The first Manchesterism meant free trade

Andy Burnham, the United Kingdom’s new premier, refers to his political agenda as Manchesterism, named after his relatively successful period as the mayor of Manchester between 2017 and 2026. Burnham has described his prime ministerial vision as an end to neo-liberalism. More specifically, it appears to be a mixture of the liberal policy of local autonomy with the socialist one of equal outcomes, as it focuses on both devolved power and state-led investment and redistribution. Closing the gap between the north and south of England is a worthy goal. However, since previous efforts in that direction, including former chancellor George Osborne’s ambitious Northern Powerhouse and Boris Johnson’s ‘Levelling Up’ policy, failed to live up to expectations, it might be advisable for Burnham and Labour to revisit the history of liberalism for inspiration.

Those who continue to believe that economic growth is best created by individuals rather than the state would do well to remember that there is an older ideology, also known as Manchesterism, that took a rather different approach to political economy. This was the political platform behind the Anti-Corn Law League, England’s radical free-traders in the 19th century, who were motivated by a moral purpose.

For the sake of price stability, England had regulated its trade in rye, malt and wheat since the 17th century, but the Corn Laws as a protectionist strategy began in 1815. The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars had greatly increased the price of agricultural goods and manufacturing products, and peace in 1815 led to a fall in prices. The 19th-century Corn Laws were tariffs introduced to protect the profits of landowners from steep falls in prices.

Traders and manufacturers, underrepresented in a House of Commons dominated by the landed interest, viewed the Corn Laws as factional since they favoured one part of the economy and the political class at the expense of the rest of the country. As the people suffered from high food prices, free-trade campaigners argued that repeal would increase real wages, as more industry would boost the demand for labour and food prices would fall.

Manchesterism came to the fore during the 19th century when Manchester and other northern cities were cutting-edge centres of industry. The first Anti-Corn Law Association was set up in London in 1836, but the national Anti-Corn Law League was formed in Manchester in 1838, a year that saw a poor harvest and growing depression in several industries. But it was not only industrialists who challenged the Corn Laws; humanitarians and Christians often rallied behind the fight for the poor man’s bread. When the Rev. J. W. Massie, a Dissenting clergyman, burned a copy of the 1842 corn bill in front of an audience in the Manchester Corn Exchange, he exclaimed: ‘So perish all the laws that would interfere with the food of the people!’ Such a law ‘starves the honest children of industry, to gratify the luxurious cravings of a heartless and pampered oligarchy,’ Massie told his audience.

Even the Manchester Chamber of Commerce put its case in religious terms: ‘Whatever law interferes with the arrangements of Divine Providence to supply the necessary food of man is an infringement at once of natural and divine right,’ it said in its annual report for 1844.

The so-called Manchester School was led by the manufacturer Richard Cobden and the Radical nonconformist John Bright. Cobden had already distinguished himself with the pamphlet England, Ireland, and America (1835), in which he promoted the view that prosperity is based on free exchange and limited government. Whereas both England and Ireland were, in different ways, held back by the dominance of oligarchy, America, though not perfect, illustrated for Cobden that freedom leads to affluence.

Cobden further wanted to promote the pacific principle of self-interest in place of national pride and aggression. For him, the logic of war and the logic of commerce were incompatible: whereas war, he argued, is a zero-sum game with a winner and a loser, trade is based on reciprocity and mutual benefit. Protectionism was war by other means, according to Cobden, whose ruling purpose was indeed pacifism.

Though Cobden wrote pamphlets and had studied Adam Smith as a young man, the men behind 19th-century Manchesterism were not primarily theoreticians but practical businessmen and campaigners. In a nutshell, they contended that free trade in corn and greater competition would lower food prices and stimulate prosperity and growth across the board. The ‘leaguers’ organised an impressive national campaign that sent lecturers and disseminated material across the country, putting pressure on parliament, where Cobden and Bright became members in 1841 and 1843, respectively.

Manchesterism succeeded. In 1846, Prime Minister Robert Peel, with a manufacturing family background in nearby Bury, repealed the Corn Laws. He was partly motivated by the need to forestall more revolutionary changes to the constitution, and he paid the price by splitting the Conservative Party. One of the ardent Peelites was William Gladstone, who started his political life as a High Tory, but became the leading Liberal statesman of the 19th century.

The repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 is often seen as a turning point in British history, since it was followed by other economic reforms that initiated an era of relatively free trade and prosperity. The Navigation Acts were repealed in 1849, and though not all tariffs disappeared, they were generally lowered, including between Britain and France following the 1860 Cobden-Chevalier Treaty.

Historians agree that living standards rose in the second half of the 19th century, but they continue to debate the precise effects of free trade and its relative importance compared with other factors. In any event, it is arguable that free trade became a central part of the spirit of the nation. This was the time when the Liberal party became a governing party, and ‘small l’ liberalism was woven into the fabric of the country. As Anthony Howe has written: ‘Free trade rapidly replaced the Corn Laws as a symbol of Britishness.’

The term ‘Manchester School’ was coined by one of its ablest adversaries, Peel’s rival Benjamin Disraeli. Disraeli did not, however, reintroduce protectionism as chancellor of the exchequer or prime minister in the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s. What is more, he greatly admired Cobden’s abilities. When Cobden died in 1865, Disraeli told the House of Commons that ‘it will be said of him that he was, without doubt, the greatest political character the pure middle class of this country has yet produced – an ornament to the House of Commons, and an honour to England’.

Burnham and Labour in the 21st century can draw a great deal of inspiration from the Manchester School. The Anti-Corn Law League was made up of radicals who criticised the status quo and attacked oligarchy and privilege. While representing a growing force within British society in the form of the middle class, from its earliest days Manchesterism presented its programme for national prosperity as serving the interest of all classes (‘nationalising the interest’, as Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey has called it). Cobden’s message to workers continues to resonate:

Mine is that masculine species of charity, which would lead me to inculcate in the minds of the labouring classes the love of independence, the privilege of self-respect, the disdain of being patronized and petted, the desire to accumulate, and the ambition to rise. I know it has been found easier to please the people by holding out flattering and delusive prospects of cheap benefits to be derived from Parliament rather than by urging them to a course of self-reliance; but while I will not be the sycophant of the great, I cannot become the parasite of the poor.

The politics of 19th-century Manchesterism might seem distant in the current age of tariffs, trade wars, and big government. The world has changed irrevocably since then. As campaigners, the advocates of the Manchester School were doctrinaire in a way that political leaders can rarely afford to be (as Disraeli recognised in his eulogy, Cobden became more moderate as an MP). Politics is the art of the possible, and Burnham’s success as a mayor has been based on ideological flexibility. But the values of freedom, national prosperity, peace, and independence that the Manchester School championed are timeless. Burnham would do well to pay attention to its understanding of how wealth is created by people seeking to better their condition rather than by government, whose job it is to supply the legal, fiscal, and infrastructural framework that can provide equal protection and facilitate wealth-creation.