8. William Grenville
(1806-7)
William Grenville had one year as Prime Minister. He wanted three achievements. Catholic Emancipation. Peace with France. An end to the British slave trade. You already know Catholic Emancipation was blocked time and again, and peace with France was a way off yet. The third seemed unlikely, given the numbers in the Commons and Lords who directly benefitted financially off the slave trade. William Pitt the Younger claimed to be pro-abolition, only, when the chips were down, to send the troops across the ocean to defend the institution of slavery. William Wilberforce demanded abolition from the back benches.
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William Grenville backed abolition and, unlike Pitt, was willing to stake his political reputation on it. To this end he created a Ministry of all the Talents, comprised of both Tory and Whig Cabinet members. Abolition had been gaining momentum, since the legal precedent set in the 1770s that slavery held no bounds in England itself (just the colonies).
To this end, he made an impassioned speech to the Lords, which went three hours long, denouncing the trade, and the Lord's inaction on the matter for decades. Alas, this was in the era in which parliament records were highlights of what was said, so we don’t have the full speech. We have Hansard snippets however:
“The Resolution imported, that the African Slave trade was contrary to the principles of humanity, of justice, and of sound policy. As to the first point, could any man in that house, or in the country, he would ask, raise his voice, and, in his mind and conscience, say, that the slave trade was not contrary to humanity? What was the object of the slave trade? To tear men from the bosom of their families, their country, their friends, wives, brothers, children, from all that was dear to them in society, and in their country. Could any man assert such a practice was not contrary to humanity? Personal freedom was a blessing granted by God and could not with justice be violated by man.”
William Grenville, as reported by Hansard after the fact, 24 June 1806
His references to humanity, justice and sound policy were echoed in the bill themselves, and a quote from the rhetoric of Wilberforce.
By the end of this speech, one of the most momentous ever given by a British Prime Minister, the House of Lords voted in favour of abolition of the British slave trade. This was not the final blow against British slavery, we hasten to add, but the crucial first step in a series against the abominable institution.
A recurring theme of this look back at history is my view that people can be the Man for A Season, where anything they do is outweighed by being the right person at the right time and doing the right thing. Considering that, Grenville’s place in the top 10 seems set in stone.
Robert Peel’s legacy is rooted in the repeal of the Corn Laws, those dreadful protectionist laws. The irony is that, in trying to avoid repeal for so long, Peel wound up tearing his party up over it. And while it would be easier for us to iron out a complicated man, and say he was doing it for humanitarian reasons (as Douglas Hurd wrote), as famine ravaged Ireland. It was really because he was an ardent acolyte of the principles of the free market. In this, he was the architect of the modern Conservative party. Yet in inheriting an economic depression and then in trying to lower the cost of living for the working classes, he set a template for future Conservative Prime Ministers rarely reached.
Also, the repeal didn’t do much to stop the Great Hunger, which in fact got worse in the year after the Corn Laws went. After all, the free-market advocates believed an unfettered free market would supply answers to all woes. We’re still waiting for those. Food imports to Ireland were on the same level as exports, but the affordability of the food remained too high. Still, the Corn Laws went to a vote in 1842, and repeal was defeated by 80% of the Commons, so to shift from that super-majority to a 100-vote majority for repeal in four years was significant.
Elsewhere, the Factory Act limited the hours women and children could work to a mere twelve hours a day. (Hey, for a Victorian pre-Disraeli Tory, that is practically socialism!) It also banned the practice of pretending children were older than they were to work in the factories, with a doctors certificate now needing proving age. Lunch breaks were mandated, regular cleaning was ordered, and children were no longer allowed to clean machinery which could move and was switched on! Similarly, the Mines and Coal Act banned all children from working in the mines, and boys under the age of ten.
Another curious side effect of Peel’s administration being progressive through being reactionary came in 1843, when a man tried to shoot the Prime Minister. It was decided that the gunman was insane, and criminal insanity was brought in as a defence in law. Income tax was reintroduced, having been repealed by Lord Liverpool. His government also introduced cheap, regular train services!
Peel’s reputation has ebbed and flowed more than the tide, since his death, via horse riding accident, in 1850. In his lifetime, he was the enemy that tore apart the Conservative movement. In the 20th Century, the Peel as Victorian liberal hero idealism was promoted by Boyd Hilton and similar historians. Both ascribed to Robert Peel the idea of the just crusader, changing Britain out of pragmatic necessity for the common good. The reality of course was far more complicated. Peel shaped the belief that the free market, above all, was the primary focus of government. In his image came the One Nation Tories and the monetarists. But also in his image came Victorian liberalism. Yes, his policy achievements came from ideology, but sometimes, people achieve great things for vested reasons.
