ConserveLand Blog

Phillip Blond, the current brains behind the so-called “Red Tory” movement in the U.K., will speak at Villanova U. on Monday evening (details at the bottom below). Whatever one thinks of Blond’s politics, it’s worth noting how his call for “local investment trusts” and locally investing post-office banks in Britain fits well in some ways with the whole idea of the burgeoning land-trust movement in the U.S. and a kind of ecological localism that many of us on these blogs probably subscribe to in one form or another, viewing landscape and ecology as part of community. In any case, Blond’s ideas represent a partial “way out” of the right-left/Republican-Democrat binaries in U.S. politics that seem to dog any efforts at substantive change to renew grass-roots localism (what some of Blond’s American supporters call a “front porch republic” or, with reference to granola, “crunchy conservatism”), especially in Pennsylvania. I don’t buy into the whole “Red Tory” package, but it’s worth engaging with such localist efforts in the U.K., which often have been ahead of the U.S. curve in terms of community landscape preservation (now even including the effort to save small-town pubs championed funnily by Prince Charles). The first link below is to an essay by Blond talking about his idea for “local investment trusts” in the context of current British politics, followed by info on his talk Monday.

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2009/02/riseoftheredtories/

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MONDAY, MARCH 22 LECTURE
VILLANOVA UNIVERSITY
PHILADELPHIA

After the Market State

A lecture by Phillip Blond on the Future of a Free Society

Blond will outline the vision that has increasingly captured the attention of Britain’s Tory Party in his lecture, “Red Toryism: What it means and why it is a genuinely radical alternative to the Market State.”

March 22 @ 7:30 PM in Driscoll Hall Auditorium

Location Information:
Villanova University Main Campus – Driscoll Hall
800 E. Lancaster Avenue
Villanova, PA 19085
Phone: (610) 519-6000
Room: Auditorium – Room 132
Contact Information:
Name: Marie Kelly
Phone: 610-519-6165
Email: marie.kelly@villanova.edu