Looking back at Simon Titley's writings for Liberator

The new issue of Liberator was posted on the magazine website this morning. You can download it free of charge from there - it's Liberator 422.

As well as Lord Bonkers' Diary, which I'll start posting here tomorrow, it includes an article by me on Simon Titley and his writings. The photo here was taken during our lunch in Melton Mowbray.

Does a decade make a difference?

Simon Titley was fond of claiming that he joined the Liberator editorial collective in the 1980s because it was the only way of ensuring that his articles were pasted down in the correct order. Whatever the truth of that, his individual take on politics soon became central to the magazine. He was well informed about machinations inside the Liberal Party and then the Liberal Democrats, interested in new thinking from well beyond those parties and aware of the continuing importance of social class in British politics, when a more common view among his fellow Liberals and Lib Dems was that, yes, class existed, but it was rather bad manners to mention it.

Now that, incredibly, it is approaching ten years since Simon’s death, this seems a good time to look back at some of his contributions to the magazine. You can find a collection of them on the magazine’s website and I’ll give the issue number of those I mention so you can read more for yourself.

Let’s start with a characteristic article. In Liberator 351 Simon looked at Liberals’ fondness for the words ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’ and asked what they mean to us in concrete terms. He begins by quoting Ralf Dahrendorf’s account of being held in solitary confinement by the Nazi regime as a teenager and how he had found himself feeling “a visceral desire not to be hemmed in, neither by the personal power of men, nor by the anonymous power of organisations”.

It is that feeling, Simon goes on to say, that Liberal Democrat talk of ‘freedom’ consistently fails to convey:

It is because the Liberal Democrats have such difficulty talking about freedom in meaningful terms that I have been regularly referring to the concept of ‘agency’ in my writing. By ‘agency’, I mean the capacity of individuals to make meaningful choices about their lives and to influence the world around them. I define freedom in these terms because it is better to think of freedom as a practical ability than as a theoretical abstraction. Unfortunately, ‘agency’ is jargon in some professional circles but I shall stick with it because it encapsulates the meaning I seek better than any other word I can think of.

Defining freedom in these terms forces us to realise the extent to which the maldistribution of power is at the root of most of our political ills. It also forces us to realise the relationship between exercising freedom and wellbeing. We can then incorporate freedom as an integral part of our policies across the board, rather than tack it on as an afterthought or omit it altogether.

An insistence on agency also counteracts the classical liberal argument that market forces are the only legitimate means by which people may exercise power.

This emphasis on the importance of the lived experience of abstract ideas can also be found in an article about social class that Simon contributed to Liberator 345. In this case the experience was his own:

Rarely have I encountered worse snobbery than within the Liberal Democrats. The symptoms are wearily familiar; the snide put-downs, the supercilious smirks, the casual discounting of one’s skills or arguments. The low point came when a ‘fellow’ party member once addressed me as “your sort”.

My own experience is more benign. If I transgress the unwritten rules in something I write online, then I’m generally told a particular comment “is unworthy of me”, with the implication that I pass muster the rest of the time. I’ll admit the speed with which public school and Oxbridge ranks close is impressive, but it tells us much about why British society is the way it is.

Sometimes Simon chose less ostensibly political subjects. Here he is in Liberator 331 on the tyranny of ‘cool’, and in particular the British middle-class take on the concept, which gives us:

A world where it is no longer permissible to have hobbies or intellectual pursuits. A world where enthusiasm or erudition earns contempt. A world where, if you commit any of these social sins, you will immediately be slapped down with one of these stock sneers: ‘sad’, ‘trainspotter’, ‘anorak’, ‘anal’ or ‘get a life’.

The phenomenon of ‘cool’ has been examined thoroughly in a pioneering book, Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude by Dick Pountain and David Robins. Cool is essentially about narcissism and ironic detachment. Its modern origins can be traced to American black culture of the 1940s, when young black men adopted a defiant posture as a means of defence. It was then picked up by rebellious white icons of the 50s such as James Dean. During the 60s, ‘cool’ began to be exploited by advertisers as a means of selling consumer goods and in the 70s it moved from the counter-culture into the mainstream. But while ‘cool’ people today affect an air of rebellion, in reality they are conforming to commercially-driven norms.

