John Bright: A true working class hero
Oct 27 2008 Agenda
Conservative MP Bill Cash looks back on a historic speech made 150 years ago by John Bright, the greatest Parliamentary reformer of his time.
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In Birmingham Town Hall 150 years ago today, on October 27, John Bright, their newly-elected Member of Parliament launched his great campaign for parliamentary reform to give the vote for the first time to the working class and thereby change the face of Britain against the bitter opposition of the aristocracy and the elite.
This was to culminate nine years later in the Reform Act of 1867, passed by Disraeli, between whom developed an unlikely alliance based on the principles set out by John Bright on that day. Bright had been defeated at Manchester the previous year on his principled opposition over the Crimean War to his putative party leader, Palmerston, for whom he had nothing but contempt. In a letter to his wife, he said: “the news scarcely affected me in the least”. Almost immediately, on the death of one of the two members for Birmingham, an election committee was formed, including Joseph Sturge, a friend of John Feeney, one of the owners of the Birmingham Daily Post.
Bright was offered the seat although he had no previous connection with Birmingham.
Once he had accepted, the candidate for the Conservative Party withdrew and Birmingham elected John Bright. Thereby was sealed a partnership with profound consequences for democracy and parliamentary reform. In the words of G. M. Trevelyan, Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, “
No public man has ever been treated better by his constituents. If the story of Burke and Bristol stands for the mixed good and evil of that married state of a great man with a great city, Bright and Birmingham stand for a perfect form of the Union
He had indeed found by a process of natural selection the constituency best able to serve him as a place of arms whence to conquer England in the coming battle for democratic Reform”. Indeed his devoted friend and colleague, Richard Cobden, in their successful campaign for the Repeal of the Corn Laws a decade before wrote, contrasting Manchester with Birmingham, that “the honest and independent course taken by the people at Birmingham, their exemption from aristocratic snobbery and their fair appreciation of a democratic son of the people confirm me in the opinion I have always had that the social and political state of that town is far more healthy than that of Manchester … In my opinion, Birmingham will be a better home for him than Manchester.”
Palmerston’s government fell on February 19th 1858 on the movement of an amendment to the second reading of Palmerston’s Conspiracy to Murder Bill with Bright as a teller.
He spoke in Birmingham for the first time on October 27, 1858, to an audience seething with expectation. He wrote to his wife that “The Times reporter called this morning to ask when I thought the meeting would be over that he might arrange for their special engine! Other men, I mean our public men, must be very little, if I am so great.” Again in the words of Trevelyan “This night for the first time, and on many a night to come, that great audience swayed, like a cornfield beneath the wind, under the gusts of cheering and laughter that shook them as he spoke. Although, when he began, they seemed packed as tightly as human beings can stand and breathe, yet more than once, in some storm of emotion, the front of the mass swung forward and the rear backward, leaving a broad strip of floor, bare to view, like an island of sea-sand revealed for a moment when the waves are sucked down by the tide.
And the magic that swayed them was not some hard appeal to the lower part of their nature, but drew its compelling virtue from the simplest invocation of moral principles in words which survive the speaker as part of the wealth of our mother tongue.
No class ever had nobler teaching than the working men of this island during the years while Bright was their champion.” The famous Congregationalist from Birmingham, Reverend Robert Dale, who was there, stated that “the hush which had fallen on the vast and excited assembly as soon as he began to speak deepened into awe … we suddenly found ourselves in the presence of the Eternal and some of us, perhaps, rebuked ourselves in the words of the Patriarch “Surely, the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not.”
Bright explained why he was launching his campaign for Parliamentary Reform, “wherever you go in Great Britain or Ireland, five out of every six men you meet have no vote”. Indeed the reforms he put forward and campaigned to achieve over the next nine years when at last in all material respects they were enacted by the Conservative Government under Disraeli, were at that time bitterly opposed by the aristocracy for whom Bright had nothing but contempt and whom he had already defeated, with Cobden, when the Corn Laws were repealed. Indeed, Lord Cranborne, later the Marquess of Salisbury, furiously denounced these proposals, saying that if the adoption of the principles of Mr Bright were a triumph, then “in the whole course of your annals, the Conservative Party has won no triumph so signal as this.”
Bright in this speech reminded the audience in Birmingham “I call to mind where I am and who are those whom I see before me.
Am I not in the town of Birmingham – England’s central capital; and do not these eyes look upon the sons of those who, not thirty years ago [at the time of the 1832 Reform Bill] shook the fabric of privilege to its base … Shall their sons be less noble than they? Shall the fire which they kindled be extinguished with you? I see your answer in every face. You are resolved that the legacy that they bequeathed to you, you will hand down in an accumulated wealth of freedom to your children.”
This speech was then followed two days later by a great speech on foreign policy. John Bright set the scene for change in the history of this country and then by integrity, conviction and political will, drove his policies for parliamentary reform into legislative change at Westminster and took the working class and middle class beyond the threshold into the chamber of the House of Commons.
The leader in the Birmingham Daily Post reporting on the speech said “John Bright is the central figure in contemporary history. What he said, and how he said it, and what it indicates in the future, are the topic of every tongue, in every circle; the one subject written about, canvassed and disputed upon. And out of this turmoil of discussion come the facts, that the member for Birmingham is preeminently the man of the time, a true man about whose opinions there is a wider diversity than upon those of any other of the present day.
On the one hand his facts are questioned, his inferences impugned, his policy assailed. On the other hand his facts and inferences are strengthened by illustration and his policy affirmed by sound logic and past history … and with all this diversity and strife of opinion, still there is but one long unanimous paragraph of praise of the stern honesty, the independence, the great power, and eloquence of the Member for Birmingham.”
John Bright went forth from this famous meeting to the successful repeal of “taxes on knowledge” which led to the creation of local newspapers throughout the country, to being the mentor of Abraham Lincoln and the scourge of slavery, the inspirer of Joseph Chamberlain, to the relief of the downtrodden in Ireland and in India, and a vehement opponent of the breakup of the United Kingdom. He was the personification at the time of his death in 1889 of the liberal unionism which became the modern Conservative Party in the following generation. He was the author of modern democracy and parliamentary reform, now undermined by our subservience to domination by European legislation and the refusal of a Referendum and the unbridled irresponsible use of the whip system in every nook and cranny of the palace of Westminster. He would never have tolerated any of this. Now is the time to launch a new campaign for parliamentary reform and to return the Government of this country to those who elect their representatives as Members of Parliament.
To commemorate this anniversary, my good friend Richard Shepherd, MP for Aldridge-Brownhills, and myself, will visit the great Town Hall of Birmingham today. It is tragic that the original marble statue of John Bright by Albert Joy which was commissioned by the people of Birmingham and a mere copy of which was presented to the House of Commons by Andrew Carnegie in 1902, should now be languishing in the museum’s collections centre, a warehouse on the outskirts of Birmingham. Would it not be a wonderful gesture of civic pride for this statue to be cleaned up and removed from its present surroundings and relics of the past and reinstated in a place, perhaps in the Town Hall itself of equal prominence to the place in history of both of Birmingham and of this country of John Bright.
* Bill Cash is writing a biography of John Bright to be published in 2009. His great-grandfather, William Cash, was a cousin of John Bright.
