A nasty Politically Correct article accusing the great Gilbert of “unsavoury xenophobia”, among other things…
Far from being an outcrop of Tory thinking, Chesterton’s idea of England’s “secret people” originated as part of this dispute within Edwardian socialism and the radical Liberalism of that time. Chesterton and Belloc came to be known as “Distributists”, arguing, against both monopoly capitalism and state socialism, that property and ownership of the “means of production” should be as widely spread as possible. Their vision was variously shaped by Catholicism, anarchism, Chartism, and also the decentralising thought of guild socialism, a movement that followed William Morris and John Ruskin in finding inspiration in the craft guilds of the medieval age. Their beleaguered “England” was on the side of the people against industrialism, monopoly capitalism and the rules and bureaucrats of what Belloc called “the servile state”. Chesterton and Belloc would join the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in seeking to preserve traditional “thatched” roofs against the big businesses that could spend fortunes pushing synthetic alternatives. Yet if theirs was emphatically a “little England”, this was also because it entailed a strong rejection of British imperialism.
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