Because he moved back to Lincoln a couple of years before he died, I was able to meet Simon three times in the East Midlands before he fell ill. Our last meeting was at a very Titleyesque event – the Melton Mowbray Food Festival – and it will be no surprise to anyone who knew him that one of his last articles for this magazine (Liberator 354) was concerned with the decline of the dinner party, suggesting that a turn taken by some television cookery programmes might be in part to blame:

The BBC’s Masterchef (“cooking doesn’t get any tougher than this”) promotes the mistaken idea that, for any dinner party host, nothing less than Michelin-starred restaurant standards will do. It makes people feel ashamed to offer a homespun casserole, even though that is much more practical for a domestic dinner party than Masterchefs labour-intensive, chefy food. Another disincentive is provided by Channel 4’s ‘Come Dine With Me’, which creates the impression that the average dinner party consists of incompetent cooking shared with a bunch of arseholes.

If you want to see Simon’s approach to politics summed up in a single piece of writing, then I recommend ‘Really Facing the Future’ (Liberator 349), which he wrote with another of the party’s original thinkers, David Boyle. It was written in response to ‘Facing the Future’, a paper from the Liberal Democrats that had failed to live up to its title. David and Simon described their article as:

an attempt to encourage Liberal Democrat policy makers to think more radically – partly because the challenges that lie ahead require more radical thinking and partly as an antidote to the idea that party policy is at its most effective when it tentatively suggests a few tiny changes that don’t threaten the status quo. 

Liberal Democrats believe the opposite is true. The justification for the party’s existence is to think radically, to force the political establishment to recognise the real world, and to put radical change into effect. If the party does not do that, it will find that people lose interest and the supply of committed activists begins to dry up.

The Simon Titley articles I enjoyed most were the ones that revealed the machinations of those on the right of the Liberal Democrats who saw political success much as Jeffrey Archer’s novels see success in business. To them, it was the result, not of new thinking and hard work, but of a clever trick, a new alliance or a bit of clever positioning. As many of these people work in public relations, as Simon did himself, he knew whereof he wrote.

So his review of Mark Oaten’s forgotten memoir Screwing Up gives us a pretty brutal portrait of the author:

Oaten … appears to have no fundamental political values but merely jumps from one bandwagon to another. In the 1980s, he joined the SDP but can justify his choice only in terms of it not being Labour or Conservative. In the 1990s, he was an überchampion of the Blairite ‘Project’ but can justify this only in terms of admiring Paddy Ashdown’s leadership. In the 2000s, he became defender of the classical liberal flame when he founded Liberal Future and the Peel Group, but can justify this only in terms of opposing the ‘nanny state’ (having presumably taken the opposite view in the SDP). In a Guardian interview on 8 January 2005, he admitted “I only really got a philosophical belief about three years ago” (i.e. nearly five years after being elected as a Liberal Democrat MP).

But Simon also discusses the book’s strange failure to mention Paul Marshall or Gavin Grant, who were important backers of Oaten’s varied projects. He also reminds us of the name of the Guardian journalist who penned a succession of articles which questioned the competence of various Liberal Democrat MPs while praising Oaten as a ‘rising star’. Who can have briefed her?

Simon also contributed a telling account in Liberator 339 of the reaction of some to the outbreak of Cleggmania that followed the first leaders’ debate in the 2010 general election campaign:

As Lib Dem opinion poll ratings soared, one cheerleader for the right-wing cabal running the campaign wrote on Facebook: “So... 26-34% in the polls, almost all the boost down to media skills and leadership not leaflets and target seats... I’ve got to ask... anyone missing Rennard...?” The complete collapse of the ‘surge’ to 23% on polling day, just 1% more than the party won in 2005, suggests there was no basis for such conceit.

To end, let’s go back to 2001 and the very first article by Simon on the magazine’s website (issue 277). Not for the last time, we find him asking why Liberals are so fond of apologising for being Liberal:

Liberals are often pilloried as timid and petty-minded. We sit on the fence and wring our hands. When we rebel, it is through self-indulgent individualism (for example, calling ourselves ‘Jedi Knights’ on the census forms) rather than confronting what matters. 

We have only ourselves to blame for acquiring this reputation. Why are Liberals so embarrassed? Why do we lack the courage of our convictions? One of the main reasons is our faith that everyone is reasonable like us. All we have to do is sit round the table and eventually we can reach agreement. If only that were so. In fact there will always be many people, probably a majority, who are not Liberals, who will never be Liberals, and whom we must confront. Beyond that, however, are groups so violent in their hostility that to tolerate their behaviour is to invite our own demise.

The contempt for Jedi Knights is an authentic Titley touch, but beyond that, I don’t know whether to be depressed or lost in admiration that his words are needed just as much today as they were all those years ago.

The Sins of G.K. Chesterton by Richard Ingrams

Writing in the latest issue of the London Review of Books, Peter Howarth reviews a book on G.K Chesterton by the former Private Eye editor Richard Ingrams.

