Xander West is an independent writer and author of the Grumbling Times substack.
In the history of the Conservative Party, factionalism and its resulting disputes are nothing new.
In fact, the ‘five families’ and internal splinter groups that marked the final two years of the previous government were relatively trivial compared to some of the wretchedly bitter episodes further in the past. Perhaps no issue has been more responsible for repeatedly driving the Conservatives to the brink of disintegration than the perennial divide between protectionism and free trade.
Readers may think this merely refers to the decades of backbencher and later popular anxieties over European integration, but such debates had been recurring for some 130 years by Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community in 1973. Similarly, in each instance protectionism and free trade became symbols for all manner of larger animating causes than the dry adjustment of tariffs the actual measures concerned.
Although the splits which contributed to the Conservatives’ crushing defeat at the last election were rather heterogenous, retracing the party’s moments of near oblivion over trade may cast light on a path towards more enduring party unity.
Since 1815, the Corn Laws had effectively prohibited significant imports of ‘corn’, meaning any cereal grains, into Britain. This was ostensibly enacted to protect farmers’ livelihoods from a drop in continental prices following the end of the Napoleonic Wars, but strongly favoured predominantly aristocratic landowners by maximising export potential from hypothetically higher domestic prices.
The ludicrously steep domestic price threshold for allowing imports was relaxed slightly in 1822, then replaced by a sliding scale of mostly punitive tariffs in 1828, but an overall system where food prices could violently fluctuate with harvests remained intact. Whilst the economic arguments made at the time for and against repeal of the Corn Laws have been seriously disputed by academics, what cannot be denied are the emotive and symbolic forces that sustained each side by the late 1830s.
For advocates of repeal, it formed the second half of the 1832 Great Reform Act, the removal of unjust privileges in economics as in politics from the aristocracy in favour of the burgeoning industrial middle class. Meanwhile, the protectionists saw the Corn Laws as a vital part of the constitutional order, the guarantor of rural life and the foundation of an indispensable landed interest in government that would otherwise be obliterated by Whiggish majoritarian tyranny.
In reality, both sides employed whatever hyperbole satisfied their prejudices, such was the impassioned environment in which Sir Robert Peel, 2nd Baronet, governed as Prime Minister of the first majority Conservative government from 1841. The election that year featured a Whig proposal to reduce corn tariffs from the 1828 scale to a smaller fixed duty, so fearful agrarian support flocked to the Conservatives in the expectation of a continued status quo.
Why these protectionist hopes were ultimately misplaced, indeed why the government eventually pushed for repeal, requires a detailed understanding of Peel’s thought and thus the apparent ease with which he converted from protectionism to free trade.
After all, he voted against the motions for repeal proposed annually from 1838 by the particularly pro-free trade Whig MP Charles Pelham Villiers. Peel was, in essence, the quintessential principled political conservative of his generation, not a dogmatic protectionist. He wished to preserve institutions and the constitution, but believed occasional reform was necessary to maintain the established order. Hence, the national interest was always placed above those of any political party.
Peel only cared about the Conservative Party insofar as its existence was necessary to rule in Parliament and ensure unity of principle amongst those presumed to support him. The firmly aristocratic government of the day, Peel argued, had a responsibility to ameliorate the conditions behind potential popular agitation to maintain the security of the nation and the wider constitution.
If an institutionalised privilege, such as the Corn Laws, was a source of suffering and animosity amongst other classes, he had little problem with its disposal. In his words, the aim of good government was thus the “careful review of institutions… combining, with the firm maintenance of established rights, the correction of proved abuses and the redress of real grievances.”
His principal fear was that radical democratic agitation could, if unaddressed by rulers, foment the kind of revolutionary cataclysm still etched by the French Revolution into living memory, repeated in Paris in 1830 and to paralyse continental Europe once more during Peel’s lifetime in 1848. These consistent motivations, of preventing popular hostility through modest reform, underpinned other legislation during his premiership, including the Mines Act 1842, Factories Act 1844, and Railway Regulation Act 1844.
However, any disposition to reform by government had to be judicious and considered, pre-emptive of constitutionally disruptive movements rather than impulsive in reaction to them. For this reason, he believed Parliament must firmly retain its agency, thus its sovereignty, on all questions of reform over being dictated by the ever-shifting whims and passions of popular opinion.
In the passage of the Reform Act in 1832, the defining political moment that propelled him to leadership over the dying Tory Party, he saw a blundering capitulation to what he believed to be transitory agitation created by the Whig reformers’ very promise of change. By the time the House of Lords was willing to consider electoral reform, violent discontent was already a reality, hence forestalling disruption through sagacious legislation was impossible.
In his view, it had also created a vulnerability at the core of the constitution, the prospect that any group strong enough to control public opinion could rewrite it irrespective of Parliament. Although he had rightly acquiesced to the Reform Act by 1834, he was determined to avoid any repetition of events for their potential to spiral into a series of hastily conceived, unprincipled laws that would only multiply popular grievances and undermine constitutional integrity.
Whilst the Corn Laws, contrary to the claims of protectionists, had not yet become a direct question about the nature of the constitution, the fact it had long morphed into a symbol of undue aristocratic ascendancy risked the emergence of a greater constitutional threat by the 1840s. Indeed, the leader of the popular Anti-Corn Law League, the Radical MP Richard Cobden, indicated his willingness to mobilise the main organisation campaigning for repeal into a movement for broad constitutional reform if Parliament refused to act.