Oh, and incidentally, it wasn’t the Corn Laws vote that brought down Peel. It was the failure of his Irish coercion act a month later!
I’ve been clear from the start that Prime Ministers would be judged on their merits in the office, and not on my personal opinion of the man or woman. The Duke of Grafton ranked low, as not only did I think he was a trash can of a human being, but his reign of error was short and woeful. Sir Anthony Eden was sympathetic but ranked low on a lousy time in office. If I was to judge Tony Blair on what I thought of him as a human being, he’d rank considerably lower, but that would churlishly given his achievements in Office, despite a few obvious low points.
"The arc of Blair’s political career is the most extraordinary and Shakespearean of all modern prime ministers."
Steve Richards, Tony Blair's Balance Sheet: our last great PM or a leader with a shameful legacy, Sunday Times 8 January 2022
I made the error of reading Blair’s memoirs. They are very long, needed a good editor if you ask me. Donald Dewar comes across better in about three lines than Blair does in half a million. He rallied against immigration, freedom of information, the NHS and disability payments, the latter two as not being aspirational enough. He also gave us far too much information about his love life. Cherie is more forgiving than I’d be…
I suppose we should start with the bad of the Blair government. Iraq. To discuss him without it would be like discussing A Christmas Carol and claiming it wasn’t a ghost story. (M.R. James did just that, and far be it for me to critique a Master of Literature, but he is wrong.)
Iraq then. A quick historical resume. Saddam Hussein took over Iraq in 1979 through a regime of terror, repression and executions. In the 1980s, Iraq got involved in an interminably long war with Iran, and as the West was pissed off with Iran for the whole getting rid of the Shah thing, it decided to keep its nose in the conflict by arming Hussein. Sending arms to a nutter dictator usually has unforeseen consequences and these manifested in Iraq invading neighbouring Kuwait in 1990. This led to the Gulf War, an internationally backed coalition to liberate Kuwait. The coalition, including George Bush Sr, baulked at the possibility of regime change in Iraq. This left a hobbled Saddam Hussein, still a danger to his own people, but with crushed dreams (and abilities) to conquer.
Also in the 1980s, the West was sending money and arms to Afghanistan, as their noble rebels were valiantly fighting back an invasion by the Russians. As seen in the underrated James Bond flick The Living Daylights, those rebels were the Mujahideen, which later devolved into what we know now as the Taliban. (Though, the crossover was not 100% by any means. The leaders of the Taliban were taught in Pakistan at the time of the 1980s war, hence their name. They did, however, make use of the money and arms that the West supplied.) Must be frustrating for a government when they want to bury an old error under the carpet, only for a Bond film to reference it.
At this time, there was a sort of negotiator working in Afghanistan. A man who liaised between the war lords and the Mujahideen, who formed a construction company to help the resistance against the Russians, and who managed to channel money from all across the Arab World into Afghanistan under charitable disguise. A man who absolutely had no ties whatsoever to the CIA, as the available CIA records make it obligatory to reference. A middleman using the circumstances, and the Western backed money flowing through the region to build connections and spread his message. Osama Bin Laden.
In the 1990s, Bin Laden’s new group, Al-Qaeda, built up strength, and Bin Laden used his PR skills in Saudi Arabia to portray himself as the mastermind behind the fall of the Soviet Union. (In 1990 he tried to drive a wedge between the Saudis and Americans, unsuccessfully, as the Saudi Arabians felt religious faith wasn’t the only defence needed against chemical weapons.) By the time of the 1990s, various security services were trying to track down the terrorist leader, but to no avail, and in the late 90s, there was a spate of terror attacks backed by Bin Laden, from Egypt to the USS Cole.
And then, in September 2001, he attacked American soil. Three thousand innocent civilians killed in a series of attacks in New York and on the Pentagon. Those who lived through those days have the images burned into their brain. We won't dwell on them, for September 11 and the consequences in the twenty years since are a story unto them own. But the US, under the Rumsfeld/Cheney “dream team” (propped up by public frontman George W Bush), wanted revenge. First, they went for the Taliban, in Afghanistan, where Osama Bin Laden was. Somehow they managed to let him escape.
