On the Record | Boris and Manchester United

Please see my latest wire for The American Spectator, ‘Boris and Manchester United’:

It was a stroke of genius for Britain’s prime minister, Boris Johnson, to begin his Brexit roadshow to talk up Britain’s “new golden age” in Manchester.

The city’s name serves as a metonym for free market economics: “Manchesterism.” It became so closely identified with laissez-faire that Pius XI referred to it in his 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo Anno. “Manchesterian Liberals,” Pius tut-tutted, hold the inimical view that “whatever was produced, whatever returns accrued, capital claimed for itself, hardly leaving to the worker enough to restore and renew his strength.”

Economic historian W.D. Grammp, noting this pejorative continued into the 1960s, called the Manchester School “a policy that relies on the market as much as it can and (even to today’s classical liberals) somewhat more than it ought.”

Such was not the original intent of its founders, Richard Cobden and John Bright, who were focused in the mid-1840s on repealing the Corn Laws, legislation that protected British landowners from cheap foreign wheat, a competitive advantage that made bread unaffordable for the working poor. Instead, Grammp observed, Manchesterism “had much less to say about the principle of economic freedom than about the likely effects of its practice in foreign trade.”

Mr. Johnson steps into this breach, for he is intent on emphasizing how Brexit leads to greater freedom and prosperity for both individuals and the nation. Call it “leveling up.” Instead of the redistributionist policy whereby equality is achieved through less for everyone, free market innovation and entrepreneurship expand both opportunity and the economic sphere.

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My thanks to editor Wlady Pleszczynski of The American Spectator.

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.

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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!