A GUEST POST BY JOHN CULLEN

Human nature, it seems, does not change much, at least over the short run, say a couple of centuries.  Perhaps that is why I see resonances in history, resonances often driven by the heady concoction of arrogance and ignorance [Ref. 1] of each era’s political elites.  Which takes me back to the early 19th century.

The Napoleonic wars disrupted international trade such that the grain market in the UK became largely disconnected from that in continental Europe.  The UK’s grain imports were reduced during the wars and hence the price of corn rose very significantly on UK markets, much to the liking of the politically influential farming lobby and much to the impoverishment of ordinary people [Ref. 2].

The Napoleonic wars ended in 1815 and so the British political elite of the farming lobby moved to protect and maintain the large profits or  ‘economic rents’ [Ref. 3] that they had been able to extract during the wars.  As Varoufakis puts it, “As working-class families were forced to pay more for less food, a vociferous minority of landowners insisted that no corn should be imported after the war’s end for the simple reason that their wealth increased in direct proportion to the misery of the majority …” [Ref. 3].

My AI Overview tells me, “The Corn Laws were protectionist tariffs on imported grain repealed by Parliament in June 1846 under Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel, driven by the Irish Famine and intense pressure from the Anti-Corn Law League. This pivotal shift to free trade favored industrial interests over landowners, caused a major rift in the Conservative Party, and lowered food costs for the public … The repeal was passed by Prime Minister Robert Peel with support from the Whigs, splitting his own Conservative Party and ending his premiership.”

Thus the Corn Laws persisted for some 30 years during which a political elite benefitted hugely at the expense of ordinary people.  The echoes down to our current century are considerable. Today a political elite, the green blob, has been able to impose an extremely expensive and economically damaging Climate Change Act and Net Zero policies on the British nation based upon a scientific consensus which, for those outside the ivory bunker of the blob’s ‘settled science’ paradigm, is anything but consensual.

We in the UK have the highest industrial electricity prices in the developed world and some of the highest domestic prices too. The short- and long-term destructive effects that these policies are having (particularly on our engineering and chemical industries and on the ordinary people who work in them) are tragedies insufficiently covered by parliament and the mainstream media.  At last, however, the public and some of the media are beginning to wake up to the enormity of the debacle and, just as in 1846, the embedded and entitled political establishment is being shaken to its foundations – and not just in the UK.

A characteristic of the present day is that many of our entitled, aloof and spoilt A-list celebrities seem to casually endorse the green blob’s anti-CO₂ narrative while they swan around the world in their private jets from one expensive venue to another unaware (or dismissive) of the hypocrisy involved.  But this sense of elite entitlement is nothing new; the early 19th century had George Bryan Brummell, more commonly known to us as Beau Brummell (1778 – 1840).

Like many of our own green blob, Brummell was very well connected. [Ref. 5] says, “He was born in London, the son of … Lord North’s private secretary.  At Eton, and … at Oxford, he was less distinguished for studiousness than for the exquisiteness of his dress and manners … having come into a fortune, he entered on his true vocation as arbiter of taste and leader of early 19th-century fashionable society.  A close friend and protégé of the Prince Regent (the future George IV), he quarrelled with him in 1813, and in 1816 gambling debts forced Brummell to flee to Calais.  From 1830 to 1832 he held a sinecure consulate at Caen.  He died there in the pauper lunatic asylum.”  Hence, one might roughly translate Brummell’s biography into modern terms thus:-

He was born into the well-heeled political elite, growing up to espouse and promote luxury beliefs.  He subsequently spent profligately from the public purse to subsidise or “invest in” those beliefs.  Once those policies were exposed as essentially worthless elitist bubbles he withdrew from front-line public life and, still spending other people’s money, he joined the quangocracy before entering the House of Lords.  Brummell personifies moral hazard (i.e. lack of incentive to guard against risk when others will bear the consequences).

The aforementioned luxury beliefs (and the people who support them) are discussed [Ref 6] by former academic Matthew Goodwin.  Goodwin observes “… how luxury elite beliefs that are promoted by the new elite often entail very negative consequences for other groups in society.”  Goodwin also observes, “Over the past two decades, Labour … has morphed into a political home for what French economist Thomas Picketty has called ‘the brahmins’ – a highly educated caste … who have little interest in reforming the economy and the wider system to help the left behind.”

Perhaps, in honour of Beau Brummell’s contribution to British elitism and its capacity to extract enormous economic rents or subsidies from the public purse, we should name and shame current members of Britain’s green blob as Beaux Brummell or Beaux Brahmins.

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même escroquerie” as Alphonse Karr almost wrote in 1849!

References and associated notes.
1.  https://www.azquotes.com/quote/613503
2.  “The middle class was provoked by one of the great acts of aristocratic self-interest – the Corn Laws of 1815” at page 93 of Robert C. Allen, “The Industrial Revolution: A Very Short Introduction”, 1st ed., Oxford, 2017.  Also note on the same page the graph of the price of wheat in both England and Amsterdam from 1785 to 1875.
3.  Yanis Varoufakis, “Foundations of Economics.  A Beginner’s Companion”, Routledge, 1998.  See pages 22 and 23 for David Ricardo’s analysis of ‘economic rent’ and Varoufakis’s observation, “Thus a society in which economic rent is a large portion of overall income is one which will grow slower and therefore be more prone to stagnation.”  Carbon taxes and subsidies to ‘renewables’ can be viewed as economic rents and so is it any wonder that the UK growth rate [Ref. 4] has been on a reducing trend in the 21st century?
4.  https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/grossdomesticproductgdp/timeseries/ihyp/pn2
5.  “Chambers Biographical Dictionary”, ed. Una McGovern, Chambers, 7th ed., 2002, page 231.
6.  Matthew Goodwin, “Values, Voice and Virtue”, Penguin, 2023.  See pages 20, 65, 146, 175 for ‘luxury beliefs’, and pages 100 and 144 for ‘brahmins’ and the related concept of the censorious ‘Elect’.