The Wintle Blog

So, first, a question: what do these countries have in common? Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, Georgia, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Moldova, Norway, Romania, Russia, Sweden, Turkey, Ukraine and the UK? Answer: all these nations’ entries in the 2010 Eurovision Song Contest are sung in English. I fetch back a recollection of the first EVSC I ever saw, in 1961, when a UK duo, The Allisons, came second with a bright and harmonious number called Are You Sure . What I remember of the other contestants is a kaleidoscope (if you can have a black-and-white kaleidoscope) of language, costume, dance, performance and minstrelsy which ranged from the picture-postcard quaint through the exotic to the bizarre. I also remember thinking how, as they watched, viewers in each country must be ranking the performances on a spectrum that rose towards “extraordinary” from a base point of “ordinary” which was settled in their own coun...

Out of nowhere this month there erupted onto the media stage the figure of Phillip Blond, until recently an unnoticed lecturer in theology at the University of Cumbria, now installed as “Philosopher King” of the Tory party, guru to David Cameron, and founder of a new think tank called ResPublica . Armed with a social theory called “Red Toryism” (a bit of a cocktail out of Edmund Burke, Michael Oakeshott and Catholicism) Mr Blond believes he has the right prescription to fix Britain’s so-called “broken society”, but first, he wants to tell us what’s gone wrong. He writes pungently. In an essay called The Ownership State he denounces the modern economy’s fixation with: “...a purely market driven approach, whose domination of the speaking parts [in the corporate narrative] is so complete that in the middle of the greatest management meltdown in history, management responsibility for the financial crisis is entirely shielded from question. Resource allocation, risk, product design, accoun...