Red Tory: How Left and Right have Broken Britain and How we can Fix It [Paperback]

'An essential pre-election read.' --GQ Magazine

'Such is the bland predictability of British politics, the territory of managerialised soundbite, that the appetite continues for Blond's intellectual equivalent of a firework display.' --Madeleine Bunting, Guardian

'His thesis makes a potent read as he tracks the history of our modern complacent society, its will crushed between markets and state. It makes sense of Cameron's mantra that there is such a thing as society, it's just not the same as the state.' --Benedict Brogan, Daily Telegraph

Set to be the most controversial, hotly debated and provocative political book of 2010

Conventional politics is at a crossroads. Amid recession, depression, poverty, increasing violence and rising inequality, our current politics is exhausted and inadequate. In Red Tory, Phillip Blond argues that only a radical new political settlement can tackle the problems we face.

Red Toryism combines economic egalitarianism with social conservatism, calling for an end to the monopolisation of society and the private sphere by the state and the market. Decrying the legacy of both the Labour and Conservative parties, Blond proposes a genuinely progressive Conservatism that will restore social equality and revive British culture. He calls for the strengthening of local communities and economies, ending dispossession, redistribution of the tax burden and restoration the nuclear family.

Red Tory offers a different vision for our future and asks us to question our long-held political assumptions. No political thinker has aroused more passionate debate in recent times. Phillip Blond's ideas have already been praised or attacked in every major British newspaper and journal. Challenging, stimulating and exhilarating, this is a book for our times.

Phillip Blond is an academic, writer and journalist. He was senior lecturer in theology and philosophy at the University of Cumbria, and was head of the new Progressive Conservatism project at the thinktank Demos. He writes for the International Herald Tribune, Guardian, Independent and Prospect and is frequently on the radio.