Phillip Blond, Red Tory (via Rod Dreher)

But if conservatism is to be more than just moralism plus the market, the logic of a revivified conservatism must also be applied to the economic sphere. The development of an economy that genuinely shares the benefits of growth is a precondition for transforming
the lives of us all. The primary economic basis of a new conservatism is that all should be owners of some realisable or tradable asset. For an increasing number wages are no longer enough to secure the fundamentals of life. In some diverse and yet to be achieved manner, everybody needs an alternate source of income, be it share ownership, employee share options, or an equity stake in a local mutual enterprise. Conservatives need to acknowledge that poor people are poor not just because of dysfunctional behaviour but also because they lack capital and therefore the ability to invest and transform their lives. So ending poverty must mean tackling income dispossession (perpetually low wages which force people into debt is a form of indentured servitude) and lack of initial possession. Asset welfare could initially accompany and then replace income welfare, and then end altogether, since self-subsistence would have been achieved. Mortgages need to be provided, in a mixture of at-cost loans and shared equity, to the most blighted areas of Britain, to ensure a property-owning democracy extends to those who lack this most primary form of stabilisation and security.

Local economies should be developed and encouraged, rather than the current situation of regional clone towns where every shopping centre is the same. Monopoly capitalism, especially in our local retail centres, needs to be penalised, with differential tax and rate benefits accruing to the producers and retailers of local markets. Likewise, decentred regional and central funds could help neighbourhood entrepreneurs to secure a family business and change a street and its environs. In this regard, Conservatives need to realise that in the end the free market is unpatriotic. A disengaged capital has no loyalty to Britain, its people, its history or its future. Conservatives must recover the notion of 'patriotic capital' - a resource dedicated to a renewed Britain of real investment and widely distributed property.

The current tax burden needs to be redistributed so that corporations and the individually wealthy pay a far fairer share of their income to the Treasury so that everybody else pays substantially less. At the latest estimate, the tax loss to the treasury of the amount held in offshore tax havens by the individually rich amounts to at least £110 billion a year - roughly what it costs to finance the whole of the NHS. The loss from corporate tax avoidance
is probably twice this figure. Instead of relentlessly agreeing to big money bidding down the local tax regimes, we could initiate a general agreement on tax - and since we already do this under the auspices of GATT for tax on trade, I see no good conceptual reason (except ideology) as to why similar concords cannot be struck in this area.

Perhaps the least developed aspect of the current conservative renaissance is the most important: culture itself. Conservatism may well provide the institutions and funding for a revival of civil society, and if it limits the state to achieve this, then it might also, to attain a similar end, constrain the market. But what is most crucial is that we have a culture of interactivity and mutuality to fill this vacated space. Currently, with our emphasis on glamour and sedentary pleasure, we wholly lack any defenders of a high culture. Instead we have a debased public realm of constructed gratification and unreflective demand. High culture is high not because of any perceived elitism on the basis of class, but because the better is superior to the worse, and the good is desirable over and above any evil. We can have any form of public space we want, but unless the Conservatives really go back to the future and try to restore a common but high civilization, one that binds all Britons together in a vision of a culture worth participating and believing in, then we will fragment into the self-interested libertarian subjects that we so very nearly already are. A recovery of a national virtue culture is required. One that allows all the different cultures, races and creeds of modern Britain to eschew multi-culturalism and create a new binding common way of life of shared values and higher belief. For it is only on this basis that something called society can be restored.