And next, they went for Saddam Hussein. He was listed in the Bush Axis of Evil. It was unfinished business for that generation of Republicans. Iraq had undergone repeat weapons inspections since the Gulf War, but the American government claimed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction which could cripple the West, and a desire to use them. This was promoted in a now massively discredited dossier, which they used Colin Powell, then one of the most respected American military men in the world, to promote. It damaged the US, it badly damaged Iraq, and it damaged Colin Powell’s reputation.
But one man it convinced was Tony Blair. Blair was one of the first to publicly support the Americans when the tragedy happened. He saw the Special Relationship not as a platitude but as genuine commitment between allies. He also had an idealist, zealous approach to humanitarian action. Blair had backed the Kosovo intervention at the request of Robin Cook, he had backed the Afghan War with international support, and he now wanted to back the Americans in Iraq. Even if Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction (spoiler alert – he didn’t), Blair still wanted him gone.
If you think there’s a defence of Saddam Hussein coming here, you’d be wrong. Hussein was a monster, cruel even among the standards of modern dictators. The issue with regime change is, once you get rid of the monster, what do you put in its place? The US/UK coalition never had a successful answer for that in Iraq or Afghanistan, and much of the trouble in the world in the last twenty years can be traced back to that lack of forward planning.
If Blair believed the American cause for war, the British public did not. The anti-war marches, of over a million people, were one of the largest protests in British history, and the crowds listened to speeches by the likes of Tony Benn and Charles Kennedy. Kennedy, leader of the Liberal Democrats, a fine orator undone by fondness for the drink, was the spearhead for opposition in the Commons, as the official opposition, Iain Duncan Smith's Conservatives, backed war in Iraq yesterday. The Labour party were split on the matter. Heavyweight Robin Cook resigned from the Cabinet, giving a blistering speech on the ethics of the war as he resigned. (This was expected to be a short hiatus from government. It turned out to be his epitaph, as Cook died of a heart attack, while hiking, two years later.) Clare Short followed suit, the Chancellor (Gordon Brown) was rumoured to be next, and the Labour party was on the brink of schism, as it had done in 1931 and 1981.
Despite one of the best speeches in modern parliamentary history by Charles Kennedy, the anti-war movement failed. Brown decided to keep his doubts to himself, and the Labour rebellion, though large for its time, was drowned out by the Tories voting in significant numbers for the proposal. And then denying they ever had in the next few decades.
By the standards the American set out, the Iraq War was a resounding success. They came, they saw, they booted out Saddam and had him executed. By the standards of not creating a lawless vacuum in which terrorism and despotism could breed, it was an absolute failure.
Blair’s reputation is Iraq. Iraq will be his epitaph.
And if that was all he ever did, he wouldn’t be close to the top ten.
Tony Blair was warned about his government’s commitment to overturning a ban on the “promotion” of homosexuality in schools in the run-up to the 2001 general election, previously classified records show. David Blunkett, then the education secretary, twice wrote to the prime minister to voice his concerns regarding the furore over section 28. It followed months of debate over potential changes to same-sex education in schools. In one letter to Blair, in December 1999, Blunkett wrote: “We appear to be in real danger of getting on the wrong side of the argument in relation to the family. Whatever we do, we must be clear that there can be no proselytising of any form of sexuality in schools or youth services. Blunkett said he was personally in favour of abolishing section 28.
Jamie Grierson, Tony Blair was warned repeal of anti-gay section 28 might harm election chances, The Guardian 19 July 2022
But then that would be to ignore the repeal of Section 28. There was a fight in Scotland to repeal the awful law (in which we have to thank the efforts of two giants, the late Donald Dewar and the late Sam Galbraith) before it was gone in 2000. It went soon after in the rest of the UK, despite troubles from the Lords. Now children grow up knowing they have an inalienable right to be gay. On the LGBT front, we also got civil partnerships for same sex couples. They also brought in Gender Recognition, and sexual (and religious) discrimination was banned.
In local politics, Scottish and Welsh devolution happened, backed by a resounding referendum success in Scotland, and a referendum success in Wales. The London Assembly, that hotbed of socialism (TM Lord Salisbury), and the London Mayor returned. Further policies for devolution, including devolved powers to the North of England, were derailed by a referendum defeat, powered by the propaganda advertising of a young Dominic Cummings.