Chesterton, who died 1936, was a journalist, controversialist, theologian and literary critic - his book on Charles Dickens is well worth seeking out for observations like this:

In such a sacred cloud the tale called The Christmas Carol begins, the first and most typical of all his Christmas tales. It is not irrelevant to dilate upon the geniality of this darkness, because it is characteristic of Dickens that his atmospheres are more important than his stories. The Christmas atmosphere is more important than Scrooge, or the ghosts either; in a sense, the background is more important than the figures. 

The same thing may be noticed in his dealings with that other atmosphere (besides that of good humour) which he excelled in creating, an atmosphere of mystery and wrong, such as that which gathers round Mrs. Clennam, rigid in her chair, or old Miss Havisham, ironically robed as a bride. 

Here again the atmosphere altogether eclipses the story, which often seems disappointing in comparison. The secrecy is sensational; the secret is tame. The surface of the thing seems more awful than the core of it. 

It seems almost as if these grisly figures, Mrs. Chadband and Mrs. Clennam, Miss Havisham, and Miss Flite, Nemo and Sally Brass, were keeping something back from the author as well as from the reader. When the book closes we do not know their real secret. They soothed the optimistic Dickens with something less terrible than the truth

Though he was most at home with tight deadlines and in the pubs of Fleet Street, there hung about Chesterton a reputation for unworldliness. So much so that some of his Catholic co-religionists have urged his canonisation.

Peter Howarth writes:

The Chestertonians’ appeal eventually resulted in a six-year investigation by the diocese of Northampton into whether there was sufficient evidence of Chesterton’s ‘heroic virtue’ and of miracles arising from his intercession. But in 2019, the bishop announced that things would be taken no further: there was too much evidence of antisemitism and, surprisingly, too little of ‘a pattern of personal spirituality’ in G.K.’s life.

And according to Howarth, Richard Ingrams follows other modern biographers in seeing Chesterton's antisemitism as the result of the malign influence of his brother Cecil and Hilaire Belloc (who was briefly a Liberal MP):

After Auden discerned the pair’s ‘pernicious influence’ in his 1970 selection of Chesterton’s prose, biographers and commentators have discovered how much the resentful obsession with rich Jews and Liberal politicians was primarily Belloc and Cecil’s. 

Ingrams supplies detail about just how nasty the pair were to G.K., too. The witty debater and brilliant controversialist was, in private, incapable of resisting Cecil’s tests of his family loyalty or Belloc’s bullying demands for a pulpit.

I think I shall read Ingrams' book as I have always had a soft spot for Chesterton, though the idea that we can simply blame his antisemitism on other people sounds a little like wishful thinking.

And if you share my interest in G.K. Chesterton and Belloc's distributism, which is described by howarth as

a libertarian and localist politics that sought to evade socialist centralisation and capitalist wage-slavery alike by keeping as much wealth as possible at household level

then you could look at David Boyle's Back to the Land: Distributism and the politics of life.

The Joy of Six 1074

"These ‘final’ train journeys are part of a long tradition for major public figures such as King George V and Winston Churchill, and everything possible should have been done to maintain this rather special way of enabling people to make their farewells without travelling to London." Christian Wolmar says the Queen’s final journey should have been by train.

David Boyle considers the causes of inflation: "So much of our economy in the UK now panders to the ultra-rich that it has worn grooves where the money flows towards them. It gathers around them like great fatbergs and the inflation gathers there too. Then, hey presto! It spreads around."

Anne Perkins reviews a new biography of Harold Wilson.

"Socially, North-East Scots is of the soil. Its distinctiveness derives from the traditional work and lives of its inhabitants, in particular, farming and fishing. This means that much which made it so distinctive has faded as the world has changed." Robert McColl Millar on Doric - once the language of the Scottish court, it is now a dialect of English.

Conrad Brunstrom watches the John Lennon film How I Won the War: "The film is certainly a satire on war movies, and on how a certain kind of British war movie is constructed for propaganda purposes. But it’s clearly more ambitious than a mere genre satire effort."

South West London once had a network of trolleybuses. Roger French joins a group retracing its routes 60 years after they closed.

Wellesley Tudor Pole and Edward Tudor-Pole

David Boyle introduces us to Wellesley Tudor Pole:

He was a former major in the British army, who had been on Allenby’s staff in Jerusalem in 1918 and had gone to great lengths to make sure that the British protected the life of the mystic 'Abdu'l-Bahá, one of the key figures in the start of the Baha'i faith. Later in life, be bought the site of Chalice Well Gardens at the foot of Glastonbury Tor.

His proposal to Churchill was that, with the help of anyone of goodwill, he would build a psychic barrier against Nazi invasion.

For one minute every day at 9pm, he would light a  candle and, for a minute, he would imagine the barrier and pray for peace.

