Monthly Archives: January 2020

FH #57  Did Brexit mark the first major split in the British Conservative party since its formation? 

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Robert Peel

It all came to an end on 31 January, after a huge split in the Tory party and might never have happened had it not been for Ireland. And, as most you have probably guessed by now I’m not talking about Brexit because we all love our little bit of misdirection on radio and besides Brexit will not be coming to an end anytime soon.

 

I’m talking about the final resolution of one of the previous apocalyptic convulsions in British politics, the repeal of the Corn Laws. It was also bubbling under for a couple of decades and then took three years of close combat to resolve. While a negotiated Brexit might never have happened without the intervention of Leo Varadkar, the Repeal of the Corn Laws probably owe their passage to a rather more doleful event in Irish history, the Great Famine.

 

The Corn Laws were, not to put too fine a point on it, a mechanism devised by the British landowning classes—represented by the Conservative party—to preserve their money and privileges. Nowadays this is achieved in Eton, Harrow, Oxford, Cambridge and the City of London. The Corn Laws ensured that imported grain, mostly from the USA, was subjected to tariffs that allowed the aristocracy to continue to obtain ridiculously high prices for their home grown grain. This made bread, the staple diet of the working class, far more expensive than should have been the case in nineteenth century Britain. Had cheaper imported American grain been used in the making of flour, bread would have been more plentiful and less expensive.

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As the industrial revolution of the early nineteenth century began to take hold in Britain representatives of the new entrepreneurial class—represented by the Whig party—began to flex their political muscles and resist artificially high corn prices. Change required the repeal of a raft of legislation known, collectively, as the Corn Laws. Opponents of this tariff regime adopted the singularly unimaginative name of the Anti Corn Law League, rather than something flashier like Buy Alien Corn Cheap or BACC for short.

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MISTER Richard Cobden

When it comes to figuring out who stood with the ordinary Joe it might help to look at the names of two of those involved on either side of the argument. One of the main protagonists of the Anti Corn Law League was Mister Richard Cobden – the leading light of their opponents, the Central Agricultural Protection Society (or CAPS for short, the aristos were better at branding) was the Duke of Richmond. He may well have been a perfectly lovely man, and he was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, but he was still a Duke. Dukes tended to have a rather different perspective on life, and things like bread, than plain Misters or Mistresses. Dukes, for example, could afford cake.

 

So where did Ireland come into all of this?

 

Well, with the Conservatives in power in the 1840s, under Robert Peel – dubbed Orange Peel by Daniel O’Connell on account of his unionism – there wasn’t a locust’s chance in a desert of the Corn Laws being repealed. Until the potato blight in 1845 led to changed priorities for Prime Minister Peel. Faced with famine in Ireland he recommended that the Corn Laws be swept away and cheap grain be imported from America to feed the starving Irish. Just in case the House of Commons said ‘No’ he went ahead and bought some anyway on the quiet.

Ranged against him was a sizeable proportion of his own party. Peel persisted and, with the help of the opposition Whigs, forced through legislation which would lead to the final elimination of the Corn Laws one hundred and seventy one years ago today. One wonders did Theresa May ever think about Robert Peel, and the assistance he received from the main opposition party in the House of Commons in the passage of his controversial legislation.

There then followed an election campaign contested against the background of the slogan ‘Let’s get the Corn Laws done’ – actually that’s a bit of a porkie. It didn’t happen like that at all. Abandoned by a majority of the members of his party Peel was booted out of office and was replaced by a Whig administration that managed to make about as big a mess of the Irish famine as it was possible to do without actually hanging half the population. The supporters of Peel, one of whom was a young Tory MP by the name of William Gladstone, joined forces with the Whigs to form the Liberal party in 1859.

 

Interestingly, when the Tories came back to power under Benjamin Disraeli they did not restore the Corn Laws. The Prime Minister proclaimed that the matter was settled and that it was now time to move on, so, no second referendum, as it were.

 

If you think that Brexit was the first major convulsion of the Tory party since its foundation, then you’ve probably never heard of the massive split provoked by the Corn Laws. That’s fake history.

 

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Tory ERG members seeking a fair deal on trade with the EU from Michel Barnier and Phil Hogan. I think.

 

FH #56 Did Queen Victoria lead a cloistered and sheltered life?

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Had she been spared, Queen Victoria would have been two hundred and one years old last Wednesday. Which, despite her actual longevity, is probably a bit of a stretch to contemplate. But as England gets its fondest wish on 31 January and seems set for a wholehearted return to the era named after her, it’s probably worth taking a closer look and asking did Old Queen Vic really lead a cloistered and sheltered life in which piano legs were covered for fear that they would become a gateway drug to unbridled admiration of the female appendage of the same name.

Let’s start with her title. Because, you see, her official name wasn’t Victoria at all. She was named Alexandrina after her godfather, Tsar Alexander I of Russia. Had she not preferred her second name, Victoria, we might be talking today about wildfires in the Australian state of Alexandrina, or the retail outlet Alexandrina’s Secret. She would probably have disapproved heartily of the latter as there is no evidence that she had a penchant for sexy lingerie.

When she was born, the odds against her becoming monarch at the time she did were prohibitive. She was fifth in line to the throne behind her father and three uncles. She had about as much chance of becoming Queen as Barbara Windsor, after whom the Royal family is now named. But, one by one the prior claimants succumbed. If you were a conspiracy theorist you might even start to think … but let’s not go there.

She was the first reigning monarch to occupy Buckingham Palace. Royal histories record her as ‘adding a new wing’ to the establishment, which suggests that she might also have been the first reigning monarch to engage in manual labour. Probably best not to take the accounts literally though.

