Introduction
Readers of a website such as this will naturally wish to know what the editorial line is. On this page, I try to give you an idea of that, with the help of Richard Cobden, a figure from English history whom I have come to admire.
Richard Cobden (1804-1865) was the son of a bankrupt Sussex farmer. When he was just ten, Richard was palmed off onto a wealthy uncle, who immediately deposited him in a veritable Dotheboys Hall far away in the north. For six years, Cobden experienced only privation and loneliness, but by a mixture of talent and audacity he rose from sweeping his uncle’s warehouse floor to become a Manchester mill-owner, and then Liberal Party MP for Rochdale in Lancashire
Cobden came to public notice in the late 1830s, first as a staunch critic of London’s hysterical Russophobia and contemptuous plundering of China, and then as the leader of the Parliamentary rebellion against economic protectionism, i.e. the policy of using sanctions and trade tariffs to ring-fence the profits of domestic corporations and cripple the economies of foreign countries. The Corn Laws, the flagship policy that had provoked war, fuelled inflation, and created a cost-of-living crisis that had brought thousands close to starvation, were repealed in 1846. His final triumph was the Cobden-Chevalier Treaty of 1860, a landmark free-trade entente cordiale between Britain and France which put centuries of mistrust behind us.
Cobden opposed international meddling, sanctions and gunboat diplomacy, and pleaded for a multipolar world in which countries were equal partners. He believed with passionate conviction in free trade between small-to-medium business enterprises as the key to national prosperity and international peace, and was consistently critical of what William Cobbett used to call ‘The Thing’, that impenetrable nexus of politicians, civil servants, corporate bosses, lobbyists, quangos and committees that governs beyond the reach of our Parliamentary representatives. An early supporter of the co-operative movement, he championed working people against exploitative employers, and campaigned for better wages and conditions, but wanted employers and employees to work this out together without heavy-handed and often self-interested State regulation. Cobden sought to address the same problems as Karl Marx did, but free from the violence and the divide-and-rule hatred that Marx and Marxists found so essential. Nazism was many years still in the future, but Cobden, had he lived to see it, would have regarded its rise with horror, and as one of those rare contingencies against which our armed forces must stand always prepared, ready “to defend ourselves, like rational beings”.
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