Red Tory and Blue Labour: More Theology Needed

Abstract

Phillip Blond's Red Tory project has been widely credited with influencing the policies of the Conservative Party under David Cameron, and especially Cameron's "Big Society" thinking. Maurice Glasman has, meanwhile, been a key voice in rethinking Labour Party policy in the post-Blair/Brown years—the so-called Blue Labour programme. Both make space for religion, and Christianity in particular, within the core narratives of their projects and both have sought to build alliances with church bodies. The two projects are united in their critique of liberal assumptions, and this leads to significant congruences between them. Yet the place of Christianity and religion in their thinking is surprisingly different, reflecting the political genealogy of their projects in Burkean Toryism on Blond's part and Alinskian Community Organizing on Glasman's. Nevertheless, the attacks which both have suffered at the hands of social and economic liberals suggest that their ideas have traction. Both, however, are deficient in that their focus on communities as sources of virtue refuses to acknowledge that Enlightenment liberalism has any virtues to its credit. This is fundamentally a theological, rather than just a political, error, since it fails to capture the essential both/and embedded in Christian orthodoxy and the importance of corrective perspectives in Christian practice this side of the eschaton.