Continuing from yesterday’s post Tarquin O’Flaherty continues to flay the 19th C British ruling classes

The delight of the great mass of people in accepting the new and astonishingly wide ranging slew of  reforms being offered by the Whigs was short lived.  It became quickly evident, as little as a year after the new (1832) Reform Act became law, that the interests of the newly installed, newly governing ‘middle-class’ didn’t differ all that much from those they had deposed.  The new lot were, its true, much less ruthless than their predecessors, infinitely more pragmatic, and much more kindly disposed towards the interests of the merchant class.  It is also true that Grey, having brilliantly read the aspirations of this new ‘middle’ class, gave them power in order to emasculate them.  These arrivistes, having taken up the franchise and elected their members, were not entirely surprised to discover that their interests now differed markedly from those of the working class.  Gradually at first, and then more quickly, they abandoned the association.  Without the vote, they reasoned, the working class, those who had once been their friends, were now rapidly becoming their enemies, which is precisely what Grey had intended.  The new government had set its feet firmly on the road, as Juvenal had observed, to becoming utterly abominable.

There were other considerations: Unions, the Corn Laws, Speenhamland, the Workhouse and the Poor Laws.

What must be understood of the UK at the time of Napoleon was that a man’s wealth was judged purely on how much land he owned.  On this land, corn (wheat) was being grown, not only to feed European troops, but to provide the people of the UK with bread.

The Napoleonic Wars began in 1793 and ended in 1815.  During all this time the price of wheat kept on rising.  As the wars came to an end and the demand for wheat lessened, the price began to fall.  Cheaper imported grain threatened the high priced domestic product.  Immediately the UK government brought in the 1815 Corn Laws, designed specifically to shore up and protect the artificially high price of UK wheat against cheaper foreign imports.  Imported corn could only be sold at the artificial domestic rate.  The Corn Laws remained in place until 1846.  This meant that bread on the domestic market became so expensive that factory owners were forced to pay higher wages simply so their employees could buy bread.  Those without the benefit of these higher wages ate potatoes.  When potato blight happened and potatoes rotted in the ground, people without the benefit of bread were allowed to starve to death.  Economists of the day viewed this as collateral damage and left them to it.  Factory owners, always keen to reduce wages, lobbied endlessly against the Corn Laws, but the repeal of the Corn Laws took thirty years and then only because millions of people, spud dependent UK residents, villagers, ploughmen, farriers and cottagers with their wives and kids were being buried in mass graves as a result of a deliberate, Corn Law engineered famine.

It is interesting to note that the Wikipedia BBC account of the Irish Famine of the 1840’s, in defending UK government policy of the time, insists that a vast amount of imported grain was available in Ireland in 1847.  Available?  To whom was it available?  It was certainly not available to the people of West Cork, who starved to death in their thousands in 1847.  These desperate people were all within a forty mile radius of Cork city, the biggest port on the Irish south coast.  So, what happened to this wonderful, life saving grain, the distribution of which was in the hands of the caring British administration?  This is the BBC, hypocritically re-writing history.  Huge amounts of this potentially life-saving grain was stolen, syphoned off or re-exported.  There was too much money to be made to waste it on the hungry.

What this BBC ‘account’ also fails to mention, indeed ignores completely is that prior to 1847, and for fifty years before that, England’s Corn Laws had made the price of home grown grain so high that people couldn’t afford bread.  It also fails to mention the appalling levels of absolute penury that existed in Ireland before the famine began, as a direct result of the UK government’s racist attitudes and discriminatory laws directed against the 90 per cent Catholic population of Ireland.

Enough already…

I’ll catch my breath and be back tomorrow