Tuesday, February 22, 2011

What Philip Blond misses out

A while back I reviewed Philip Blond's book Red Tory (here) and concluded the missing link was a lack of appreciation of the contribution of enterprise and innovation. I've met a kindred spirit in the last few days - Malcolm Evans - a sociologist AND a Lancastrian to boot.

A flavour of his erudite analysis is here:

And, this, to my mind, points to the crux of the matter. Our political leaders (and future leaders), by and large, just don’t get the notion of production. Production for the Left has never recovered at all from Engel’s Salford-based research of Victorian mill conditions.
Production for the Right has never really been fully acceptable in certain circles under the very long snob shadow of land-based and multi-generational wealth. There’s still a suggestion, even today, amongst the professional and the professional political classes, of a sleight in the air to the self-made businessman who buys his own furniture, however expensive.

A link to the full monty is here.

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