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Liberalism has many roots in its theory, and many branches in its expression. The branches have often grown later than the roots, in different places and different conditions, and to different definitions of liberalism.
British liberalism’s roots include David Hume and Adam Smith in Scotland, and John Locke and later David Ricardo in London. At the midpoint of these two places, in the late 1700s and early 1800s, their theories met the new prosperity generated by the industrial revolution and were forced into deeper application.
Britain was creating wealth faster than ever before by doing new things in new places. Manchester and Birmingham — today England’s largest cities after London — barely existed in 1700.
Joseph Priestley was a Minister at the Unitarian Mill Hill Chapel in the older North English city of Leeds when the Lunar Society tempted him to Birmingham. There he would deepen his Ministry, join forces with fellow advocates for abolishing slavery, and build on his discovery of oxygen by establishing a world-leading scientific laboratory.
The Lunar Society had brought together great industrialists such as Matthew Boulton and Josiah Wedgwood with scientists and philosophers such as James Watt and Erasmus Darwin. Their shared interests were scientific truth and freedom of thought, religion, industry, and trade.
Many of the society’s members were barred from attending Oxford or Cambridge — England’s only universities, a duopoly protected in law — due to their religion. Priestley himself had attended the dissenting and technically focused Warrington Academy. The Society let him absorb university experiences from conforming Anglicans who had gone to Oxford or Cambridge and from other members who had attended universities in Scotland with fewer and less strict religious exclusions.
The Lunar Society was a false start for English industrial liberalism. Birmingham’s population was uneasy with non-conformist religious views and when combined with Priestley’s expressions of support for the ongoing French revolution, the city erupted into the Priestley Riots of 1791. Priestley fled first to London and then to the United States whose independence he had a played a role in inspiring. The Lunar Society failed to adapt and faded away. Its most popular modern echo is as the original name and still the background image for Dwarkesh Patel’s eponymous podcast.
The next round of industrial liberalism in Britain would have more enduring impacts.
Forty years later, Manchester Liberalism rose with John Bright and Richard Cobden as figureheads.
The invention of the railway had accelerated industrial progress. The world’s first intercity railway line in 1830 had connected Manchester to the port of Liverpool. Manchester had grown, at a distance from government in London and largely on the back of its own capital, to become the world’s original modern industrial city.
Manchester’s industrial scale and technological advancement were unmatched. Even against substantial tariffs to protect emerging domestic industry in places like the USA, its textiles were highly sought after.
Business was booming, but the wealth generated in the city had barely raised the living condition of the factory workers and their families. The business tempted the Warrington Academy back to Manchester. The poverty attracted Marx to join Engels and study the city’s working-class poverty in detail. They proposed revolution to eradicate it.
Bright and Cobden were radicals, but not revolutionaries. They saw a different solution. They fought to remove tariffs on imported grain so that workers, including their own, could spend less of their wages buying expensive bread made from British wheat grown on farms owned by protected British landlords. They also hoped that a shift in British trade policy towards free trade might encourage other countries to lower tariffs on their exports, and those of their friends. In 1846 their anti-corn law league succeeded. By 1850 British industrial workers were eating cheaper bread, made with imported wheat.
To celebrate, through public subscription on land donated by Cobden, Manchester built the fabulous Free Trade Hall, still the only grand hall in the country to be dedicated solely to an idea.
Cobden’s legacy is even deeper. He helped found the Manchester Corporation, the first modern local government for Manchester. It was soon building sewers, providing fresh water, improving slums, and providing services such as the world’s first municipally owned gas supply.
Both Cobden and Bright would go into national government as Liberal MPs for constituencies including Manchester, Rochdale, Stockport, Birmingham, and the West Riding of Yorkshire (including Leeds and Bradford). From their bases of industrial power and prosperity they embedded their ideas deeply and permanently in British politics.
A fine statue of John Bright stands in the gardens behind the grand town hall of his birthplace and home, Rochdale. Among many statues, Cobden is remembered in similar glory in the beautiful former Wool Exchange in Bradford.
But the strong economic positions of their cities within Britain that funded such memorials and provided the foundation for their liberal legacy would not last.