This was said to be why Churchill asked the BBC to broadcast the Big Ben bongs every night at 9pm, as a kind of focus, which they did from November 1940.

David is writing about how we can deal mentally and spiritually with the threat of nuclear war.

And me? On reading that I wanted to know whether Wellesley Tudor Pole is related to Edward Tudor-Pole. And the answer is yes. He is his grandfather.

The Joy of Six 1031

"We need to find a way that we can return responsibility to local people and get all the sectors on board – to show how to build an economy that can save the planet and save our lives at the same time, and how the moving parts might fit together." David Boyle calls for a new-style national plan.

Louise Whitfield has no time for Dominic Raab's plan to overhaul the Human Rights Act: "Watering down the HRA has long been one of Raab’s pet projects - he quite literally wrote a book on it – but to human rights lawyers like me who’ve spent the last 20 years seeing the Act change lives for the better, these plans make no sense."

Mark Zuckerberg's pitch for the future of Facebook was a "delusional fever dream cribbed most obviously from dystopian science fiction and misleading or outright fabricated virtual reality product pitches from the last decade," says Jason Koebler.

Rachel Aviv on the frightening US shadow penal system for troubled youngsters run by a Christian organisation.

"They managed to open one wagon and free 17 of the prisoners. As the train continued slowly forward, other prisoners were able to free themselves. In all, 233 people got off the train; 89 were recaptured and 26 were killed, but 118 managed to remain free." Three young men from Brussels who set out in 1943 to rescue a train of deportees headed for Auschwitz are to be honoured, reports Alan Hope..

Sophie Atkinson explains why George Orwell hated Sheffield.

Six of the Best 1000

Congratulations on reaching number 1000? Up to a point. 

I seem to recall that something went wrong with the numbering of this feature early on and I am increasingly embarrassed by its title.

I sometimes think that the best links should get there own post and the average ones should just be a tweet, but I enjoy putting Six of the Best together and with so much of my time spent looking after my Mum these days I am not in the mood for radical changes,

Edward Docx says Boris Johnson is a clown: "Instead of uniting his country, he now finds himself facetiously hastening its breakup. And it is the Conservative and unionist parties that have facilitated him. They licensed their comforting fool and told themselves that he could restore a glorious past. But a leader who personifies tomfoolery and nostalgia is eloquent of sharpening decline not renaissance."

"There are now political academics who use the term ‘distributist’, shorn of its Catholic accretions, as a shorthand for the bearded sandals wing of the party. As one of that persuasion myself, I feel myself increasingly alone and misunderstood by either technocratic wing – neither right nor left seem to understand why I might be against big business but in favour of small, why I might be in favour of entrepreneurs but against corporates." David Boyle is drawn to the liberal distributist tradition in British politics.

Former BBC journalist Patrick Howse believes the corporation’s biggest mistake was to court and give a platform to extreme voices.

A bus for every village, every hour is possible argues the Campaign to Protect Rural England.

David Southwell, landscape punk and creator of Hookland, is interviewed by the Spirit Box podcast.

Victor Ambrus, book illustrator and the resident artist on Time Team, is eulogised by Britain is no Country for Old Men: "He was in Budapest during 'The Siege', the 50-day-long encirclement by Soviet Russian and Romanian forces in which about 38,000 civilians died through starvation or military action, before it unconditionally surrendered in. He later recalled 'the smoke and the rubble' he had seen and would have then witnessed Russian soldiers and tanks on the streets of Budapest."

Six of the Best 963

Jonathan Chait offers a way of understanding Donald Trump: "He is a brilliant con man, who has, throughout his career in business and politics alike, honed the singular skill of identifying marks and exploiting them with spectacular lies."

"Senator Bankhead, the uncle of Tallulah, managed to get a bill drafted in Congress which would have authorised $1 billion of stamp scrip to be issued the following year." David Boyle girds up to make the case for local money again.

Jessica Grose says that though devices for tracking children calm parents' fears, they hamper the children's development.

"'Sport confirmed that in England, you could do as you pleased,' he writes, and to this end he takes us on a dizzying journey from the bull-runners of Stamford to the public school cricketers of ­Uppingham, from the militaristic pomp of the fox hunt to the bloodied bare-knuckle heroes of the prize-fighting ring, from the Peterloo ­massacre of 1819 to the stirrings of modern football." Jonathan Liew reviews This Sporting Life: Sport and Liberty in England, 1760-1960 by Robert Colls, who taught me on my Master's course at Leicester many years ago.

Adrian York celebrates Kate Bush's election to fellowship of the Ivors Academy, the independent professional association UK for music creators.

Will Carr looks at Anthony Burgess as a Mancunian.

