The Conservative Party still doesn’t grasp the Red Wall’s historic love of liberty
The Free Trade Hall is my favourite building in Manchester, a perfectly proportioned palazzo cut from that rich pink sandstone that lends a certain warmth to the city even when (as often happens) its skies are like pewter and its street lights reflect wanly in puddles.
The hall stands on the site of the 1819 Peterloo massacre. Campaigners against the Corn Laws first built a temporary pavilion there to host their rallies and then, after their victory in 1846, the present gorgeous temple, the heart of the free-trade movement.
It was behind those handsome colonnades that Disraeli made his One Nation speech in 1872. It was here – in a hall rebuilt after the Blitz – that Bob Dylan appeared on stage with an electric guitar in 1966, prompting the famous cry of “Judas!” from a horrified folk music fan.
It was here, too, that, in 1904, Winston Churchill, then the MP for Oldham, delivered one of his one-line zingers. The context is rarely remembered these days, and it is worth setting down in full.
“It is the theory of the protectionist that imports are an evil. He thinks that if you shut out the foreign-imported manufactured goods you will make these goods yourselves, in addition to the goods which you make now, including those goods which we make to exchange for the foreign goods that come in. If a man can believe that he can believe anything. We freetraders say it is not true. To think you can make a man richer by putting on a tax is like a man thinking that he can stand in a bucket and lift himself up by the handle.”
For Churchill, as for every free-trader, the removal of tariffs was an essentially radical cause. Protectionism, in those days, was seen for what it was: a way to transfer money from the poor to the rich.
This should not need saying, except that a strange and ahistorical idea has recently entered our political discourse, namely that the only way that the Conservatives can hang on to their new, blue-collar electorate is to adopt more interventionist economic policies. To hold their “Red Wall” seats, we are told, the Tories must become Trumpsters, implementing industrial strategies and subsidising favoured sectors and instituting Buy British campaigns and whatnot.
The idea that the Northern electorate is inherently protectionist is flat-out wrong. Britain’s industrial towns led the campaign against tariffs, which were maintained by and for Tory landowners. What Lefties now call “neoliberalism” was, in the 19th century, called “Manchesterism”.
This week, in the first speech by an independent British Trade Secretary to the World Trade Organisation, Liz Truss, a flinty and patriotic Yorkshirewoman, recalled that history. The abolition of agrarian tariffs, she told her audience, had seen “ports like Liverpool, Glasgow and Teesside flourish with new commerce, trading cheaper goods more efficiently, and overcoming the objections of vested interests and wealthy landowners to the benefit of the majority”.
Free trade is not some Thatcherite excrescence that somehow needs to be smuggled past former Labour voters. It was the original, defining cause of Northern and Midlands towns, the reason they fought to get the vote in the first place.
Scrapping tariffs is fundamentally about cutting prices. With freer trade, people can work the same hours while having extra disposable income. They spend that income on other goods and services, thus lifting the entire economy. Everyone wins but, as a rule, the less you earn, the more you win proportionately.
These days, our tariffs are set by the EU, and fall most heavily on food, clothing and footwear. For people on low incomes, buying those things represents a big chunk of the monthly budget. They stand to gain the most – now, just as in the days of the Corn Laws.
As the leader of the National Agricultural Labourers’ Union put it in 1884: “The natural effect of Protection is to restrict trade, and restriction means less of everything for the working classes. This is proved by actual experience. The darkest days in our history were those of Protection.”
Progressives used to think that way until well into the 20th century. Philip Snowden, Labour’s first chancellor, was determined to cut tariffs on everyday items, especially food, so as “to realise the cherished radical idea of a free breakfast table”.
Nowadays, though, Labour politicians use the word “cheap” disparagingly. Jeremy Corbyn shudders at the idea of Brexit turning Britain into what he calls “a bargain basement economy”. What is wrong with bargain basements, for heaven’s sake? A party that sneers at lower prices has well and truly lost touch with ordinary people.
Why did Labour change? Part of the answer has to do with the ecoradicalism that has captured large parts of the Left, an ideology that is hostile to trade because it dislikes growth per se. More widely, there is a sense that globalisation has left certain communities behind, and that autarky will revive their old industries.
This is not just a bad prescription; it is a woeful misdiagnosis. Yes, there are problems in parts of Britain. But why blame them on free trade rather than on, say, poor schools, family breakdown, welfare dependency or substance abuse? The truth is that more people are in work than ever before in British history, wages are rising and the cost of living is falling. There are glitches, of course, notably the high cost of housing – but that is a failure of state control, not of markets.
The notion that more free trade – what Leftist commentators sneeringly call “Singapore on Thames” – would disproportionately favour the wealthy is the opposite of the truth. Poor people in Singapore enjoy a higher standard of living than poor people almost anywhere else. They enjoy better public transport and schools, have higher disposable income, are healthier and live longer. Why? Because their government does not oblige them to pay higher prices as subsidies to well-connected domestic producers.
When Britain embraced free trade in the 19th century, the effect was precisely what its advocates had hoped for: a tangible improvement in living standards for ordinary people. Foreign visitors were astonished by the luxuries and leisure enjoyed by Britain’s working classes. To borrow one of Boris Johnson’s favourite phrases, free trade “levelled up”. Given the chance, it will again.
Free trade was the original defining cause in the North and Midlands, the reason they fought to get the vote