Hope I’m not becoming a red Tory, but…

I recently met the writer Adam Wishart and today found a link on his blog to an episode of Start the week from mid-June 2009 in which he participated. I enjoyed the programme enough to listen to it all, and hence it seems worthy of a post here.

It was explained that Adam’s recent documentary The price of life examined the way in which groups lobby the UK government agency NICE, which vets new drugs, for their cures of choice to be underwritten by the NHS. In the light of more recent news from the USA it is rather good to think that in the UK the argument is over the dispensing of a social service rather than whether such a service should be brought into being.

In general the conversation was around the issues of entitlement and liberty that are I suppose the characteristic fodder of the thinking middle class. But it contained a few thoughts that chimed with my own, particularly from Phillip Blond, a political philosopher who calls himself a ‘red Tory’. Amongst other things, he advocates supermarkets would be best broken up and their business returned to independent shop keepers. Further than I would go, but interesting. His Wikipedia profile provides more quotes.