To him that hath shall be given: Hilaire Belloc's Mr Petre

Our leaders' appetite for the good things in life, and getting them for free, has put me in mind of a satirical novel I read years ago - Hilaire Belloc's Mr Petre, which was published in 1925.

My hazy recollection was that the hero was taken to be a rich man and so was never asked to pay for anything. Showered with gifts, soon he really was rich.

A contemporary review from the Manchester Guardian fleshes out the plot:

The story begins in 1953 with the return of Mr Peter Blagden from New York, and for a page or two the irony seems to be held in reserve; we have time to think that Mr Belloc could, if he would, give us a very interesting "ordinary" novel. But Mr Blagden loses his memory completely, and from no particular cause; chances combine to identify him with Mr Petre, the great American millionaire. 

So he becomes involved in enormous transactions, and on the strength of an occasional "Exactly" or "I quite understand" his reputation as the most astute man of his time becomes assured. He puts up at the Splendide (or, as the proof-reader leaves it on one occasion the Savoy), and so courted is he that he must bolt to the country sometimes for breathing space.

If he buys everybody follows, and his chance expression of opinion breaks up a luncheon party, everybody rushing for the telephone. Perhaps the loss of memory is a little arbitrary in its working, but it is a good device for the display of Mr Belloc's scornful irony. 

For, of course, everything that Mr Petre says and does is idiotic. A man reputed to have fifty million pounds must be a master-mind, and financiers feel that they must crawl before him or be ruined.

Belloc was Liberal MP for Salford South between 1906 and 1910. Though he was a raving antisemite, his book of political theory The Servile State is worth seeking out. I think of it when I read that the government is to give itself powers to investigate the bank accounts of people receiving welfare benefits.

Another feature of Mr Petre is that, according to that review, it was illustrated by Belloc's great friend G.K. Chesterton.

These days we think of illustrations as suitable for children's books but not fiction written for adults. Yet some of the greatest 19th-century novels were illustrated.

And in Vanity Fair, where the text says one thing and Thackeray's own drawings suggest something more sinister is taking place, we instinctively trust the picture over the words.

Ludlow wall's down and England's done

Twelve years ago, a section of Ludlow's medieval town wall collapsed. When I visited the town a couple of weeks ago I found that repairs have still not begun.

Andy Boddington reported at the start of this year that there has been a dispute over who is responsible for the repairs, You suspect that has been fought with such tenacity because no public authority has the money to fund the work if they cop for it.

Someone I knew in planning used to tell me that Ludlow was safe from insensitive development because it's one of the towns foreign dignitaries are taken to show them the best of England.

Now it seems we can't afford the upkeep of the place.

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.

Hilaire Belloc's influence on A Canterbury Tale

This public lecture by Mr Colpeper (played by Eric Portman) from A Canterbury Tale is probably my favourite moment in probably my favourite film - a film I've learnt not to take lightly.

A reader has now alerted me to an obvious source for it: Hilaire Belloc's The Old Road. Published in 1904, it describes the author's journey along what he claims to be an ancient trackway from Winchester to Canterbury.

Describing what he hoped to gain from this journey, Belloc writes:

For my part I desired to step exactly in the footprints of such ancestors. I believed that, as I followed their hesitations at the river crossings, as I climbed where they had climbed to a shrine whence they also had seen a wide plain, as I suffered the fatigue they suffered, and laboriously chose, as they had chosen, the proper soils for going, something of their much keener life would wake again in the blood I drew from them, and that in a sort I should forget the vileness of my own time, and renew for some few days the better freedom of that vigorous morning when men were already erect, articulate, and worshipping God, but not yet broken by complexity and the long accumulation of evil.

You can certainly here echoes of this passage in Colpeper's lecture, but as the person who put my reader on to this connection said:

I think the three Ps (Powell, Pressburger in particular as the screenwriter, and Portman) did a better job of it, not least by toning down the religious aspect Belloc the Catholic was keen to stress.

I agree. Indeed, there is something pre-Christian in Colpeper's complex character. He is in part an aristocratic Puck.

Hilaire Belloc sat for Salford South as a Liberal between 1906 and the second general election of 1910. He was a nasty antisemite, but his book The Servile State remains a challenging read and is well worth seeking out.

The Joy of Six 1038

"Johnson’s personal greed, hypocrisy, clumsy lies and sheer extravagance in overseeing the distribution of billions of pounds in government contracts to 'VIP' donors and friends of government ministers have made the workings of this machine all too publicly visible." Tom Scott says the Conservative Party will almost certainly act to remove Boris Johnson in the near future.

To preserve our environment, we must realise that nature is not elsewhere - in the safari park or on an eco-resort - but here and everywhere, argues John Burnside.

Jonathan Meades revisits the county of his boyhood: "Wiltshire, in the grip of the Church, the army and the past, gets the architecture and sub-architecture that reflects those unhappy fates."

"Although it was the next major leap forward in visual storytelling after Citizen Kane, many did not recognise it until the ’70s. The lyrical nature of the horror on the screen was perfectly complemented by the fantastic screenplay by James Agee." Swapnil Dhruv Bose on Charles Laughton's masterpiece Night of the Hunter.

The background to Marianne Faithfull's hit As Tears Go By is explored by Mick McStarkey.

Kathryn Burrington finds that the path to Halnaker Windmill is "a magical tunnel of trees".

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.

What was good about George Osborne's budget

The first unfettered Conservative budget for 18 years contained all the meanness towards the young, poor and disabled that you would expect.

But there was one initiative that I welcomed.

The move to cut public spending on tax credits while obliging employers to pay higher wages is surely right.

Tax credits are a way of subsiding bad employers from the public purse and are a move towards the intermeshing of the power of the state and the power of capital that Belloc warned about in The Servile State.

It may well be that some poor people will be worse off as a result of these changes - it is a Tory budget, after all - but the direction in which it is taking public policy is the right one.

Hilaire Belloc was a Liberal MP

Madelaine Bunting had an article in the Guardian today arguing that David Cameron should embrace the "neglected tradition of English radical conservatism" if he wants to attract voters back to the Conservative Party.

I think that Cameron senses this intellectually, even though he is by nature a narrow economic Tory in the Thatcherite mould.

The thinkers Bunting elects to this "red Tory" tradition are William Cobbett, John Ruskin, G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc.

Cobbett and Ruskin are fascinating figures who could - and should - be claimed by both left and right. Chesterton was a Liberal of sorts, as is seen in his widely quoted:

I still believe in liberalism today as much as I ever did, but, oh, there was a happy time when I believed in liberals.

But Belloc was no Tory: he was even a Liberal MP. Though he became disaffected with the party afterwards, he sat for South Salford between 1906 and the second general election of 1910.

Belloc's most important political book was The Servile State. As Bunting says, in it he argues that both capitalism and socialism enslave the masses to their dictates. We modern Liberal Democrats should read it and reclaim Belloc for ourselves.

Later. Read David Boyle on red Toryism too.