Phillip Blond

Phillip Blond is an English theologian and philosopher. He was educated at Peterhouse, Cambridge and has a BA Hons in Politics and Philosophy and an MA in Continental Philosophy. He is currently Senior Lecturer in Christian Theology at St Martin's College at Lancaster University and has formerly taught in the Department of Theology at the University of Exeter.

Ideology

Phillip Blond labels himself a 'red conservative', proposing a popular capitalism which respects traditional values, local communities and allows the 'little man' to participate in the econonomy, as opposed to neoliberalism, socialism and communism. Blond considers that a true conservative should reject present-style capitalism because it has increasingly concentrated ownership to a few 'oligarchs' and created a dispossessed group at the lower level of society, thus preventing many ordinary people from maintaining their own lifes and communities. Blond argues the economic gap has widened during the last 30-40 years and the development is similar to that of the 19th century.

Blond appeared in the Danish TV talkshow Den 11. time ("The 11th Hour") on 6 March 2008, Den 11. time, Third season, programme 96, 3 March 2008, DR2] [ [http://www.dr.dk/Forms/Published/PlaylistGen.aspx?qid=616842&odp=true&bitrate=low&location=Lyngby&uri=http://www.dr.dk/Forms/Published/PlaylistGen.aspx Interview with Philip Blond] , Den 11. time, DR2, 3 March 2008, Windows Media file, 28 min. (in English with Danish subtitles)]

Quotes

"The great error of the last 50 years is that conservatives think that they should believe in the free market, but the free market destroys almost all things; it destroys traditions, family life, societies, cultures, ways of doing things. The market place, as understood by comtemporate neoliberalism, is something no genuine conservative should support or endorse."

"The welfare state disempowered the working class people people by taking away their ability to self-organise, by taking away their ability to work with each other. It atomised working class communities and also in some way prevented innovation."

"What is actually happening now is capitalism needs the state to disempower ordinary people's insitutions and lifes. What we are actually developing in modern Europe is a post-democratic society. We are creating an oligarchical elite structure where moneyed elites, the elites of industry cohabit with political elites and they move into each others regimes and spaces. So we have now produced what I would call a market state, and the market state really just exists for the benefit of those in the top. And there is very clear economic and social evidence for this, it is very clear that only the top one percent or the top five percent of people in the developed world have really benefited from the last thirty years."

"What we are seeing is the rise of new oligarchies. It is almost as if the 19th century is returning to the 21st century where we are going to live in a world where most of us are disempowered, most of us permanently struggle, most of us can't make ends meet, all for the benefit of a very small elite at the top which is reaping vast rewards."

"Both the state and the market have destroyed civil society, which is our world. ... Civil society is soemthing that is not the state or the market. Civil society is the world of you and I."

"The free market tends to monopoly. What we should do is try to restore the free market, try to restore a market where people are more equal in its participation."

"I believe in markets, but I don't believe in capitalist markets. I believe in local, civic markets. If everybody owns, and there wasn't just an exclusive, dispossessed class, there wouldn't be a radically insecure bottom twenty or thirty percent of society that causes problems for everybody else."

Bibliograhy

*"Eyes of Faith", Taylor & Francis Group, ISBN 0-415-24450-1
*"Post-Secular Philosophy: Between Philosophy and Theology" (editor), London: Routledge, 1998, ISBN 0-415-09778-9(incomplete)

References

* [http://www.ucsm.ac.uk/ma-theology/blond.html Biography, St Martin’s College, Lancaster]
* [http://www.annettegreenagency.co.uk/phillipblond_197030.html Annette Green Authors' Agency: "Phillip Blond"]
*Phillip Blond: [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/may/30/davidcameron.welfare "The true Tory progressives"] , The Guardian, 30 May 2008
*Phillip Blond and Adrian Pabst: [http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/07/27/opinion/edpabst.php "The roots of Islamic terrorism"] , International Herald Tribune, 28 July 2005
*Phillip Blond and Adrian Pabst: [http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/21/opinion/edblond.php "The problem with secularism"] , International Herald Tribune, 21 December 2006