When They Go Low, We Go High

by Philip Collins

  In due course, Peel found the courage. On 4 December 1845, The Times announced that Parliament would be recalled for the first week of the new year and that a Royal Speech would be brought forward that would give immediate consideration to the Corn Laws, prefatory to their total repeal. Peel resigned because he did not believe he had the numbers in Parliament to implement his policy, but the Liberal leader Lord John Russell was unable to form a government after Cobden refused the post of vice-president of the Board of Trade, so Peel remained prime minister. On 22 January 1846 Peel came to the House of Commons and conceded that, in part due to the failure of the potato crop in Ireland, he had changed his mind on the question of agricultural protection, on which he had voted in favour every year up to and including 1845.

  Five days later, in a speech that lasted three and a half hours, Peel proposed that total repeal would follow within three years, leaving only a 1 shilling duty per quarter. On 15 May 1846 Disraeli gave a cruel ad hominem speech in which he denounced Peel for the proposal to abolish the Corn Laws. Peel tried a personal counter-attack but, with tears in his eyes as his claim to integrity was jeered in the House of Commons, his voice broke and he had to stop. He took a moment to compose himself and then delivered an explanation of his change of course that was as dignified and impressive as any speech he ever gave.

  The split between Peel and Disraeli was irreparable. Peel pushed through the abolition of the Corn Laws with the help of the Whigs in Parliament and tore his own party in two for the first and only time in its history. The division has never gone away, though. Free trade has ever after been the fault line between the liberals and the traditionalists in the Conservative Party, and it was Cobden, Bright and Peel, the men of Manchester, who opened it up. The Peelites merged with the Whigs and the Radicals in 1859 to form the Liberal Party. The legacy of the battle over the Corn Laws was the origin of the party-political system as we know it today. In his resignation speech Peel had attributed the success of the repeal case to Cobden. On 2 July 1846, at a meeting in Manchester, Cobden moved a motion, which Bright seconded, to dissolve the Anti-Corn Law League. A library of twelve hundred volumes was presented to Bright as a memorial of the struggle.

  The Condition of the English Working Class

  At precisely the same moment that free trade was winning its first decisive victory in British politics two young men were working half a mile away, in the library at what would become the music school Chetham’s, on a system to rival commercial enterprise. The rivalry that was brewing in Manchester in 1846, the competition between market enterprise and communism, would eventually convulse the world.

  In the years of the tumult over the Corn Laws, the Manchester mill owner Friedrich Engels received regular visits from his friend Karl Marx. Engels had been sent to Manchester from Germany by his father in December 1842 to work at the family firm of Ermen and Engels in the hope that commercial experience would rid the young Friedrich of his radical opinions. In the three decades he stayed there, Manchester had the opposite effect. Engels spent his days as a cotton merchant in the Exchange earning the money he then sent to Marx to finance the latter’s work. He spent his evenings scouring the Manchester slums for the evidence that, in 1844, he would accumulate and publish in The Condition of the Working Class in England, which is still the most pertinent description of the dismal fate to which factory work condemned the Manchester working class at the height of the industrial revolution.

  Manchester had grown rapidly in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Between 1773 and 1801 the population quadrupled in size from 22,500 inhabitants to 84,000, but the city’s housing could not expand to cope. Cholera tore through large families in small spaces. Of the slums just off Oxford Street, Engels writes: ‘The cottages are old, dirty, and of the smallest sort, the streets uneven, fallen into ruts and in part without drains or pavement; masses of refuse, offal, and sickening filth lie among standing pools in all directions … The race that lives in these ruinous cottages, behind broken windows, mended with oilskin, sprung doors, and rotten door-posts, or in dark, wet cellars, in measureless filth and stench must surely have reached the lowest stage of humanity.’

  These days the slums that Engels reported in The Condition of the Working Class in England are no longer there. But it wasn’t the research that Marx and Engels did together in the library at Chetham’s that made the difference. The work of Marx and Engels went to the heads of political radicals all over Europe, inspiring a great speaker like La Pasionaria to her rhetorical heights and her political lows. But Britain never had much taste for their economic eschatology. The answer to the condition of England question did not lie there. It lay instead, improbably, in the argument of another Conservative prime minister who changed his mind.

