When They Go Low, We Go High

by Philip Collins

  Unfortunately, for Kinnock, they didn’t. Just under a month later, on 11 June 1987, the Conservatives won a handsome victory, their third in succession. Only 31 per cent of the nation was persuaded to vote for the first Kinnock in a thousand generations who had been to university. The Conservatives were returned with the loss of just 21 seats on their 1983 victory and an overall majority of 102. Clearly, Kinnock’s invective had not worked. The harsh lesson shows the limitations of political rhetoric, of course, but it shows something deeper than that. It shows that rhetoric is duplicity if it is not matched to an underlying reality. After delivering this speech, Kinnock was filmed, with his wife Glenys, walking in the hills above Llandudno. The footage became the basis for the celebrated film directed by Hugh Hudson in which this speech was laid over shots of the Kinnocks and the Welsh landscape. As a landmark in party-political broadcasting it is famous. So is all of the communications effort of the 1987 Labour Party campaign. Led by Peter Mandelson, it was cleverly conceived, perfectly executed and entirely futile, because Labour wasn’t ready to win.

  There is only one story in Labour politics. Attlee promised to rebuild Britain after the war. Wilson promised the white heat of technology. Blair said he would modernise for the information age. By 1987, Labour had not modernised enough and the electorate sniffed it. Kinnock was still too prone, as he had been in Bournemouth in 1985, to call Labour ‘the party of production’. He thought he meant manufacturing; the country heard trade union influence. It is a reminder that the same message sounds different according to the identity of the speaker. Kinnock often outlined an industrial strategy that Theresa May has more or less endorsed. When May says it, the industrial strategy sounds like the one aberrant foray into left-wing tendencies in the otherwise conventional life of a Tory vicar’s daughter. When Kinnock said the same it sounded like his first step on the road to socialism. Rhetoric has an intrinsic content, but it also points in a certain direction, and every speaker needs to calculate where the passage fits within the overall impression. It is a common tactic for all Labour politicians to describe expenditure as ‘investment’, which sounds laudable rather than profligate. Tories counter by describing the same event as mere ‘spending’, which by implication is reckless and wasteful.

  A lot of politics is a battle over words. I once drafted a speech in defence of university tuition fees which can just as accurately, in fact more accurately, be described as a capped graduate tax. Labour MPs prefer the title of tax, which the public hates. However, re-description only goes so far. Labour’s policies of the 1980s were not credible and Kinnock knew it. Between 1988 and 1992 incredible policies on unilateralism, nationalisation, Europe, council-house sales and the closed shop were abandoned. It was still not enough and in 1992 Kinnock lost again.

  Neil Kinnock thus stands as something of a case study in the caveats that must be applied to the power of speech. Kinnock was the best public speaker in British political life in the latter part of the twentieth century. He had a command of imagery unrivalled among his contemporaries and a better speaking voice than any of them. He also had something important to say. He could be long-winded, to be sure. John Major cruelly said of Kinnock that he talked so much because, as he had no idea what he was trying to say, he could never tell when he’d finished. But there were days, magnificent days, like 11 October 1985 in Bournemouth and 15 May 1987 in Llandudno, when Kinnock knew exactly what he was trying to say and he said it with a power matched by none of his peers. It was still not enough. Magnificent though this speech was, it could not mask the facts. Rhetoric never does, at least not for long.

  THE PHILOSOPHICAL CAPITAL OF THE WORLD

  The material and political progress of Britain can be told without ever venturing far from a small site in Manchester called St Peter’s Field. The story of democratic politics, its best answers and its false trails, can be found in words that were either spoken at St Peter’s Field, inspired by it or written about it. In his novel Coningsby, Benjamin Disraeli, one of the protagonists in the great drama of Manchester, summarised its leading role in modern British history: ‘a great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest; Faith hovers over the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art … In the minds of men the useful has succeeded to the beautiful. Instead of the city of the Violet Crown, a Lancashire village has expanded into a mighty region of factories and warehouses. Yet, rightly understood, Manchester is as great a human exploit as Athens.’ Manchester, Disraeli went on to say, was the philosophical capital of the world.