As regards the cloistered existence bit, she was certainly kept away from the hoi polloi when she was a young princess, she was even made to share a bedroom with her mother until she became Queen, so no chance of interaction on social media, the dominant form of the day being something called ‘the letter’ which appears to have involved actual writing, with no abbreviations.  Ha, LOL!

However, she was exposed to one of the most common pursuits of many of the crowned heads of Europe at the time, surviving attempted assassination. At least six people, all men, tried to kill her in a variety of ways, mostly by taking pot shots at her. She was only wounded once, in 1850, when an enterprising assassin struck her with an iron-tipped cane.

A mad Scottish poet, Roderick MacLean, plotted to kill her eight times before he finally made his own failed attempt. Apparently his resentment was because she had been a tad caustic about some poetry he sent her. The episode prompted the infamous Scottish versifier, William McGonagall—the world’s worst poet —to pen one of his own deplorable rhymes.

Maclean must be a madman,
Which is obvious to be seen,
Or else he wouldn’t have tried to shoot
Our most beloved Queen.

And that’s more than enough about Scottish poets.

Victoria’s latter years were spent as a virtual recluse in Balmoral in the Scottish highlands after the death of her beloved husband Prince Albert, for whom a well-known piercing was named, but only long after his death when he could no longer seek an injunction. Her diary suggests that she thoroughly enjoyed their wedding night. In it she wrote …

‘I never, never spent such an evening!! My dearest dearest dear Albert … his         excessive love & affection gave me feelings of heavenly love & happiness I never could have hoped to have felt before!’

Indeed!

Many years after the death of Albert, Victoria may or may not have had an affair with her personal attendant, John Brown. There are even allegations that she secretly married him. Victorian gossips took to calling her ‘Mrs. Brown’, so Brendan O’Carroll didn’t get there first. When she died she was buried with a lock of John Brown’s hair, his photograph, his mother’s wedding ring, and a number of his letters. As he had predeceased her he didn’t join her in the coffin himself.

Half a dozen assassination attempts, a passionate marriage and an alleged affair later in life suggest that, despite her restrictive childhood and her self-imposed reclusiveness in widowhood, the notion of a cloistered Victorian existence for Britain’s second longest reigning monarch, is fake history.

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FH#55 Is Presidential impeachment actually worse than the Salem Witch trials?

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Late last year a penitent Donald Trump wrote a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi taking full responsibility for his actions in the Ukraine scandal and admitting to a whole host of impeachable offences.

Now, if you’ll excuse me for a second or two we just need to switch the dial and journey back from that parallel universe. Because, of course, President Trump did precisely the opposite. The bit about the letter is true though, you may remember it. It was six pages long, only the numbers at the bottom of each page made much sense, and the President, who is, of course, an acknowledged expert in 17th century US history, observed that …

I have been denied the most fundamental rights under the constitution … more            due process was afforded to those accused in the Salem Witch trials.

Far be it from me to challenge the authority of a man who has obviously spent hours poring over dusty and obscure documents from the history of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, when he should have been reading his daily CIA briefing, but his controversial utterance does seem to invite some rigorous analysis. So, let’s examine the validity of the suggestion that the impeachment process is odious in comparison with the procedures employed in the prosecution for witchcraft of a large number of women, and a much smaller number of men, in the rural community of Salem village, Massachusetts, in 1692.

Perhaps we should start with the response of the current Mayor of Salem, Kim Driscoll, to the President’s thesis.

‘Oy vey…again. Learn some history’ she tweeted,  ‘Salem 1692 = absence of evidence + powerless, innocent victims were hanged or pressed to death. #Ukraniegate 2019 = ample evidence + admissions of wrongdoing + perpetrators are among the most powerful and privileged.’

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Straightaway we need to enter a caveat here. Because Kim Driscoll is a lazy ‘do-nothing’ Democrat, and is also the Mayor of Salem Town, not Salem village where, in 1692, the uproar actually took place. Back in the 17th century the two entities were deadly rivals, Salem town being much wealthier than the adjoining village of the same name. The patent lack of objectivity in the Mayor’s tweet, as well as her gender, suggests that Kim Driscoll may indeed be a witch herself.

The Salem witch trials were symptomatic of suspicion of one’s neighbour and the fear of outsiders, a phenomenon that, happily, has no place in President Trump’s America.  Were Arthur Miller alive today he would undoubtedly focus on the agony of Presidential impeachment rather than the Salem witch trials for his allegorical play about McCarthyism, The Crucible.

The Salem commotion arose when two young children began to have fits and accused a number of local women of bewitching them. The resulting witchcraft trials led to the hanging of nineteen women and the formal crushing to death of the single male victim, Giles Corey, husband of one of the alleged witches.  Much of the testimony at the trials was so-called ‘spectral evidence’ where the witnesses recounted incriminating dreams rather than offering factual accounts of their experiences. As the record of the House of Representatives will show, spectral evidence, though encouraged by the Republican minority, was not accepted during the impeachment process. Neither is it likely that President Trump will ever be pressed to death under a pile of stones (the fate of Giles Corey).

One other major point of contrast is that in 1711 a shamefaced Massachusetts legislature retrospectively exonerated the condemned witches and offered financial restitution to their families. Impeachment, however, is not subject to retroactive pardons (unless the President opts to pardon himself) and it is unlikely that Ivanka, Eric, Donald Jr. or any other Trump dependent will be getting a cheque in the past anytime soon from a chastened House of Representatives.

So, is the impeachment process actually worse than the Salem witch trials? Given that no one has ever been executed for high crimes and misdemeanours committed as US President, thus far at any rate, that’s probably fake news. Sorry, I obviously meant fake history.

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