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Along with his friend and collaborator, Richard Cobden, Bright stumped the country, calling for free trade in corn. This was class politics — attacking the landed aristocracy — and many saw it as a mill-owner’s dodge, as cheaper bread would allow employers to cut wages. But Bright’s brilliance as a speaker meant that he could raise the game, translating this economic issue into a moral campaign against the evils of aristocratic privilege.
Most historians would agree that the Anti-Corn Law League was only partly responsible for the decision by Robert Peel to repeal the Corn Laws, which was governed largely by the Irish famine. But the League claimed the credit. Bright’s name was made. Having entered parliament in 1843, he now embarked on a lifetime of crusading politics. He agitated for democracy and parliamentary reform, he attacked Britain’s foreign policy as a system of outdoor relief for the aristocracy, and he championed the North in the American Civil War, perceiving early on that this was a fight against slavery.
Bill Cash has a family connection with Bright, who was his great-grandfather’s cousin. The Cash family were also Quakers, and for several generations chairmen of the Abbey National Building Society. More importantly, perhaps, as an MP, Cash is heir to the John Bright tradition of parliamentary nonconformity and independence.
‘My life is in my speeches,’ Bright once grumpily remarked when pestered by would-be biographers. Cash’s book is structured thematically around Bright’s campaigns; it is a very political biography. This works well for Bright’s early battles for free trade or parliamentary reform, but it means that the book loses narrative pace during the sections on foreign policy or Ireland.
It is an oddly old-fashioned account. Cash is not interested in exploring Bright’s ideas about democracy, for example, in the context of the time. He makes little of Bright’s private life. Bright suffered a major breakdown in 1856, brought on by his unpopularity for opposing the Crimean War, and he retired from public speaking for two years; but the author makes no attempt to probe this puzzling episode. He barely mentions the strains in Bright’s second marriage, caused it seems by the conflict between his wife’s Quaker values and the demands of his political career. The notion that Bright was jealous of Cobden, and tried to undermine and upstage him, is dismissed.
Cash’s purpose is to restore Bright to his proper place as a politician who used his formidable speaking talents to campaign for progressive reform — an MP who had no ambition for office but just wanted to make the world a better place. In this, he succeeds.
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