  This sounds like the hyperbole that Disraeli could rarely resist, but just for once it is not. The claim that liberal democracy can best represent the people and improve the condition of their lives has had some persuasive advocacy at St Peter’s Field. So have the rival claims from the extreme left and right of the political spectrum, traditions of thought that have been voiced but never fixed in British public life. The demands for individual recognition that inspired the passion of William Wilberforce, Emmeline Pankhurst and Martin Luther King are all requests for equal moral worth to be respected by making everyone a political citizen. This has been achieved in Britain through a tradition of slow adaptation, rather than violent cataclysm.

  There are two traditions that have been heard here, two routes towards progress. The first is the demand for inclusion in the parliamentary franchise. The second is the many answers that have been heard to what Disraeli defined in the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, as the condition of England question. These are speeches that changed an argument and therefore change the world. They show the glacial pace at which democratic politics progresses towards a utopia that is always receding. The first instance combined both demands. On 16 August 1819 more than 60,000 people assembled in Manchester at a patch of empty ground known as St Peter’s Field. They had come to demand parliamentary representation and a better standard of living and for the promise of hearing the renowned speaker Orator Henry Hunt.

  Later in life Hunt would be an entrepreneur who produced a roasted corn breakfast powder in a vain bid to replace tea and coffee, and shoe-blacking bottles that carried the slogan ‘Equal Laws, Equal Rights, Annual Parliaments, Universal Suffrage and the Ballot’. But Hunt’s early renown was as a magnetic public speaker. In a series of speeches at assemblies of radicals, his was the most eloquent voice of the early nineteenth century for universal suffrage on the grounds that extending the vote to working men would lead to the better use of public money, fairer taxes and an end to the restrictions on trade, which damaged industry and were a cause of unemployment. Protesters descended on St Peter’s Field from all over Lancashire to hear him speak. In the event, Orator Hunt is best known for a speech that was never given.

  The Patriotic Union Society had organised the assembly to protest against material conditions and exclusion from representation. In 1815, at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Lord Liverpool’s Conservative government had introduced the Corn Law which imposed a tariff on foreign grain to protect native merchants. The 1815 Corn Law prohibited the importing of wheat, except under a vast duty, until the price of domestic wheat had reached 80s per quarter. The obvious consequence was that wheat then sold on the home market at an artificially inflated price – 112s 8d per quarter by 1817 – which caused great hardship among the poor, who could not live without paying the price.

  The ‘bread tax’ as it became known was the cause of riots. By 1818 weavers and spinners in Manchester and its surrounding mill towns were earning a third of their 1803 wages. Parliament would not hear their demands because in 1819 Lancashire had just two MPs to cover the rapidly growing industrial centres of Manchester, Salford, Bolton, Blackburn, Rochdale, Ashton-under-Lyne and Oldham, which between them had a population of almost one million people. Not that any of these industrial workers were permitted to do anything as democratic as vote. The franchise was restricted to adult male owners of freehold land with an ann
ual rental value of 40 shillings or more.

  The purpose of the St Peter’s Field meeting was peaceful protest for the franchise and better conditions. The publicity material for the event stated explicitly its aim ‘to consider the propriety of adopting the most LEGAL and EFFECTUAL means of obtaining a reform in the Common House of Parliament’. Instructions were issued to attendees that ‘Cleanliness, Sobriety, Order and Peace’ were expected and all weapons prohibited. The crowd did proceed in an orderly way to St Peter’s Field on a hot day under a cloudless blue sky. They gathered under banners demanding ‘No Corn Laws’, ‘Annual Parliaments’, ‘Universal Suffrage’ and ‘Vote By Ballot’.

