‘If I hear anyone say Manchesterism again, I will…’ said my husband, leaving his thought unfinished, and slipping, rather easily, into the role of Lear in his impotence. I had no intention of explaining to him what Andy Burnham means by Manchesterism. No one knows – perhaps not even he. But the word has been around since 1883, when it was reputed to be a system that ‘enriched the few at the expense of the many’.
That had been the charge against its inventors, Richard Cobden and John Bright, whom Disraeli accused in 1846 of being ‘Gentlemen of the Manchester School, who believe they may fight hostile tariffs with free imports’. To free trade, the Manchester School of Liberalism added the reduction of state intervention, rejoicing in the prosperity of mills worked by barefooted girls.
Francis Hirst, the principal contributor to an 1897 book called Essays on Liberalism by Six Oxford Men, defended Liberalism against charges of Manchesterism – or Manchesterianism. ‘A sneer at Cobden, a contemptuous allusion to Manchesterianism and the “dismal science”,’ he wrote, ‘help nowadays to make up that small but choice reservoir of blind abuse, upon which Social Democrats and Primrose Leaguers [campaigners in favour of Conservative principles]draw for the great work of irrigating electoral ignorance.’
In 1931, however, Pius XI’s encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, condemned the ‘teaching of the so-called Manchesterian Liberals’. The Pope’s thinking was influenced by the Jesuit Heinrich Pesch, who criticised his fellow economist Ludwig von Mises for attributing ‘the terrible conditions in English factory regions where Manchesterism prevailed, not to that phenomenon, but to other circumstances’.
For Burnham to appropriate Manchesterism requires the old word to be turned upside down and emptied of meaning – or simply ignored.
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