The Freedom of Information Act was a major milestone too, despite Blair’s own regrets. Ofcom was introduced, community radio was legalised and legislated, and pistols were banned. There was a ban on radioactive waste, the pardoning of World War One cowardice executions, and the introduction of anonymous registration on the electoral roll. There was the creation of the EHRC, the Independent Safeguarding Authority, the Pensions Regulator, and the Gambling Commission. The Animal Welfare Act made neglect of pets a criminal offence, as well as the docking of dog's tails, and hunting foxes with dogs was banned. (Which, ironically, is more humane than snares or guns, but it’s the pageantry around it which irked.)
Environmentally, we had the Sustainable Energy Act, the recycling focus, the smoking ban and the age raised to buy cigarettes. The Humans Right Act was made part of UK law. Causing death by careless driving became a criminal offence, shops were to shut on Christmas Day, and the London Olympics were won. (Though that was Tessa Jowell.) There was the Racial and Religious Hatred Act, which does what it says on the tin, and the Employment Relations Act, which brought in employment protections, banned blacklisting, and brought in collective bargaining for Unions.
The Blair government also focused on the anti-terror legislation, brought in tuition fees, and reduced welfare payment categories. Despite his trickiness, or because of it, Blair was the first Prime Minister to talk to the liaison committee.
Blair’s legacy, for the positive, is based on three main achievements, however.
The first is the Minimum Wage, which was a Gordon Brown policy, but then, the decriminalisation of homosexuality was a Leo Abse policy.
The second was the axing of the hereditary peers from the House of Lords or cutting their numbers down to a small minority. House of Lords reform has been the white whale of progressive government since the Great Reform Act. Blair’s removal of the hereditary peers right to exist by default, after a considerable parliamentary fight, was one of the biggest reforms the Lords has ever had and has contributed to the House of Lords being more open and reformist since. (When it's not flooded by cronies, of course…)
The third dwarfs all others. Under Tony Blair, the Good Friday Agreement was signed. The peace agreement between loyalist and republican forces in Northern Ireland and the principles of power sharing, is still one of the most successful and important deals done in my lifetime, despite recent efforts to undermine it. The treaty was the end product of decades of work by John Hume, who never gave up on his hopes he could get both sides round the table to sort out a deal. He managed to get Gerry Adams to agree in principle to talks, and the UUP led by David Trimble. But intractable differences made a deal still unlikely. Tony Blair, to his credit, never gave up belief of a peace deal, and worked heavily to back the talks and push both sides into keeping the talks going whenever a quarrel arose. Blair had sent Mo Mowlam to sort things out in her invaluable way. At the crucial point, when Trimble struggled with the treaty (to be fair, he had to sell it to half the country, let alone his own party), Blair went to Belfast to talk to both sides himself. Crucially, Blair got Trimble to talk to Bertie Aherne (the Irish Taoiseach) who convinced him of the Republic’s genuine wish for Northern Irish success. Then it came the turn to dissuade the suspicions of Martin McGuiness.
In the end, all sides signed the Agreement. You couldn’t have this agreement without a number of people – David Trimble, Gerry Adams, Bill Clinton, John Major, Mo Mowlam, and many others. Especially not John Hume, the great man of Derry. It was, by far, the greatest achievement for all of them. And it was that for Tony Blair too. A cumulative effort in a marathon to bring peace to a civil war.
This agreement brought in the Northern Ireland Assembly, and the St Andrews Agreement led to the power sharing between the DUP and Sinn Fein. It led to Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness working together at the head of a Northern Irish executive.
It was a great achievement for peace. Humanitarian peace was Tony Blair’s greatest dream. Alas, his other significant achievement, Iraq, led to the worst humanitarian crisis of the century.
The first thing to note is that Earl Grey would have hated to be ranked this high. Of his two links to popular memory, he would be much happier being known as a tea. He came to regret his greatest achievements and did not like being seen as a reformer. However, Isaac Asimov hated ghost stories, yet wrote one of the great American ghost stories in Legal Rites (alongside Frederick Pohl).
There are two worthy policies which cement Grey’s spot in history.
“He yielded to no man in his anxiety to put an end to the degrading system of human slavery; and he derived great comfort from reflecting that during the first Administration with which he had been connected, a total end had been put to the African slave trade—an object which, in the plenitude of his power, Mr. Pitt had never been able to effect; and that, in the last administration with which he had been connected, slavery itself had been abolished.”