Six of the Best 955

"Whereas Thatcher offered young people hope - not least the hope of owning their own home - today’s Tories do not. Yes Thatcher wanted to achieve cultural change, but she saw economics as the means of achieving that." Boris Johnson's Conservative's Party has diverged from Thatcherism and not for the better, argues Chris Dillow.

David Boyle reports from the front line of his war with tickbox culture, which is currently to be found in the NHS.

"The form of public accountability we’ve settled on is one that relies on a robust, independent-minded, largely private-sector media to do the job of scrutiny. It hasn’t always done this job well, but no other body is equipped to do it. Now it’s falling away, and as we’ve already seen at the local level, this is not a vacuum that there is any rush to fill." Sarah Ditum mourns the state of journalism.

Enslavement continues in the US and it is called prison, says Ashish Prashar.

Friends of Islington Museum has a history of Islington and Gainsborough Studios - 'Hollywood by the canal.'

Catherine O'Flynn on Cliff Richard's 1973 film musical set in Brutalist Birmingham, which was shown by Talking Pictures TV today: "Take Me High is a mind-bogglingly strange film. A critique of rapacious capitalism. A hymn to a second city. A vehicle for a flagging pop star. A film about a hamburger. It’s a musical without hits and a comedy without jokes."

Six of the Best 938

Philippe Sands sees the British government still defending our colonial legacy: "Five decades on, many former residents of the Chagos Archipelago still wished to go home, supported by Mauritius, many other African countries, and much of the world besides. This was one of the purposes of the resolution before the General Assembly—and it was, of course, precisely such a matter as the United Nations was created to address."

"If you use a piece of data as a target or as a box that must be ticked, then the data will become inaccurate. That's Goodhart's Law." David Boyle introduces us to an important concept.

Boak and Bailey give their initial thoughts on the guidance for reopening pubs.

Flickering Lamps watches airships over London - in war and peace.

"Tony Benn, who was a cousin, spoke of her as a genial companion and produced a photo for a BBC documentary of the two of them sitting in deck chairs on a beach. He said she was exactly the same on screen and off." Jack Buckley says Margaret Rutherford was a gift from the gods.

Backwatersman shares my affection for Vic Marks: "His estimate of his Test career may be accurate rather than merely self-deprecating, but his one-day bowling (which he rather underplays) entitled him to respect (both his average and economy rates were superior to his England contemporaries Emburey, Miller and Hemmings)."

Six of the Best 935

A podcast from Matthew d'Ancona reveals how Boris Johnson’s brush with death exposed a lethal amateurism at the heart of government.

"There is a long tradition of 'crowd psychology', Professor Reicher said, which 'sees the group as problematic', as something that “undermines us at a cognitive and moral level." Times Higher Education talks to Stephen Reicher, who says psychology can help policymakers tap wisdom of crowds during times of crisis.

And where does this fear of the mob come from? David Boyle suggests it has its roots in classical education.

Emily Marchant, Charlotte Todd and Sinead Brophy ask why outdoor learning isn't used more by schools when it has such benefits children and teachers.

"In 1914 a very concerned father sent a letter to the school teaching his young child. The complaint? He was concerned that 'sexual instruction' had been given to his 11-year-old daughter by Miss Outram, Headmistress of the Girls Department at Dronfield School, near Sheffield." Vicky Iglikowski-Broad on a cast that shows a fear of female empowerment, and illustrates the slowly changing world girls were growing up in.

Peter Webster visits a memorial to Protestant martyrs above Lewes.

Six of the Best 916

David Boyle looks to life after the coronavirus: "I'm not sure anyone will miss the airlines and airports (except the British, of course, who fly more than any nation on earth). The future of food looks set to be local with short supply lines after all. But if the economy was in such a dire situation before, then it may be that some government support for salaries will have to be semi-permanent."

From miraculous cures to paranoid conspiracies, misinformation about coronavirus is going viral at a disturbing rate say Ella Hollowood and Alexi Mostrous.

"Even nowadays, with parents the stunned and submissive onlookers at their children’s lives, a middle-aged man would think twice about meeting the family of the 17-year-old son he’s knocking off." Alan Bennett on W.H. Auden in love.

Film School Rejects chooses the 50 best coming of age movies ever.

"Astérix doesn’t beat brute force by superior cunning and intelligence – he does it thanks to his unexpected access to even bruter force than the enemy can deliver." Mary Beard considers the most celebrated Gaul.

Patrick Mulkern looks at the career of Patrick Troughton, who was a hundred years ago today.

GUEST POST Belloc, Chesterton and the Distributist League

In an extract from his Back to the Land, David Boyle looks at the emergence of Distrbutism as an ideology.

