Sir Robert Peel, by W. H. Pickersgill saviour and destroyer of his party. Public domain |
Peel's triumph?
The 1840s should have been a triumphant decade for Peel. He had reformed his party after its defeat of 1832 and won the election of 1841.There was however, a lurking problem.
- The Conservative vote was overwhelmingly agricultural and deeply committed to agricultural protection.
- Peel himself was increasingly in favour of free trade on ideological grounds and his conversion exposed a fault-line in the Tory party. Were they agrarian traditionalists or believers in the free market? Throughout the decade, his government's budgets saw a steady reduction in duties, and disgruntled backbenchers came to believe that the Corn Laws would be next.
The Irish famine
It is usually believed that it was the Irish famine that converted Peel to free trade, but it is now clear that this simply provided him with an excuse.There are posts on this distressing and still controversial subject here and here.
Scene at Skibbereen, Cork, 1847 |
By the autumn of 1845, with the Europe-wide failure of the potato crop, Ireland was facing the greatest social and humanitarian crisis in its history. On 15 October, Peel wrote to the Lord Lieutenant that the only practical remedy was
the removal of all impediments to the import of all kinds of human food - that is the total and absolute repeal for ever of all duties on all articles of subsistence.But this was not the real issue. Cheaper bread was not the answer to the immediate problem; the Irish could not afford to buy any bread. The only thing that could save them was food relief on a massive scale. The Corn Laws were therefore an irrelevancy.