Phillip Blond's 'Red Tory' peddles nationalistic, liberal racism as a necessary response to the BNP threat, just as the mainstream political parties do
As a short follow up to both my review of Phillip Blond’s Red Tory and my post asking ‘Is anti-fascism a waste of time?‘ I would like to combine the two to compound the argument I forwarded in the latter post. In this post I questioned the wisdom, given the limited resources of the left, of structuring activities around opposing the BNP. Rather, I advocated targeting our ire at the liberal racism of the mainstream political parties, where they use the ‘threat’ of the BNP as a justification for their own much more powerful and influential anti-immigrant discourse and legislation.
If there is one book in which the bogeyman of the BNP is blatantly used for forwarding a parochial, nationalistic and quietly anti-immigrant politics it is Phillip Blond’s Red Tory.  In the introduction Blond attributes the growth of the BNP—no figures are actually quoted, of course (that would actually derail the BNP’s rhetorical usefulness as a threat)—-to a “collapse of British culture, virtue and belief.” (p.2) From herein the twin strategy of denouncing BNP fascists in order to argue for various nationalistic cultural and economically protectionist policies becomes something of a reliable trope in Red Tory, as it also is for the Tories as a whole, as well as Labour and the Lib Dems. In this sense Red Tory acts as a case study for the cynical use of the BNP in propping up the rationale of mainstream liberal racism.
For instance, Blond writes conspiracy think resentiment such as: “We became multi-cultural and cosmopolitan but at the price of an open borders policy that looked at times designed to destroy the prospects and outcomes of the white working class.” (p. 128) This could, of course, be straight out of the textbook of BNP canvassing lines. Not further on in the text he discusses the BBC—whose new generation of employees have all, apparently, suffered from a miseducation in “bad, French philosophy” (p. 140) [damn those frogs!]—and approves that it “rightly refuses to reflect back the values and beliefs of the BNP”, but argues that ‘we’ need to go further to “recover instead the Reithian belief in the sort of people we British ought to be and what sort of culture we should have as a result.” (p. 141)
The same sort of thing is replete throughout Red Tory. Condemn some easy racist target and use it as an excuse to advocate a remarkably similar sugar-coated nationalistic vision. If even a Tory prop like Blond can find some easy moral pivot for advocating an extremely backward looking vision of society and politics, the left should really question whether running around screaming at the BNP and penning raging polemics against the ‘Nazi BNP’ is really a good use of our time and energies?
I like it!
A few points to consider
1. There are numerous studies that show that immigration is good for the economy. It can only hurt the white working class if the processes of distribution make it so, and these processes are not controlled by immigrants. Why no political exploration of this theme? Is it because of the awkward fact that currently, most white people are oppressed by… other white people?
2. I was gearing up to write an article on Red Toryism a year ago. Whilst my research was not thorough, the ideas of localism and charity it is based around are so thoroughly wonky it is hard to know where to start criticising them. One thing to look at is that civic engagement, within modern conditions, is strongly related to how close the democratic processes of the state get to the people. This can be expressed by how many people per lowest level representative, and looked at that way the UK has some of the weakes local democracy in Europe, and some of the lowest levels of civic engagement. The rest of the debate follows, disaffection, BNP, hoodies, low voter turnout etc….
Problem with this for the Tories is that democracy of this kind costs money. So they magic up the idea of “community” and “values” in order to pretend they can do democracy on the cheap. But what they are really headed towards is trying to do Victorian Philanthropy, and if you really follow it through, Feudalism on the cheap.
3. So actually the money made from immigrants could be used to pay for meaningful processes of local civil engagement. And yes, the debate on the BNP is, in this light, more about symptoms than causes.
Reminded of Morgan Freeman†s interview, short excerpt here, that the best way to get rid of racism is to stop talking about it.