By 1918, and G. K.’s brother Cecil Chesterton’s death, and the reorganisation of his paper as GK’s Weekly, a Back-to-the-land ideology had begun to emerge among the new Distributists. They had backed allotments against town councils, backed tea parties in the street against officials or market stalls selling the produce of small farmers.

Hilaire Belloc was especially incensed by the growing power of Wall Street – forcing the defeated Germans to repay their war debts when the British had repudiated their own. But for Chesterton, the real battles were smaller scale. “It is time for an army of amateurs, for England is perishing of professionals,” he wrote.

It was in this spirit that I believe his poem ‘The Secret People’ needs to be understood. The words: “We are the people of England,/And we never have spoken yet”, have sent a frisson of fear down the necks of the technocratic left for generations.

If Chesterton was populist, he was also in favour of self-help and human-scale that he believed – quite rightly, in fact – were under threat. “Do anything, however small,” urged Chesterton in 1926.  “Save one out of a hundred shops.  Save one croft out of a hundred crofts.  Keep one door open out of a hundred doors; for so long as one door is open, we are not in prison.”

One of the first campaigns by the emerging new Distributists, that followed New Witness with enthusiasm, was one in favour of the former soldiers who had been encouraged to sink their war gratuities into buying buses, which they drove themselves.

But these had fallen foul of the monopolistic London General Omnibus Company, backed by the transport union who called the ‘pirates’ and – suspicious of self-employment – began to run them out and to deliberately deprive them of custom.

The Distributist campaigners took the unprecedented step of launching their own pirate bus service. They leased a series of ancient omnibuses, painted them in rainbow colours and called them ‘Morris’, ‘Ruskin’ and names with similar radical echoes – and took on the giant bus company on its most lucrative routes.

The campaign failed.  London General swept all before it, including the small bus operators the campaigners were defending, only of course to be nationalised under the auspices of the London Passenger Transport Board.

It was clear that Distributism was emerging as an ideology. There were even now two financial backers, the Olympic powerboat racer and Marylebone landlord Lord Howard de Walden, and Cedric Chivers, an alderman from Bath.

The first meeting of the new Distributist League took place in Essex Hall in Essex Street, off London’s Strand on 17 Septmber 1926. The launch was marked by the publication of Chesterton’s Outline of Sanity, and Back-to-the-land was at the heart of it – and the horror of wasting food when people remained desperate. “We are destroying food because we do not need it; we are starving men because we do not need them,” he wrote.

On their plans for the League itself, Chesterton said this: “We hope in the end to establish within the state a community, almost self-supporting, of men and women pledged to Distributism, and to a large extent practising it. Less and less, then, will the juggling of finance have power over us; for it does not matter what they call the counters when you are exchanging hams for handkerchiefs, or pigs for pianos.”

This kind of statement seemed deeply old-fashioned at the time, but – with its emphasis on being the change, and new kinds of barter – it now seems strangely forward-looking. But the central message – the vital importance of small-scale property ownership – has never been fashionable, hence

Chesterton’s frustration that the prevailing culture failed to grasp his critique of institutions inhuman in scale. “The choice lies between property on the one hand and slavery, public or private, on the other. There is no third issue,” wrote Belloc.

Painfully and slowly, he and Chesterton were beginning to develop their ideas, aware how out of kilter they were with the collectivist spirit of the time, emphasising always that not even property is an absolute – it is small-scale property they were underpinning, because it supported the medieval family unit of production.

For Belloc, the key was to defend the yeoman farmer tradition, only too aware that – for centuries – the yeoman families held their land by tradition, rather than by legal paperwork, and this could be overturned by statute at any time, and reduced to tenant status. It was important therefore to understand the history. That explained his prodigious production of history books and biographies, always dictated to long-suffering secretaries at great speed.

For Chesterton, on the other hand, the key argument was about corporate scale and retailers in particular. It was the great age of chain stores and ribbon developments reaching out beyond the suburbs. Chain stores undermined income and reduced people to wage slavery: where there were, say, 40,000 independent grocers, wrote Belloc, “there cannot be forty thousand managers, the wage slaves of a combine, because the cost of administration is less, and this economic advantage handicaps the small man against the great.”  Chesterton was writing poems like his ‘Song against grocers’.

Distributism also managed to dodge issues around public versus private. Yes, you would need to use the power of the state to end capitalism, with “its clique of masters and its myriad of dependents”. You would need to prevent the mergers and encourage de-mergers. You would need differential taxes on the small and on big combines, chainstores and multiples. But the purpose would also be to guarantee independence against the state. It was – as it so often was with Chesterton – a kind of paradox.

