By Adam Lent

Red Tory Philip Blond is an acknowledged influence on David Cameron while Ed Miliband, The Guardian revealed on Friday, will soon make a speech responding to the ideas of Blue Labour guru Maurice Glasman. 

Beyond this shared influence on their respective party leaders, there is also considerable overlap in their outlooks. But they also share one glaring problem.

Originally published by Liberal Conspiracy

Both regard the financial crisis of 2008 as the just deserts of a neo-liberal era that allowed big business to erode the fundamental values of social solidarity and ethical (or even spiritual) self-improvement.

Both share an abiding interest in the way mutualism and community activism can invest private and public sectors with a combination of John Lewis-like efficiency and co-operative style humanity. And while Red Tories may have more interest in the benign power of the free market neither Blond nor Glasman have much time for the Labour tendency to see state action as a solution to numerous social ills.

In short Blond and Glasman represent a new breed of party intellectual who do not share the mainstream party consensus on the importance of embracing material aspiration and individual freedom but instead favour ethical virtue and community action.

To this extent both Blond and Glasman offer a stimulating and potentially important break from politics as usual.

Unfortunately, Red Toryism and Blue Labour also share a failure to say much about the biggest challenge currently facing the UK: the search for sustainable economic growth.

The lacuna is maybe inevitable. Both Red Toryism and Blue Labour are deeply idealistic outlooks. They start their analysis not with an assessment of the economic trends and imperatives shaping the UK and wider world but with a set of principles they believe are central to the ‘good life’ and which they then hope to implement through policy and voluntary action.

Hence a recent paper from Blond’s think-tank Respublica on the future of the retail sector in the UK lacked any analysis of the impact of the internet.

Economic challenges

The core problem that Blond and Glasman have yet to acknowledge is that the UK operates in a harsher, tougher economic world than that which existed even before the Crash. We live in a country that has a history of low business investment, a weak skills base, a patchy SME sector and a limited presence in emerging markets just at the time when eastern companies have access to huge capital, increasingly skilled workforces and a striking willingness to innovate and exploit new technologies.

In short, the space for idealism has arguably been narrowed not widened since the Crash.

Blond and Glasman may be right to lament the way the rapid change wrought by business innovation has damaged communities and livelihoods. But the truth is that change will continue to be driven at ever greater speeds by the eastern powerhouses and the spread of the interactive web over coming years.

Whether the UK chooses to be part of that change or not will make little difference to India and China but it will make a huge difference to us and our capacity to generate growth and jobs in the decades to come.

The only developed economic answers provided by Red Toryism and Blue Labour of more mutual and community-led business are not a serious roadmap out of this dilemma.

None of this is to say that we need to abandon our ideals in the face of economic reality but, whether on right or left, we do need to come up with a vision that shows how our ideals can either promote or, at the very least, sit alongside a UK economy that has the necessary investment, skills and productivity to compete with the highly effective commercial forces now reshaping the world.

This is the sort of thinking being done, for example, by the IPPR’s New Era Economics programme. Red Toryism and Blue Labour alike would do well to engage with such thinking if they are to reach their potential as serious intellectual forces as the harsh realities of our new economic world begin to bite