  Benjamin Disraeli had led the opposition to the abolition of the Corn Laws and was widely regarded as a Tory chancer to whom rhetorical fluency came too easily. The most conspicuous legacy of the Anti-Corn Law League had been set in stone when, between 1853 and 1856, a grand Free Trade Hall was constructed, on the site of St Peter’s Field. It was here, of all places, in April 1872, that Disraeli came to define Conservatism as a creed of social reform. This was the speech that advocated moderation in all things yet made a series of bold promises that politics would deal with the condition of England question better than radical anger ever could.

  On 3 April, Disraeli gave a disquisition that lasted three and a quarter hours during which he got through two bottles of brandy. He opened by pondering why Britain, alone of European nations, had not experienced a genuine revolution and therefore enjoyed an unbroken history of ‘that long established order which is the only parent of personal liberty and political rights’. Though there is something of the Pollyanna in his uncritical reflections on the appeal of republicanism, the status quo in the House of Lords and the relationship between Church and State, Disraeli’s main point is a sound one. Referring to the 1871 Paris Commune, he asked why, as the latest French revolution unfolded, ‘yet not five men were found to meet together in Manchester and grumble. And why? Because the people had got what they wanted.’

  What they had wanted and what they had got, said Disraeli, were the two demands of St Peter’s Field: the parliamentary franchise and more congenial living conditions. It was the latter to which he devoted most of his remarks. During the forty years after the Great Reform Act, Disraeli noted of working people, ‘their wages have been raised, and their hours of daily toil have been diminished’. He then named the next task for a public policy that has a claim on the title of One Nation, which is better public health. Without ‘pure air, pure water, the inspection of unhealthy habitations’, the glories of the nation collected in museums and galleries matter little.

  It is remarkable how close a model this speech was for Disraeli in government. The Manchester speech is, in effect, a prospectus for the government that he was to lead between 1874 and 1880. The 1875 Public Health Act laid down minimum standards for drainage, sewage disposal and refuse. The 1875 Artisans’ and Labourers’ Dwellings Act gave local authorities the power to buy, clear and redevelop the slums. The 1875 Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act meant that trade unions could no longer be prosecuted if they were doing something that would be legal if done by an individual. This, in effect, legalised peaceful picketing. The 1875 Employers and Workmen Act introduced a contract of service that granted terms to employees that were the equal of those offered to employers. The campaign of Lancashire MPs for a maximum nine-hour working day was successful and the six-day working week of women and children was reduced by half a day, to a maximum of fifty-six hours. The minimum legal working age was raised from eight to ten.

  By the standards of the early twenty-first century some of these improvements seem minor and from a base so low that it seems like an injustice. But this creeping piecemeal process is exactly how progress in the material conditions of the people of England has come about. The Condition of the English Working Class is, as the name
implies, a classic study of the condition of England question. The rhetoric of Orator Hunt at St Peter’s Field provided the stimulus to seek representation in Parliament. The rhetoric of John Bright and Richard Cobden in the Free Trade Hall and in Parliament provided the answer that comes from the good will of commerce. A notable speech by a Conservative prime minister in the Free Trade Hall and his legislation in Parliament provided the good will of government. Between them they described the means by which the condition of the working class was improved.

  The Mother of Parliaments

  Orator Hunt had made two demands – material progress and parliamentary representation – and they were linked. Bear in mind that the Manchester radicals never wanted to break the parliamentary system. They wanted to join it so that they could partake of progress. It was John Bright who, in a speech in Birmingham in January 1865 in support of extending the franchise, had coined the phrase ‘the mother of Parliaments’.

  On 24 September 1866 Bright had returned to the Free Trade Hall to make a captivating case for universal suffrage; ‘It is a fact worth knowing’, he argued, ‘that five millions of men in the United Kingdom have no vote … I call it a stupendous fraud upon the people.’ Once again, Disraeli was the villain of the hour, organising the opposition to Gladstone’s attempt to extend the franchise. But, here as with everything else, Disraeli’s substantive political views owed more to his own status than to any enduring conviction. It is a strange but salutary happenstance of democracies that volatile pragmatists can get a lot of good done when the national interest coincides briefly with their own. Once he was installed as chancellor of the exchequer, Disraeli introduced his own Reform Bill. The 1867 Reform Act did not bring universal suffrage and a property qualification remained, but it did double the electorate in England and Wales from one to two million men.