  Orator Hunt, accompanied by Mary Fildes, the leader of the Manchester female reform movement, arrived at 1 p.m and made his way up to the hustings amid a rapturous ovation. He arrived under the watchful observance of the Manchester magistrates who had arranged the presence of 600 men from the 15th Hussars, several hundred infantrymen, a Royal Horse Artillery unit with two six-pounder (2.7 kg) guns, 400 men of the Cheshire Yeomanry, 400 special constables and 120 cavalry of the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry, the grand title granted to a motley band of local volunteer businessmen. The ovation that Hunt received on the way to the podium was enough to convince William Hulton, chairman of the magistrates, who was watching from a house on the perimeter of St Peter’s Field, to issue a warrant for his arrest. The chief constable, Jonathan Andrews, replied that military assistance would be required to disperse the crowd. The first contingent to receive the order were the erratic Manchester and Salford Yeomanry, stationed a few streets away in Portland Street and led by a local factory owner, Captain Hugh Hornby Birley.

  Trying to pick their way on horseback through a narrow channel formed by two lines of special constables, the Yeomanry induced panic in the crowd and then responded in kind by striking with sabres. The arrest warrant was duly issued to Orator Hunt. When the Yeomanry set about destroying the banners and flags on the podium, the crowd threw brickbats, at which provocation Hulton sent in the Hussars to disperse the meeting. With uncoordinated contingents of Hussars and Yeomanry attempting to restore order, at least eleven people were killed and more than 600 injured in scenes of shocking chaos.

  The incident was at once notorious. James Wroe, the editor of the Manchester Observer, gave his report of the day the headline ‘the Peterloo Massacre’, to link it to the 1815 Battle of Waterloo, which was still fresh in the memory. Lord Liverpool’s government responded with authoritarian stupidity, passing what became known as the Six Acts to suppress radical meetings and publications of a free press. James Wroe was charged and found guilty of sedition and imprisoned for twelve months. Orator Hunt and eight others were tried at York Assizes on 16 March 1820 and charged with sedition. After a two-week trial, Hunt was sentenced to thirty months in Ilchester Gaol, where he served two years.

  Despite the restrictions placed on free publication after Peterloo, one legacy of the massacre was the foundation, in 1821, of the Manchester Guardian by John Edward Taylor, who had been in St Peter’s Field the day Orator Hunt was arrested. Taylor’s prospectus for the new publication was a manifesto of defiance. The Manchester Guardian would ‘zealously enforce the principles of civil and religious Liberty … and warmly advocate the cause of Reform’. Percy Bysshe Shelley offered a more poetic expression of the same impulse. Shelley was away in Italy at the time of Peterloo and only heard reports a month later but when he did his response was to write The Masque of Anarchy, subtitled Written on the Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester. State prohibition of the radical press meant that the following famous lines were not published until 1832, ten years after Shelley’s death:

  Rise like lions after slumber

  In unvanquishable number.

  The Manchester School

  The lions were to roar eventually, and none more potently than John Bright, the man described by the Conservative prime minister Lord Salisbury as ‘the greatest master of English oratory that this generation has produced … At a time when much speaking has depressed and almost exterminated eloquence, he maintained robust and intact that powerful and vigorous style of English which gave fitting expression to the burning and noble thoughts he desired to express’. Bright was trying to emulate the best. His interest in politics and in rhetoric in particular had been first kindled by the election in Preston in 1830 in which the winner, after a long battle, was one Henry Hunt. Bright then learned his trade among the Quakers in the Rochdale Juvenile Temperance Band. At his first open-air event he got into a muddle with his notes and had to stop. During a musical interlude, the chairman told him to say what came into his mind, which is truly terrible advice for anyone who doesn’t happen to be a rhetorical supernova in the making. Bright, typically, was magnificent, but it is not advisable to try public speaking that way.

