I was very happy that Karol took the time to comment on David Cameron's recent article on Guardian Unlimited. So happy, in fact, that I've decided to flag it up as a post in it's own right. He raises some very interesting points, but I'm sure you'll gather that if you read on...
Sian, at the risk of flying into the intellectual stratosphere, I'm going to critique the article - albeit briefly.
What David Cameron is talking about is not an idea that springs from Tony Benn in isolation, although he may well have emphasised its 'socialist' aspects.
The theme of subsidiarity in economic/political organisation as against unjust wealth distribution and, later attempts at State monopoly whether of the left or right-wing variety, was highlighted by two popes: Leo XIII and Pius XI.
In his encyclical 'Rerum Novarum' published in 1891, Leo emphasised the growing dangers of rampant, unregulated capitalism (how about that as a pointer to today's global dislocations?). In 1931, as the Great Depression took hold, Pius re-examined Leo's themes in 'Quadragesimo Anno'.
Times had changed in the forty years between these two encyclicals - the latter coming after the Great War and contemporary with the rise of Mussolini's Fascist Party and the excesses of Lenin and Stalin.
The Nazis still had to make their critical electoral breakthrough, but the portents of a coming storm were all too clear. Pius warned of the dangers of an over-weening government, stifling political dissent and imposing atheistic values by coercive means, i.e using the Gun and The Gulag.
G. K. Chesterton also examined how working class grievances, e.g., the struggle for a 'just wage' could be assuaged. His answer, echoing the aforementioned popes, in which he argued strongly for a retreat from the twin extremes of Communism and Fascism, came to be labelled 'Distributism'.
It was to fade in the turmoil of the Second World War, later dismissed by its critics as smacking of an outmoded feudalism, but the germ of the idea was not really forgotten (except perhaps by David Cameron).
For example, in the early 1970s, the economist E. Schumacher published 'Small Is Beautiful: Economics as though people mattered'. This appeared as oil prices began to soar, globalisation and its attendant ills became manifest and unemployment rose inexorably.
Sounds familiar doesn't it?
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