Even so, it was never entirely clear how they planned to make the change happen, whether by expropriation of the land or by enabling tenants to buy out their landlords along the lines of the Wyndham Land Act in Ireland that Belloc so admired.

But Chesterton always pointed out, in his set-piece debates with Shaw, that this ambiguity was shared by the socialists. The point was that life would be better. “The peasant eats not only of his own produce but off his own table and at his own house,” wrote Belloc.  “And he eats better food and brews better drink.”

At the heart of Distributism was the idea of going back-to-the-land, and that was not going to be easy. “We have got to say to our friends, ‘you are in for a rough time if you start new farms on your own,” said Chesterton. “But it is the right thing to do.’ There is no way out of the danger except the dangerous way.” 

Then there was the question of how in the meantime we could defend people’s small-scale property, given that they probably did not own it outright – it was “in the hands of the money-lenders”. Here it was another Distributist, the architect and promoter of ‘guild socialism’ Arthur Penty, who developed an answer: the revival of the medieval guilds. To fight back against the giant financial institutions, in other words, people would need to create institutions of their own.

“I cannot count how many vital and valuable human institutions have been sacrificed to this one simple and silly idea – the idea that, by making a thing large, we make it more orderly; whereas making it large is obviously more likely to make it loose.”

When the 1660 Restoration threw to the winds the “common morality of Europe”, wrote Belloc, our organisations of economic self-defence were destroyed. The only guilds left were the ones for doctors and lawyers. In the Distributist world, the banks would have to meet and come to terms with, for example, the small traders’ guild. You may not be able to get rid of the banks, but you could undermine their power by supporting small-scale property ownership.

It was simple in a sense, but it so flew in the face of conventional political categories, that many found it all too confusing. There were also more conventional, and increasingly bitter divisions among the Distributists themselves. These had begun four months before the launch of the League, when both Belloc and Chesterton were publicly on the side of the strikers in the General Strike.

On March 19 you can here David speaking on 'Could Distributism still change the world?‘ at the Ditchling Museum in Sussex.

David Boyle on taking power locally

David Boyle has written an essay - Counterweight: How Big Local areas are levelling the scales of local power - for the Local Trust:

Great steps forward in community development often happen as a result of crises or disasters, like the earthquakes in Kyoto or Christchurch. We don’t normally have earthquakes in the UK, but we have had similar, and it was one of these that led to the start of community development in the UK: when poverty-stricken Stepney in east London was abandoned to its fate during the blitz in 1940. 

One of those who were there, who broke into the locked and shuttered council offices in Stepney borough, and who witnessed the way that the neighbourhood regrouped and organised makeshift police and social services for itself out of the chaos, was a young Quaker ambulance driver called Tony Gibson. 

It was his memory of this, and his sense of the right people have (when they feel abandoned by those who administer them) to take matters into their own hands, that led to the launch of the ground-breaking unit at Nottingham University, Education for Neighbourhood Change; his influential 1978 Pelican book People Power; and other projects which led to community development, community technical aid, and so forth.

You can hear David discussing his ideas in a Local Trust podcast.

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"Most of us know precisely what is wrong with Tickbox - that most of these measures or targets either miss the point or get finessed by managers. Those who can’t see it tend to be the elite forces who run the world - and who believe what they are told by the frontline." David Boyle has a new book out on tick-box culture - or 'Tickbox'.

High-tech smart cities promise efficiency by monitoring everything. But, asks Amy Fleming, would cities be better if we ditched the data?

Shoshana Zuboff explains how we are all controlled by surveillance capitalism.

"The most dramatic moment came on May 17, 1972, when ten thousand school children went on strike. Central London came to a standstill as police struggled to contain crowds marching through the streets with banners reading 'No to the Cane'." Owen Emmerson on school strikes against corporal punishment.

"Terry was warm, generous and sociable. Always interested in meeting new people and sharing his enthusiasm with them. I’ve made many good friends through Terry and their messages and memories, coming in over the last few days, all conjure up a vision of a good man." Michael Palin remembers his friend Terry Jones.

Helen Day pays tribute to the Ladybird Books illustrator John Berry.

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Jen Yockney says that Labour, by expending so much of its energy on attacking the Liberal Democrats, is repeating a battle plan that leads it to defeat.

"The whole language of general elections is about what alternative governments can do for people. It assumes a widespread and somewhat hopeless passivity. There is no obvious election language to draw down in praise of the idea of people doing things for themselves." David Boyle wonders if that narwhal horn might have slowed the Johnson juggernaut.

Tim Ellis reminds us that Nancy Astor wasn’t the first woman MP.

Aishwarya Kumar explains why grandmasters lose weight during elite chess tournaments.

