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This chapter discusses how free trade continued to embody the single most popular element in Liberal and Radical politics, both as a defence of the community and of individual welfare. The ideology of free trade survived not only successive attacks of fair traders, foreigners, faddists, and federationists, but emerged reinvigorated from the Boer War through its interlocking with the New Liberal ideology of social reform.

In England, the Whig government during the late 1830s was moderate but weak, so that it was beholden to the small knot of middle-class and Irish Radicals in the Commons, and that subservience, too, swayed the electorate against ideological politics. An alternative view suggests that it was the Whigs who paralysed the Radicals, rather than vice versa. Under either interpretation, Whigs and Tories are seen to be rallying together against the threat from below and groping towards the ‘Victorian compromise’ of moderate liberalism. Lord John Russell was fully aware of the need for a Whig legislative programme which would contribute to the progress of improvement and restore popular confidence in government. He had by 1837 got to grips with the Home Office and had already set in train a series of ambitious social reforms covering Poor Law, public health, and factory legislation. His engagement with social policy was to culminate in a frontal assault on the education question.

Viewed from the outside, the prospects for a Whig government did not look good in 1846. The Whig party's will to resist coalition with the Peelites seemed very weak, as its liberal wing had grown very moderate and the old Whig families seemed to be withdrawing from active leadership altogether. The alternative to coalition with the Peelites, some kind of agreement with the Radicals as in 1835, was no longer feasible. If an aggravated reprise such as that of the late 1830s was to be avoided, a liberal–conservative coalition — certainly bringing together Robert Peel and Lord John Russell, and possibly roping free-trade Radicals into the bargain — seemed inevitable. This chapter focuses on the last Whig government (lasting from 1846 to 1852), the Condition of England politics, the Condition of Britain politics, the rise and fall of the General Board of Health, and the passing of the Whigs.

Entrepreneurial Radicalism ultimately failed in its mission, and Richard Cobden and John Bright lived long enough to discern this melancholy truth. Meanwhile, some historians claim, nothing had come from the attempts of the old Anti-Corn Law League leaders to find the ‘big idea’ that would sustain their campaign against the aristocracy. Financial reform, parliamentary reform, and the freehold purchase movement were all broached — without much success. As for the involvement of Cobden and Bright in the peace movement, this not only lacked popular support but was also repudiated by most of their one-time middle-class followers. Since no other middle-class politicians were prepared to take their place, entrepreneurial politics quickly ran into the sands.

The so-called entrepreneurial Radicals of mid-Victorian Britain hoped to reshape the world in the image of the new manufacturing class ‘entrepreneurial politics’. Their main concern was to undermine aristocracy and to create a world in which monopoly would be replaced by competition and merit would take precedence over inherited position. Many members of the Victorian middle class also resented intensely the prevalent assumption that ‘government’ was some arcane mystery best left to a hereditary caste of landowners and higher professionals. Were the entrepreneurial Radicals primarily concerned to further their material interests? What did their beloved laws of political economy really mean? And were they really willing to follow the implications of these ‘laws’ to their logical conclusion? More basically still, to what extent did the needs of ‘capitalism’ coincide with the actual political and economic demands that were being advanced by flesh-and-blood capitalists? And why did so few businessmen force their way to the top in politics? These questions are tackled in the present book.

In late 1847, Britain was in the throes of a commercial depression; many banks failed, among them the Royal Bank of Liverpool, which closed its doors in October. In that same month, the government temporarily suspended the Bank Charter Act. This commercial distress reawakened the militancy of the class-conscious urban Radicals, while the agricultural depression stimulated a pronounced Protectionist revival. To appease restless MPs, the Whig government proposed a revised budget, which renewed income tax for three (rather than five) years and left the existing rates unchanged. This triggered a renewal of the bourgeois revolt, and leagues sprang up all over the place. The middle class launched a series of protests, channeling their anger by forming provincial pressure groups. One such group was the Liverpool Financial Reform Association, which criticized the monarchy and the armed services. This chapter looks at the economy campaign of the LFRA and the budget policies of Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone in 1852 and 1853, respectively.

When businessmen in Britain sought to carry out the reforms they believed to be necessary if commerce and industry were to flourish, they often came up against the hostility of an aristocratic legislature unsympathetic to their endeavours. Inevitably, therefore, many urban Radicals were driven to wonder whether limited reforms were worth pursuing at all until such time as the basis of representation had itself been changed. The majority of the middle-class reformers, however, drew back from initiating a campaign for parliamentary reform because they doubted whether so ambitious an objective was at that moment attainable. Some sceptics argued that the success of the Anti-Corn Law League had demonstrated that even an aristocratic-dominated Parliament and government could be successfully pressured when ‘opinion out of doors’ had been mobilized on an issue possessing popular appeal. This chapter examines the debate over parliamentary reform and the events surrounding the Reform Act controversy of 1865–1867.

According to Harold Perkin, the 1870 Education Act (along with the 1862 Revised Code) in Britain provided the ideal entrepreneurial education for a docile and permanent labour force. The author of that Act, W. E. Forster, was a businessman Radical who had recently been highly active in the Chambers of Commerce movement. However, educational historians now generally agree that the main catalyst for the 1870 Act was not economic pressure. More important was the discovery, from a survey of Manchester, that the country was probably less well provided with elementary schools than the ‘experts’ had previously supposed. This chapter explores whether the principles of the entrepreneurial Radicals were capable of being applied to educational problems, voluntaryism and the creation of an educational market, secularism and education, public subsidy for church schools, capitalism as a goal of education, and entrepreneurial Radicals' views on higher education.

In Britain, all businessmen were necessarily involved, in their day-to-day lives, in handling their work-force, and all would have had strong opinions on trade unionism and factory legislation. During the 1840s and early 1850s at least, most of the entrepreneurial Radicals took an entirely negative stance on both issues. Whereas in nearly all other areas of public life, Radical businessmen were dissatisfied with the status quo and advocated changes, industrial matters most simply wanted to be left alone. Trade unionism and legislative restrictions on the working hours and conditions of factory operatives were seen as unwarranted interference with their rights as employers, to be resisted accordingly. In fending off all external encroachments on their business practices, employers were motivated in varying proportions by self-interest, class pride, and a theoretical commitment to the ‘laws’ of political economy. Yet, despite the obduracy of many employers, others became more relaxed in their attitudes towards both trade unionism and factory legislation.