BLOND/ Some reflections on economics and immigration

Dr. Phillip Blond is the founder and director of the public policy think tank ResPublica, based in London. Prior to entering politics and public policy he was a senior lecturer in theology and philosophy – teaching at the Universities of Exeter and Cumbria. He is well known for his book Red Tory and his ideas have influenced the agenda of the Big Society at the center of David Cameron’s electoral campaign in the recent elections in the UK. Ilsussidiario.net interviewed Dr. Blond on the present economic crisis and on how the Big Society can help to meet the serious problems of this time.

Let’s talk about the present economic crisis.  How can the need for austerity and the need for growth be balanced?
In many ways, I think that you cannot have austerity in all countries because that takes so much out of the economy. In the end, you can only export to growing countries and now there are too few of them and too many countries that are cutting back. Who do you sell, or export, to? By the same token, I think that we clearly do have unsustainable public debt, so what we need to do is innovate. That is the only way to go between Scylla and Charybdis. By innovating, we can have public services that cost less and actually deliver the level of cuts that people are looking for, without actually cutting the existing services. We should renovate and create a new model for that public service.

In the UK you have a very comprehensive welfare system. What are the proposals by Red Tories on this point? How can you maintain the needed coverage without spending too much or creating a dependency on the State, which limits individual freedom?
I think we need a new model of welfare. On the one hand, we need to genuinely tackle dependency and there are two ways to do that. First, we need to lower the barrier to work, so I agree with the government’s proposal to lower the marginal tax rate when people move off benefits into wages. This way, it will become more advantageous to get work, which is correct. There is a second element of welfare, however, that is missing from the current mix, and that is asset welfare. Currently, we are not creating a society of owners. One of the reasons that poor people are poor is that they do not own anything. Because they do not own anything, they cannot transform their situation. What we have to do is to think of ways in which people can own the budget that expends on them, so that they are recapitalized. For example, in the localism bill currently going through Parliament, people are arguing for the power of budgetary capture, where people can capture income and expenditure spent on them, and actually own it for the first time, which would be a form of recapitalization. Then we need to look at middle class welfare, and the ways in which the middle and upper class people are getting subsidized. Some things, like having no capital gains on your first home, are fine. I think we need that.