On the Record | Tories Manhandle Brexit at Birthplace of Manchester School

Please see my latest wire for The American Spectator, ‘Tories Manhandle Brexit at Birthplace of Manchester School’:

“Our first and most important duty is to get Brexit right.” So vows Prime Minister Theresa May at the conclusion of the Conservative conference at Manchester. In the early 19^th century, this northern English city nurtured faith in free trade. Led by Richard Cobden and John Bright, the “Manchester School” rose to protest agricultural protection against imports of cheap foreign wheat from feeding England’s working poor. In time, Manchester came to represent the principles of free trade and economic liberty; so much so that, according to one economic historian, “Manchester liberalism has come to mean a policy that relies on the market as much as it can and somewhat more than it ought.”

(As October is anniversary of the infamous “Charge of the Light Brigade,” a topical aside: Florence Nightingale, heroine of the Crimean War and founder of the Victorian Order of Nurses, spoke out in favor of a strong British army; she thus castigated the Manchester School’s pacifism that wished to cut army expenditures, which “made a deity of cheapness.”)

Yet little of the ghost of the Manchester School walked among Tory conference delegates, whose sympathy for interventionist welfare economics influences the party much as it did before the era of Margaret Thatcher. Only the conference’s Brexit segment gives cause for encouragement, with two stand-out performances.

Read more . . .

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My thanks to editor Wlady Pleszczynski of The American Spectator.

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May I wish friends and supporters Happy ‘Canadian’ Thanksgiving!

On the Record | Boris Johnson emerging as Brexit’s biggest booster

Please see my latest wire as Brexit diarist for The New York Sun, ‘As Tories meet in Britain Boris Johnson is emerging as Brexit’s biggest booster’:

Brexit. Brexit. Brexit. And Boris Johnson. That’s what’s on as Britain’s Conservative Party meets this week at Manchester, England. Poor Theresa May, prime minister and leader of the rancorous Tories. She is persona non grata for many delegates, although most are too polite to say so. Once enjoying the respect, if not the love, of the party whose lead she assumed when David Cameron resigned office to let others oversee the United Kingdom leave the European Union, Mrs. May is now reviled as the leader who called an unnecessary election that was hers to win and then to lose.

Which left her humbled before Parliament to manage a minority government propped up with discordant Irish unionist support. The embattled Prime Minister is routinely dissed as the one-time “Remainer” who seems set to bottle Brexit. Into this leadership maelstrom swirls the Foreign and Commonwealth secretary, Mr. Johnson.

A Telegraph article in mid-September was Boris Johnson’s first salvo over No. 10’s transom, in which he lays out his “glorious Brexit blueprint.” He conjures up all manner of exploits, from regulatory and tax reform to technical and financial innovation, where Britain will triumph again. And he drives home the case for Brexit, as the patriotic response to an evolving Euro-federalism — “an attempt not just at economic but political integration of a kind that the British people had never bargained for” — that was the impetus for the “Independence Day” referendum results of June 2016. “That plan is simply not for Britain,” Mr. Johnson writes, “and we should have been more honest about it years ago.”

Read more . . .

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My thanks to editor Seth Lipsky of The New York Sun.

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Readers of these DMI updates will be aware that yours truly has been away on ‘sabbatical’ since early August — momentarily setting aside my journalistic responsibilities to devise a scholarly agenda (focussed on natural law and ‘spontaneous order’ in the political and economic realm) for research planned in the months ahead. But as the summer heat beats retreat at autumn’s advance, it’s time to re-enter the fray. Brexit, as much else in the Anglosphere political world, is ‘hotting up’ once more.

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