousy.”

Is one of the most funny-because-it’s-true things I have ever read?

“that Big Business and Big Government are both actively harmful to the man in the street… To that end, we must make business and government smaller”

and how do “we” make _both_ government and business smaller? Via transcendental meditation? Ah, no, by the magic hand of “civil society”, which is whwere the guff sneaks in.

To take an example, It strikes me that if “we” desire to make big business smaller, “we” must make _something_ more intrusive and interfering. Let’s call it this new actor “Civil Society”.

If we give “civil society” the power to deny planning applications, or withold funding from a school, or raise or lower taxes, or split up corporation on their say so, we turn “civil society” into something that looks, feels and acts like a v regulatory interfering government, if a rather localist one. But it isn’t, oh no, because that kind of intrusive government is v bad.

Surely in a democracy, it’s more or less irrelevant: either I and the other people in my community get to vote for local councillors, who make decisions about local housing based on what we want on aggregate; or I and the other people in my community get to vote for a committee of tenants, who make decisions about local housing based on what we want on aggregate. Whether it’s nominally of the state or not is completely irrelevant, as far as I can see?

Now, obviously if everything is managed at so high and bureaucratic a level that in practice there’s no local decisionmaking, that’s rubbish: but that would be just as well solved by transferring powers from Westminster to regional and local government as by transferring them to random groups of busybodies…

It’s pretty fundamental. Do try to keep up.

Do you understand the difference between ‘the state’ and ‘not the state’?

It’s pretty fundamental. Do keep up.

I think there’s a degree of wishful thinking. Nobody really thinks New Labour will win the next election and some people are hoping we get a less ‘Tory’ Tory government.

Or a Council?

Phillip Blond’s flowery style does make it rather difficult to get to grips with what specifically he’s hinting at, but I’ve never had any difficulty understanding the core premise.

The thesis is simple: that Big Business and Big Government are both actively harmful to the man in the street, that they are exclusionary, damaging to the societal values that we claim to hold dear, and centralize power over people’s lives in the hands of a small number of already-powerful people.

To that end, we must make business and government smaller and work for the people: and the way to achieve that is nothing less than a ground-up reconstruction of civil society, making business and government highly localised and subservient to civil society.

How we achieve that aim is left as an exercise to the reader.

This will no doubt have Hopi rapidly questioning the views expressed above but…..I agree.

I’ve not yet seen anything from this Red Tory argument that isn’t entire and unmitigated toss.