  The operative word was the last one. The extension of the franchise in 1867 and the further extension in 1884 took the electorate to two-thirds of the men in the country. Women, however, remained entirely outside the fold of democratic politics. The demand for the representation of women had always been part of Manchester’s radicalism. It had been notable how many women had been at Peterloo. Female reformers had appeared at St Peter’s Fields dressed in white as a symbol of their virtue. In Manchester, the unjust absence of women from the electorate fuelled a radical response. It was there, in 1903, that Emmeline Pankhurst formed the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) to prosecute the case for women being given the vote. The controversy excited by the WSPU for the militancy of its methods derived largely from two speeches given in the Free Trade Hall. The first was at a meeting of the Free Trade League on 2 February 1904, and was delivered by a young MP who had recently switched from the Conservative to the Liberal Party. His name was Winston Churchill. The promising young MP gave a speech of impeccable Liberal credentials, citing Cobden and Bright by name and putting the traditional case for free trade that was the raison d’être of that chamber. Emmeline’s daughter Christabel attended the meeting and refused to sit down when her amendment with regard to women’s suffrage was not put. In her memoir Unshackled: The Story of How We Won the Vote, Christabel Pankhurst gives her account of the 1904 speech under the title ‘The Actual Start of Militancy’.

  The second speech took place in October 1905 when Sir Edward Grey, soon to be the Liberal foreign secretary, spoke at the Free Trade Hall in the election campaign. The WSPU had written to Grey to ask him to receive a deputation but had received no reply. Christabel and her friend Annie Kenney, a mill worker from Oldham, joined the audience intending to heckle with a view to getting themselves arrested. As Grey spoke, Pankhurst unfurled a banner on which they had inscribed ‘Votes for Women’ and Kenney shouted out: ‘Will the Liberal government give women the vote?’ The two of them were dragged from the hall and, after giving an impromptu speech outside the Free Trade Hall, did indeed contrive to get arrested.

  The next day they appeared in court, were fined but refused to pay. Pankhurst received a sentence of seven days’ imprisonment and Kenney was confined for three. According to the account of Christabel’s sister Sylvia in The Suffragette Movement, Churchill turned up at Strangeways prison and tried to pay the fines but the governor refused to take his money. Pankhurst and Kenney were released a week later and on 20 October, ten days after they had been dragged out, addressed a crowded meeting at the Free Trade Hall. Keir Hardie, who four months later became the Labour Party’s first official leader, also spoke. This was the beginning of the Votes for Women campaign that led, eventually, to universal suffrage in Britain. The 1918 Representation of the People Act gave the vote to men over the age of twenty-one, all women over thirty and women over twenty-one who were householders or married to householders or university graduates over twenty-one. Ten years later, the 1928 Representation of the People Act granted women the vote on the same basis as men. The demands that had begun at St Peter’s Field over a century earlier had finally been met.

  The populist and the utopian always, though, seek to accelerate progress. The various stamps of Manchester radicals and visiting Conservative prime ministers had all seen the slow road to material comfort that passed through Parliament. The anti-democratic radicalism of which Marx and Engels became the international prophets gained no traction in England which, uniquely amongst the European democracies, experienced no serious communist party. As a more realistic German economist, Werner Sombart, said, ‘all socialist utopias come to nothing on roast beef and apple pie’. From the other end of the political spectrum, with equally negligible effect, in 1931 Sir Oswald Mosley offered himself as the man of the hour, England’s own native dictator.

  The road that runs down to the site of St Peter’s Field in Manchester is called Mosley Street. The first Sir Oswald Mosley had been created a baronet in Ancoats in Manchester by George I in 1720, upon which he inherited the manor of Manchester. The third Sir Oswald Mosley then sold the manorial rights to the mayor and corporation of Manchester in 1846, the year of the repeal of the Corn Laws. The sixth baronet, who succeeded to the title on his father’s death in 1928, was the Sir Oswald Mosley who, having already gone through the Conservative and Labour parties, came to the Free Trade Hall on 26 October 1931 to launch his New Party. Rather like Donald Trump’s self-obsessed lament at Gettysburg, there could hardly have been a more inappropriate venue for Mosley’s confection of high protective tariffs and corporatist optimism.