Earl Grey, summarised, House of Lords, 2 April 1838
Yes, slavery was finally abolished throughout the British Empire. The slave trade itself had been outlawed decades earlier by William Grenville, but loopholes and arguments about reparations (for the slave owners of course) rumbled on, delaying full abolition. In 1772, the UK had decried that there was no place for slavery in Britain itself, and from that point the die was cast. Abolitionists like William Wilberforce (who lived just long enough to know Grey would complete his life work) and quasi-abolitionists like Pitt the Younger had spoken out against the institution. Grenville managed to ban the trade, with great parliamentary difficulty, but the Jefferson government in America had been heavily promoting that they too would be banning the slave trade, so Grenville hoped to use that as a precedent for further moves. As you may be aware from US history, that law was not passed in 1807.
Slave traders used American precedent of a slap on the wrist for trafficking by continuing to traffick, so in 1811, Britain made trading in slavery a felony throughout the British Empire. The Navy was sent to patrol the west coast of Africa. This supressed the trade significantly (but not entirely), however, the “need” to protect profits in the Caribbean led Lord Liverpool’s government to do little on the abolition front. By the 1830s however, the Anti-Slavery movement, led not only by the aged Wilberforce but by strong black voices such as Louis Celeste Lecesne, had outlived Liverpool.
Grey’s government set about plans to abolish slavery all together. However, the slave owners could still send representatives into the rotten boroughs which plagued British democracy, and block reform in the parliament. So, before you got rid of slavery, you had to reform parliament.
You may recall that parliamentary reform had been a recurring demand of the left throughout the early decades of the 1800s. It inspired Pitt’s crackdowns and the Peterloo massacre. Grey’s contemporaries in the Lords damned him for the move, and in his later years, he even regretted it himself. The Great Reform Act of 1832 got rid of the rotten boroughs, home to so many vested interests.
(For an example of a rotten borough, I present the famous case of Old Sarum, which had no residents for close to 200 years, yet two MPs voted to represent the hill.)
The Reform Act got rid of these non-existent constituencies and replaced them with MPs for the cities. It also brought in a basic rate of vote, expanding the franchise considerably. At the same time, it also defined a voter as a male, thus changing the number of women with the right to vote in the UK from very few to none. (This has been used online to claim the Reform Act made the UK worse. It did not. It did, however, not attempt to address female suffrage. Also, it raised the electorate to less than 10% of the population, and originally left many thinking they had a vote they did not. Basically, it was a precedent, not a liberation, and the big achievement was getting rid of the rotten boroughs.)
This cleared the way for the abolition of slavery in 1834. This was replaced by forced apprenticeships for the rest of the 1830s, which proved deeply unpopular! This was seen as a way of slowly changing things abroad as, if you can believe it, the British government had made no plans whatsoever for how they would actually end slavery once they had banned it. It’s the British way, a slow hodgepodge to mild success. It was common critique of the time to blame abolitionists for not planning for what to do after slavery was banned, but by then, William Wilberforce was dead.
Essentially, Britain went from being the most successful slave traders in the world, to the country in the West who most pushed for the abolition of the abhorrent institution. We went from hoping it could be liberally reformed, to letting it fall apart under us, and then claiming most of the credit. We were the Mikhail Gorbachev of the abolition movement. The recently departed Russian heavyweight has gained widespread praise for his lifetime achievements, though this has not excluded criticism of his failings (such as sending the tanks into Lithuania), nor acknowledgement that he hadn’t actually intended to end the USSR on becoming leader in 1985. Even so, we acknowledge his failings but celebrate the achievements. Britain’s abolitionist stance is the same. By all means, celebrate it, but don’t ignore the bit that came first. As a country with deep rooted conservatism and progressive stances, we wouldn’t have had the abolitionists without the pro-slavery side.
Basically, what I say is, feel free to celebrate history. Just don't try and whitewash it to claim moral superiority. All of our lives are defined by a series of flawed people managing to do the right thing at the important time, after all.
In words we haven’t heard in a while (ahem), Grey’s government was brought down by Ireland. Namely, church income, and a Cabinet split on how to distribute it between the Catholic and Protestant sides.
Incidentally, if you are wondering what the link to the tea is, nobody knows. There are a lot of stories out there, outlandish and almost certainly all apocryphal to a man. (Although I like the idea of the young future Lord saving a sailor in a storm only for, coincidentally, that sailor to be a tea brewer. Rubbish but romantic!) In fact, it is quite possible that the tea makers added the name after the Earl’s death to give the brand a distinguished name!
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