CRAIG MURRAY SHEDS TOO DIM A LIGHT ON JOHN BRIGHT & Co.
CRAIG MURRAY not a bad geezer is giving a 19th century Lancashire politician a spot hero worship - you can clock his hero worship blogspot HERE. BRIGHT was a free trader along with RICHARD COBDEN and various of their other other contemporaries. Of course the Free Traders were ape-shit crazy to repeal the Tory Corn Laws. Their politiking came to something of a head back in 1842 and they and some of their closest were doing lots to foment unrest and industrial action ... especially Up North.There was some widespread industrial action and resultant disorders and in the Northern Areas where Bright and Co., held quite a lot of sway. There was a geat deal of contemporary Government concern about policing and how to cope if things got bad - as indeed they did. The central Government Home Dept concern - well one of the BIG concerns - was how could Tory appointed top cop officials in the industrial north cope with policing problems in those areas where pro free trade manufacturing and increasingly politically significant characters, could and were influencing the growth of disorders and associated rhetoric. It was BIG law and order polemics such as came about IN THIS ERA that probably greatly influnced the long term thereafter so that political elected police chiefs never became the UK way of doing things - well that is until this current 21st Century well-below-the-belt CAMERON CLEGG outfit have just lately introduced them.
PLUG PLOT RIOTS of 1842
Anyway back to Bright, Cobden and Co. and the 1842 PLUG PLOT/RIOT events. Very curious that the only people who faced criminal prosecution resulting from the 1842 disorders were Chartists altho' the Free Traders - who included B and C who were scrutinised officially to see if they might be worth charging. The then Tory hierachy cried off trying that on their cases even though it was very widely known and recognised that BRIGHT etc had done a fair amount of overtime to foment disatisfaction and unrest. JAMES MILL - AND THE ART OF REVOLUTION gave a taster for the so-called Great Reform Bill agitations of 1832 and things got more extremely manipulated to buggery a decade or so later - however the only folks who got nicked and put on trial were 60 plus CHARTISTS - SEE HERE. Chartist demands were far more proletarian than those of JOHN BRIGHT's mafia of FREE TRADERS. See HERE for an interesting anecdotal reference re Free Traders, Chartism and the August 1842 events.
posted by Ian Cameron aka KILROY WAS-A-HERO @ 06:54
2 Comments:
I like your style. I might even have loved it in the sixties. Thanks for the John Bright conference plug. Hope you'll be there tomorrow.
John Goss
Hi J G afraid I couldn't make the Conference. Bright wasn't a deep dyed bad bloke but the political events of 1842 leave him with a shadowy reputation re that episode. I'm sure - indeed have read - but cannot now find the reference that he and other Anti Corn Law core faces were officially scrutinised for possible prosecution by the Prosecuting Authorities re the Plug Plot events. They wouldn't have gone to those lengths had not the rhetoric and Anti Corn Law activism not got pretty unsavoury.
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