You have probably found yourself wondering why so Many medieval manuscripts depict violent rabbits. Sad and Useless has the answer.

"Here was a story of shattered European dreams, of friendship betrayed and transactional murder, shot with all the murky, Expressionistic tricks in the ’40s noir handbook. And then over the top comes Harry Lime’s Theme: an ingenuous and wholly undisturbed tune, the kind that you might whistle to yourself whilst chopping vegetables." Jim Hilton on the importance of of Anton Karas's  zither to The Third Man.

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"Brexit is presented as some sort of triumph of popular will. But in actuality it has involved a relentless attempt to massively strengthen the executive and dismiss other forms of democratic legitimacy," Ian Dunt on today's Supreme Court's judgment.

John Preston explains what the government is really saying with its ‘Get Ready for Brexit’ campaign.

David Boyle is right on education: "The trouble with nationalised education is that it assumes that all children are the same, that they require identical education. The voluntary sector education sector has largely been subsumed, the experimental sector – so influential in the 1960s and 70s – has largely been driven out."

MPs are calling for a ban on pavement parking across England. Andy Boddington thinks they are right.

"Voice hearing has a bad name in our culture. The media tend to focus on the occasional instance where someone diagnosed with psychosis does something violent in response to a suggestion or command from voices." Rufus May suggests a different approach.

Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais talk to Ann Chadwick about their career.

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"If the Lib Dems can paint themselves as the only party that can end the whole Brexit debate, and moreover do so quickly, I think the party can pick up a huge number of seats in a snap election." Nick Tyrone says our slogan at the next election should be 'Revoke and Make it Stop'.

Alison Faulkner looks at the use and misuse of the concept of 'recovery' in mental health.

The death of Richard Booth, the self-styled King of Hay-on-Wye. leads David Boyle to mourn the lost radicalism of the UK.

"The same year saw her adventure novel The Mystery That Never Was rejected by Macmillan on the grounds that, 'there is a faint but unattractive touch of old-fashioned xenophobia in the author's attitude to the thieves: they are "foreign" ... and this seems to be regarded as sufficient to explain their criminality'." Charles Connelly shows that controversy over Enid Blyton's books is nothing new.

David Glover watches himself as an eight-year-old philosopher.

Down at Third Man watched Jofra Archer menace the Australians at Lord's.

Another good Lib Dem result in Shropshire

David Boyle once said his favourite party press release from his time as editor of Liberal Democrat News read 'Liberals storm to second place'.

Well something similar happened in Shrewsbury yesterday:

Meole (Shropshire) result:

CON: 37.6% (-17.8)
LDEM: 26.5% (+14.4)
LAB: 24.6% (-2.9)
GRN: 11.3% (+6.3)

Conservative HOLD.

— Britain Elects (@britainelects) August 15, 2019

Market Harborough is the most liveable place in England

Market Harborough comes out top of a league table of the most 'liveable' places in England, reports the Guardian.

The table was produced by the former Treasury economist, Chris Walker for Your Housing Group.

Positions were calculated by balancing the affordability of homes with factors like employment opportunities and the performance of local schools.

I recall that, years ago, David Boyle produced a report on 'clone town' Britain - the way that every high street is now home to the same chains.

Market Harborough was mentioned as being on the cusp. It had the national chains, but had retained a lot of independent local shops too.

That is, of course, the best place to be, but the problem is that such a state of equilibrium is hard to maintain. But somehow we have defied economic gravity and kept that perfect mix.

The Guardian is suitably euphoric about Market Harborough, but the Old Grammar School, despite what it says, is neither a covered market nor a museum.

The Richard Jefferies Museum plans expansion

Much has changed at the Richard Jefferies Museum in Swindon since I visited it in 2009.

Here is the Swindon Advertiser:

Mike Pringle, along with poet and cultural event organiser Hilda Sheehan, took over the running of the Richard Jefferies Museum about a decade ago. 

At the time, the museum devoted to the passionate Victorian nature writer was attracting perhaps 800 visitors per year. 

Last year there were about 15,000.

This increase in visitor numbers arises from the museum being open more often and its use as an arts venue.

Welcome as it is, this rise is putting strains on the museum, particularly in bad weather.

The museum occupies the farmhouse in which Jefferies was born and there are now plans for a new building on the site once occupied by its cowshed.

I rather liked it when the museum was a secret known only to a few, but Jefferies deserves to much better known. (Come to think of it, I am meant to be writing a little book on him for David Boyle.)

And I like what Pringle says to the Advertiser:

"For us, if a kid sits under the mulberry tree here, they’re sitting under the same mulberry tree, experiencing the same things that Jefferies did, and that’s much richer than trying to persuade a child to read a bit of Victorian text."