  The great insight of Bright and his colleague and friend Richard Cobden was to realise that, when a state seeks to protect its industries, it is the wealthy who are protected and the vulnerable who suffer the cost. Cheaper food, they reasoned, meant higher real wages. Cobden and Bright understood that free trade should be a doctrine of the downtrodden. This is the axiom of the Manchester school. It was to uphold that principle that the Anti-Corn Law League was founded at the York Hotel, Manchester, on 24 September 1838. Bright gave his first notable speech on the issue to an open-air meeting in his home town of Rochdale on 2 February 1839. The price of corn, he said, was not a party question, it was a pantry question. The working classes, he argued, had been grievously injured by the monopoly enjoyed by the landed classes.

  The early years of the League were devoted to petitions, circulars, handbills and all manner of written persuasion. Bright and Cobden embarked on a speaking tour to take the case for abolition of the Corn Laws to the nation. They spoke everywhere but they always came back to their campaign headquarters in Manchester. On 29 December 1840, Bright told the Corn Exchange in the city that towns all over Britain now looked to Manchester rather than to London for leadership to lessen the distress of the daily struggle for bread. Cobden then gave his new association a significant gift. He bought the land at St Peter’s Field. Here, on the site of the Peterloo massacre, a temporary pavilion was built in 1840 and was named the Free Trade Hall after the cause.

  Bright and Cobden spoke at the Free Trade Hall many times, and they flattered Manchester, but their main audience was in Parliament. When Cobden became MP for Stockport in 1841 and Bright MP for Durham in 1843 they were able to speak directly to Prime Minister Robert Peel, a man from just down the road in Bury. In his speech ‘You Are the Gentry of England’ in March 1845 Cobden spoke for the consumer exploited by the plutocratic merchants. Cobden and Bright complemented one another ideally. Cobden provided the calm reasoning of the philosopher and Bright brought the passion and emotion of the great speaker. He was universally recognised as the chief orator of the free trade movement.

  Bright sat in the House of Commons between 1843 and 1889 as the MP for Durham, then Manchester and then Birmingham, where he gave some of the greatest parliamentary speeches ever heard. They include his unheeded warning about the risks of war in the Crimea, ‘The Angel of Death Has Been Abroad throughout the Land’, and ‘If All Other Tongues Are Silent Mine Shall Speak’, his visionary speech against British support for the slave-owning South in the American Civil War, which ranks with the rhetoric of Wilberforce on the same subject and earns him a place in the first tier of parliamentary orators. It is, though, his campaign against the Corn Laws and the eloquence he first displayed in its cause that earned Bright the statuesque immortality he now enjoys in Manchester’s Albert Square.

  Between 1841 and 1846 the prime minister had been hard to move. Peel’s government introduced a sliding scale for corn in 1842, but the triumphant reaction among the landowners and Tory protectionists, chief among them Benjamin Disraeli, showed that it did little to bring prices down for the consumer. Eventually, though, the rhetorical torrent broke Peel’s resolve. One
of the great virtues of a democracy is that it allows a politician to change his mind. Peel’s career can be marked out by the significant problems on which he changed his mind. He was the opponent of extending the franchise who, in the Tamworth Manifesto of 1834, provided the apostate’s template for conservatives. He was the resolute ally of the merchants who realised that reform was necessary no matter the political price to be paid.

  Bright always attributed the change of heart to the speeches that Cobden gave in the House of Commons, and they did have an effect, as did Bright’s own rhetoric. But speeches alone change nothing unless the background events are grand enough to warrant the rhetorical indignation. The event that really moved Peel was the Irish potato famine. In August 1845 a potato disease blackened thousands of acres of the crop and threatened the lives of millions of people. A meeting of the Anti-Corn Law League was held in the Free Trade Hall on 28 October at which Cobden pointed out that the remedy was to remove the impediments on imports. Bright said that the Corn Law was now having its desired effect, of taking from the starving poor and handing ‘the bounty of Providence’ to the rich. In a speech in London, Cobden called Peel ‘a criminal and a poltroon’ for hesitating and Bright predicted that the prime minister had concluded the Corn Law had to be abolished but that he as yet lacked the courage to say so.