Reid All About It

Speaking of Stuart Reid, he writes:

Brown may not be directly responsible for the present economic mess, but runaway globalisation certainly is.

Without globalisation - without the export of jobs and debt and trash culture - the world would not find itself on the brink of bankruptcy and moral collapse.

Phillip Blond, theologian, political philosopher and occasional contributor to The Catholic Herald, is no friend of globalisation. He has just written a remarkable piece in Prospect in which he outlines a "Red Tory" agenda that is socially conservative and sceptical about neoliberal economics.

Blond, now with the think-tank Demos, is an admirer of Benedict XVI and a believer in localism, or what the Pope would call subsidiarity. He rejects all the pieties of the neoliberals and therefore just about everything Westminster policymakers accept as revealed truth.

He acknowledges, for example, that we live a "broken society", but says that we are not going to fix it with beefed-up free-market superglue. "British conservatism," he writes, "must not ... repeat the American error of preaching 'morals plus the market' while ignoring the fact that economic liberalism has often been the cover for monopoly capitalism and is therefore just as socially damaging as Left-wing statism."

But here's the best, the most outrageous bit: Blond rejects the doctrine that social mobility and meritocracy are desirable, and scorns what he calls the "statist and neo-liberal language of opportunity, education and choice".

Why? "Because this language says that unless you are in the golden circle of the top 10 to 15 per cent of top-rate taxpayers you are essentially insecure, unsuccessful and without merit or value." In place of that, he argues, we need "an organic communitarianism that graces every level of society with merit, security, wealth and worth".

David Cameron seems to have been listening. In Davos at the weekend the Leader of the Opposition spoke of "global corporate juggernauts".

"This is what too many people see when they look at capitalism today," he said. "Markets without morality, globalisation without competition, and wealth without fairness. It all adds up to capitalism without a conscience and we've got to put it right."

Neither Blond nor Cameron has yet gone as far as Eamon de Valera, however. When asked in 1927 by the Manchester Guardian whether he understood that a self-sufficient Ireland would mean a lower standard of living, the great Irish patriot replied: "You say 'lower' when you ought to say a less costly standard of living. I think it quite possible that a less costly standard of living is desirable and that it would prove, in fact, to be a higher standard of living. I am not satisfied that the standard of living and the mode of living in western Europe is a right or proper one. The industrialised countries have got themselves into a rut and Ireland is asked to hurry along after them."

Well, Ireland caught up, God help her. It's a good thing Dev did not live to see it.