Today Bradford and Rochdale are among the poorest large cities and towns in Europe. Even together with their neighbours — Bradford is just eight miles from Leeds and Rochdale just ten miles from Manchester — they are among the weakest big city economies in the rich world. Large similar US cities like Cleveland, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and Detroit typically have 50% higher GDP/capita. Comparator city regions in Northern Europe are similarly far ahead. Britain’s industrial cities have been left behind.
Birmingham’s economy fares no better and the whole of North England and the English Midlands are reliant on large and increasing transfers from the British government to run basic public services.
Much of the legacy of Cobden and Bright is gone too.
The functions of Manchester Corporation and the even more expansive Birmingham Corporation were gradually moved into national control after the second world war and later privatised following Margaret Thatcher’s election. Education, gas, electricity, water, and sewage are controlled by the UK government in London. What competences Britain’s cities like Manchester and Britain retain, such as waste collection and local road maintenance, are highly managed from the centre. The right to run buses was only, finally, returned to Manchester last year.
England is the most politically centralised country in the rich world, and Britain is the most regionally unequal.
Some legacy of liberalism remains. Britain remains an open trading economy with low tariffs and a scepticism of government involvement in the economy. Cities like Manchester and Birmingham continue to benefit from the cheap food this guarantees, but it is hard to argue that they have prospered in many other ways.
Competitors abroad learned from the USA’s early example and used targeted national tariffs to protect fledgling industries.
In Britain, Thatcher argued that industrial research and development worth doing would be funded by industry itself and then defunded, privatised, and closed the UK’s industrial research associations. In other countries, government subsidies propelled national champions and their industries towards the technological frontier. The economic data, especially in the rise of China and South Korea, suggests the latter approach has worked better.
Importantly in Britain, the government did not apply its approach uniformly. While the state stepped back from research in industry in places like Manchester and Birmingham, it doubled-down on research in academia, helping to create the global innovation powerhouses of London, Oxford, and Cambridge. While the state nationalised and then privatised municipal functions, it grew ever larger and more focused on its Capital city. London’s leading industrial strength of finance was preferred by currency choices and implicit state guarantees, and the city’s global importance was bolstered by huge investments in connectivity. London today has among the world’s best transport infrastructure while Birmingham and Manchester have among the world’s worst.
The industrial liberalism that rose in Birmingham, Manchester, and their surroundings when they were at the forefront of building the modern world is less compelling than it once was.
The central state destroyed the local state that liberalism built. Then it stepped backed and left competitors abroad to erode the technological superiority that once made low tariffs an obvious policy. And now it tells those in left behind places to move to the places where it took a successfully different approach of state involvement in protecting and building prosperity. Where those places refuse to build enough homes to accommodate new arrivals today, some liberals argue that the state should deepen its intervention in local areas and force them to build.
Liberalism is always a product of its time, its place, and its conditions. It is unsurprising, and generous, that liberals in London argue for more people to be free to come to that city and thrive. It is also unsurprising that liberals in Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and the other great industrial era cities of England often reject this suggestion and instead propose an alternative.
Rather than repeat the failures of central government crushing local government, this time to force growth in London, Oxford, and Cambridge, we propose that the government embrace competition, markets, and creative destruction.
If London, Oxford, and Cambridge will not grow then the state investment in transport and scientific research that underpins their success should be moved to places that will. Places like Manchester, Birmingham, and Leeds stand ready. And to ensure that there is competition between places more broadly, the powers that Cobden built in Manchester, and others similarly built in all of the great cities of Britain, should continue to be returned to them, as devolution has started doing.
Liberalism today in Britain, and there are lessons for the rest of the world I’m sure, must not repeat the mistakes of the Lunar Society. It must adapt itself to the society and the economy it finds itself in. It must be closer to the Manchester Liberalism that succeeded and endured.
That is a liberalism with an active state, of the kind which has succeeded in South East England and which was abolished in the rest of the country from the centre of that region. It is a liberalism that can no longer rely on domestic technical superiority to underpin an argument for completely free trade. It is a liberalism that continues to be moulded by industry and by society away from its idealistic roots and towards the opinions of the public and the realities of the successes of state interventions in other countries overtaking Britain.