  When the New Party failed to win a single seat in the 1931 general election, Mosley gave up on democratic politics altogether. In 1932 he formed the British Union of Fascists (BUF), and in March 1933 he returned to the Free Trade Hall for a rally that ended in a riot and a fight with the Communist Party of Great Britain. By September of that year Mosley was copying the theatre of fascism. At a rally at Belle Vue in Manchester, he gave a speech which, in a different country at the same time, might have sounded like the call of a frightening future. Marching through a mass of cheering supporters all dressed in black, Sir Oswald mounted a stage and, more than a little hysterical, declaimed: ‘If you think the present system of things can really see you through then it’s idle for our new and virile faith of fascism. I come to you with a new and revolutionary conception of politics, of economics and of life itself. We have another doctrine to put before you … We say that England is not dead. We say, and I ask you to say with us, lift up you mighty in this great meeting in the heart of England, send to all the world a message, England lives and marches on.’

  Mosley never found a way to speak that was not a ventriloquist version of Hitler. But Britain already had its Manchester school doctrine and it was tempted by no other. The ascent of Sir Oswald Mosley was about as likely as the tale in the Superman: War of the Worlds comic in which Mosley became prime minister after a Martian invasion in 1938, or Philip Roth’s fantastic imaginative notion in The Plot against America that Hitler installed Mosley as his puppet in Britain.

  Mosley’s military display caused consternation fo
r a short time. For six months during 1934 the BUF gained the support of the Daily Mail. His fascist rallies rattled the government enough to pass the 1936 Public Order Act banning political uniforms and organisations of a military type. The thuggish anti-Semitism of Mosley’s supporters was nasty and must have been horrible to be on the receiving end of, but in the end his attempt to bring the politics of the extreme Right to Britain was a total failure. The BUF collapsed into acrimony and squabbling. Mosley was interned during the Second World War along with his wife Diana Mitford, whom he had married in October 1936 in the Berlin home of Joseph Goebbels. Adolf Hitler was one of the guests.

  After his release, Mosley was a figure of some disrepute in the nation, so much so that he lived out most of the rest of his life in France, occasionally essaying a rather bathetic comeback. The best commentary came from P. G. Wodehouse, whose Sir Roderick Spode was a mockery of Mosley: ‘The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you’re someone. You hear them shouting “Heil, Spode!” and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: “Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?”’

  The Rise of the Meritocracy

  England, or rather Britain, had sent out a message to the world, as Sir Oswald Mosley had asked. England did live and it did march again. It did so slowly, democratically, quietly. It achieved something for which it is hard to give thanks, which is a rather temperate, dull political life. The condition of England has improved slowly but this utopia like every other is elusive and the quest goes on.

  Britain is still not a thoroughgoing meritocracy. Birth still accounts for too great a part of destiny, as Neil Kinnock pointed out. The time of perfect racial equality, of which Martin Luther King dreamt, has not arrived in Britain yet, let alone in America. But there has been great progress since the people of what is now called Greater Manchester marched to St Peter’s Field to demand representation in Parliament and their economic due. The life chances of their descendants are also significantly greater than theirs. The improvements are owed to three things: to social reform pursued through politics, to the prosperity generated by free enterprise, and to the liberties of association and speech. These were the values of the magazine The Economist which was founded by the Liberal politician James Wilson in 1843 to propagate the doctrines of the Manchester school. Wilson’s son-in-law, Walter Bagehot, was one of its first editors. It was, to cite the title of Bagehot’s famous 1867 work, the English constitution to which progress is owed rather than the works of Marx and Engels or ersatz political heroes of the political Right like Sir Oswald Mosley. The real heroes of the story are Orator Hunt, John Bright, Richard Cobden, Robert Peel and Benjamin Disraeli. Taken together, their words describe a country gradually moving forwards.