Xander West is an independent writer and author of the Grumbling Times substack.
In the history of the Conservative Party, factionalism and its resulting disputes are nothing new.
In fact, the ‘five families’ and internal splinter groups that marked the final two years of the previous government were relatively trivial compared to some of the wretchedly bitter episodes further in the past. Perhaps no issue has been more responsible for repeatedly driving the Conservatives to the brink of disintegration than the perennial divide between protectionism and free trade.
Readers may think this merely refers to the decades of backbencher and later popular anxieties over European integration, but such debates had been recurring for some 130 years by Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community in 1973. Similarly, in each instance protectionism and free trade became symbols for all manner of larger animating causes than the dry adjustment of tariffs the actual measures concerned.
Although the splits which contributed to the Conservatives’ crushing defeat at the last election were rather heterogenous, retracing the party’s moments of near oblivion over trade may cast light on a path towards more enduring party unity.
Since 1815, the Corn Laws had effectively prohibited significant imports of ‘corn’, meaning any cereal grains, into Britain. This was ostensibly enacted to protect farmers’ livelihoods from a drop in continental prices following the end of the Napoleonic Wars, but strongly favoured predominantly aristocratic landowners by maximising export potential from hypothetically higher domestic prices.
The ludicrously steep domestic price threshold for allowing imports was relaxed slightly in 1822, then replaced by a sliding scale of mostly punitive tariffs in 1828, but an overall system where food prices could violently fluctuate with harvests remained intact. Whilst the economic arguments made at the time for and against repeal of the Corn Laws have been seriously disputed by academics, what cannot be denied are the emotive and symbolic forces that sustained each side by the late 1830s.
For advocates of repeal, it formed the second half of the 1832 Great Reform Act, the removal of unjust privileges in economics as in politics from the aristocracy in favour of the burgeoning industrial middle class. Meanwhile, the protectionists saw the Corn Laws as a vital part of the constitutional order, the guarantor of rural life and the foundation of an indispensable landed interest in government that would otherwise be obliterated by Whiggish majoritarian tyranny.
In reality, both sides employed whatever hyperbole satisfied their prejudices, such was the impassioned environment in which Sir Robert Peel, 2nd Baronet, governed as Prime Minister of the first majority Conservative government from 1841. The election that year featured a Whig proposal to reduce corn tariffs from the 1828 scale to a smaller fixed duty, so fearful agrarian support flocked to the Conservatives in the expectation of a continued status quo.
Why these protectionist hopes were ultimately misplaced, indeed why the government eventually pushed for repeal, requires a detailed understanding of Peel’s thought and thus the apparent ease with which he converted from protectionism to free trade.
After all, he voted against the motions for repeal proposed annually from 1838 by the particularly pro-free trade Whig MP Charles Pelham Villiers. Peel was, in essence, the quintessential principled political conservative of his generation, not a dogmatic protectionist. He wished to preserve institutions and the constitution, but believed occasional reform was necessary to maintain the established order. Hence, the national interest was always placed above those of any political party.
Peel only cared about the Conservative Party insofar as its existence was necessary to rule in Parliament and ensure unity of principle amongst those presumed to support him. The firmly aristocratic government of the day, Peel argued, had a responsibility to ameliorate the conditions behind potential popular agitation to maintain the security of the nation and the wider constitution.
If an institutionalised privilege, such as the Corn Laws, was a source of suffering and animosity amongst other classes, he had little problem with its disposal. In his words, the aim of good government was thus the “careful review of institutions… combining, with the firm maintenance of established rights, the correction of proved abuses and the redress of real grievances.”
His principal fear was that radical democratic agitation could, if unaddressed by rulers, foment the kind of revolutionary cataclysm still etched by the French Revolution into living memory, repeated in Paris in 1830 and to paralyse continental Europe once more during Peel’s lifetime in 1848. These consistent motivations, of preventing popular hostility through modest reform, underpinned other legislation during his premiership, including the Mines Act 1842, Factories Act 1844, and Railway Regulation Act 1844.
However, any disposition to reform by government had to be judicious and considered, pre-emptive of constitutionally disruptive movements rather than impulsive in reaction to them. For this reason, he believed Parliament must firmly retain its agency, thus its sovereignty, on all questions of reform over being dictated by the ever-shifting whims and passions of popular opinion.
In the passage of the Reform Act in 1832, the defining political moment that propelled him to leadership over the dying Tory Party, he saw a blundering capitulation to what he believed to be transitory agitation created by the Whig reformers’ very promise of change. By the time the House of Lords was willing to consider electoral reform, violent discontent was already a reality, hence forestalling disruption through sagacious legislation was impossible.
In his view, it had also created a vulnerability at the core of the constitution, the prospect that any group strong enough to control public opinion could rewrite it irrespective of Parliament. Although he had rightly acquiesced to the Reform Act by 1834, he was determined to avoid any repetition of events for their potential to spiral into a series of hastily conceived, unprincipled laws that would only multiply popular grievances and undermine constitutional integrity.
Whilst the Corn Laws, contrary to the claims of protectionists, had not yet become a direct question about the nature of the constitution, the fact it had long morphed into a symbol of undue aristocratic ascendancy risked the emergence of a greater constitutional threat by the 1840s. Indeed, the leader of the popular Anti-Corn Law League, the Radical MP Richard Cobden, indicated his willingness to mobilise the main organisation campaigning for repeal into a movement for broad constitutional reform if Parliament refused to act.