False Economy - Alan Beattie [93]
In 1842, the Chartists called a series of industrial actions, known as the Plug Strikes, to try to induce the industrialists to support them. The League responded that they should concentrate on the issues on which they agreed. In an address "To the Working Men of Rochdale," intended to persuade them to return to work, John Bright argued that the Chartist leaders were imperiling progress by asking for too much. "For four years past they have held before your eyes an object at present unattainable and urged you to pursue it," he said. "Your first step to entire freedom must be commercial freedom—freedom of industry." The League argued vehemently against the position that lower food prices would merely be used as an excuse to lower wages. They got enough support to carry the day. The backing of thousands of voteless citizens might not have been the determining factor in shifting the tally in the House of Commons. But it may well have played an important role in persuading the Lords, for whom the memory of the disturbances around the Reform Act were still vivid.
Meanwhile, the opposition to reform, the Anti-League (also known as the Agricultural Protection Society), came much later onto the scene than the League itself, not emerging until 1844. Loyalty to the Conservative Party and a reluctance to campaign openly against Robert Peel restrained the protectionists until it became clear that he was irrevocably decamping to the free trade side. And organizationally they were no match for the free traders. By 1845 the League had an annual budget of £250,000, while the core of the Anti-League, the Essex Agricultural Protection Society, had raised just £2,000.
Protection for farmers was in fact gradually reduced over some years, but the repeal in 1846 stands out in the history books as the pivotal moment. The final push was helped by a disastrous harvest in 1845 and famine in Ireland, which required emergency imports of grain and finally got the message through to the Commons and the Lords that continuing to protect landowners ran an increasingly large risk of serious unrest. When it came to a head, Parliament chose the certainty of limited damage from repeal over the uncertainty of what might happen if they did not. Revolutions and rebellions spreading across Europe in the 1840s showed what happened when hungry and vulnerable emerging working and lower-middle classes demanded a modicum of power and did not get it.
According to Richard Cobden (admittedly, not an unbiased source), Peel reacted with something like satisfied vindication when news arrived in the House of Commons in 1848 that France had erupted in a second revolution that overthrew the restored monarchy and once again instituted a republic. That, Peel reportedly responded, was what came of ignoring entirely the wishes of those who did not have a vote. "It was what this party behind me wanted me to do in the matter of the Corn Laws," he said, speaking of his own Conservative Party, "and I would not do it."
To succeed, the free traders had a series of formidable lobbies to overcome. One of the most prominent was the sugar planters, whose demise is a fine example of how trade interests can endure at length but not necessarily forever. Like so many other industries that boasted of the contribution they made to the nation, England's Caribbean sugar industry rose to prominence almost entirely under the wing of the state. The great sugar aristocracy of Britain got fat on artificial financial sweeteners. Historically,