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My AI Overview tells me, “The Corn Laws were protectionist tariffs on imported grain repealed by Parliament in June 1846 under Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel, driven by the Irish Famine and intense pressure from the Anti-Corn Law League.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’.

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9 Comments

  1. Thank you John.

    A sad ending:

    His cravat and its incontestable authority was left to him, with its three turns round the neck, its weighty and majestic dignity. It, too, was unfortunately to perish in the storm, and a day arrived when Brummell felt that it was falling away from him, and was forced to rush into the nearest shop. With a heroic gesture he untied his scarf, and a wave of yellow linen, a disgraceful rag, was seen to fall upon the floor. Seizing at random a piece of silk, he put it round his neck and appeared with a black cravat for the first time. The same evening he drew in the album of a friend an aged Cupid above a broken bow with the punning inscription, “A broken bow” (beau).

    Beau Brummell and His Times, Roger Boutet de Monvel, p183-4

    The picture of Brummell used as the featured image also comes from the front cover of Boutet de Monvel’s 1908 book, which you can read at Archive.org.

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  2. Lessons should most certainly be learned from history, and parallels noted. I shall look forward to BBC Radio 4’s excellent “The Long View” delving into this particular parallel.

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  3. ” … they (the Blob) swan around the world in their private jets from one expensive venue to another unaware (or dismissive) of the hypocrisy involved …”

    Having observed this for years, as has everyone, it is my view that the hypocrisy is not unaware, but quite deliberate. It is a wealthy middle finger in the air to emphasise just how powerless the bulk of the population is when there is no electoral choice on the issue.

    In short, I think it is spitefully nasty.

    Liked by 1 person

  4. ianl,

    You may be correct, but the hypocrisy does not go unnoticed. It may yet be one of the factors that brings net zero crashing down.

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  5. Ah, amazing! My years of toiling over Modern European History at A level, LSE, all coming back to me…. an extremely interesting lesson being drawn! But of course Peel was defeated by logical argument I recall. One day in the House of Commons, as Cobham blasted the inhumanity of the Corn Laws, Peel whispered to a colleague “You must answer this, for I cannot.”

    And you have managed to also include Varoufakis, for whom I have huge respect having witnessed his attempts to take on Brussels when in the Greek government (the Greeks were hugely punished of course on behalf of the German banks) and even Piketty, who was terribly fashionable for a while. I even have his weighty tome here to read one day — so far unopened.

    But I dont see much sign that our Westminster Labour politicians are having an epiphany just yet…. but who knows?

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  6. In the head post I described just one major case of Moral Hazard. The example dates from some 200 years ago and relates to the Corn Laws which remained on the UK’s statute books for about 30 years. However, major cases of Moral Hazard influencing large swathes of the UK’s population have, until recently, occurred at roughly 100 year intervals (unless I have omitted cases that, to me but not to Cliscep readers, are lost in the mists of time).  Cases now seem to occur much more frequently – so has this become a crisis of capitalism or just a (planned?) feature of globalisation in which the rich/elites benefit while lesser mortals suffer what they must?

    In the following list (with brief notes attached) I include other major Moral Hazard events; I hope readers can add others.

    1815 – 1846. Corn Laws (see head post for details).

    1914 – 1918. First World War wherein millions of soldiers (mostly below the most senior ranks) lost their lives in the belligerent nations while, on the Home Front senior politicians and their aides went largely unscathed (although some of their children were killed or wounded).

    2008 to date? The Global Financial Crisis (which for the UK started in September 2007 with a liquidity crisis at Northern Rock building society) was triggered by the collapse of investment bank Lehman Brothers while the underlying problem was the so-called sub-prime mortgages i.e. potentially very risky loans where the risk was initially masked and thus inadequately insured against. The banks that made the risky loans initially made very large profits but, when the collapse came, the banks were, in large part, bailed out from the public purse.

    In the years before the financial crisis the UK finance industry lobbied government for, and was effectively granted, “light touch” regulation. There were, as far as I know, no strictures placed on the finance houses to the effect that, “If you bankers let this system collapse then you will”, with due apologies to the makers of the board game Monopoly, “Go to jail, go directly to jail, and you will not collect £200 million” in fees, bonuses or other benefits.
    https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/2018/september/the-financial-crisis-ten-years-on

    Circa 2008 to date. Following ‘scientific’ guidance from the UN, many Western states (e.g. Germany, UK, Australia, California) adopt Net Zero strategies which require the high taxation or abandonment of fossil fuels and their replacement with energetically incompetent “renewables” for electricity generation, mostly wind turbines and solar PV. When all costs are considered these “renewables” are both expensive and non-dispatchable resulting in very high energy costs which in turn made these states’ industries uncompetitive internationally.

    2020 to date? Covid event where an air-borne virus similar to the ‘flu virus and roughly as dangerous (for most but not all people) was confronted by many governments all over the world with the most authoritarian crackdown on free speech, free association and mandated injections. It was notable that, for example, the Chinese used the tried and tested antigen vaccine technology against Covid (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoronaVac), while many Western countries adopted (but why?) variants of the largely untested gene-therapy counter-measure. Western governments repeatedly claimed that these gene-therapies were “safe and effective”, although such claims are increasingly contested (see, for example, [Refs. 1 and 2]), albeit mostly outside the mainstream media.

    References
    Norman Fenton & Martin Neil, “Fighting Goliath – exposing the flawed science and statistics behind the COVID-19 event”, Sovereign Rights, 2024.
    Dr. Claire Craig, “Spiked: a shot in the dark”, Aloud Ltd., 2025.

    Regards, John C.

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  8. Jit, thank you for the link to Tilak Doshi’s important substack article; there are indeed echoes in it of so many of the arguments that turn up regularly on Cliscep posts and among the comments thereon.

    Dr Doshi speaks in terms of the pricipal-agent problem [e.g. “At its core, the betrayal of the English working class reflects the age-old principal-agent problem. In economic theory, the principal (say, a shareholder) hires an agent (company management) to advance his interests. But agents have their own incentives — prestige, comfort, ideological commitments — and, without discipline, will drift away from the principal’s goals.”].

    By contrast I have spoken in terms of the closely related issue, identified by Michels over a century ago, namely the Iron Law of Oligarchy or “Who says organization, says oligarchy.”

    Both the principal-agent problem and the Iron Law show how a self-centred and entitled elite can dominate and direct policy, often to the detriment of the people that the elite were originally meant to be helping. The problem can be corrected (or avoided in the first place) by, for example, the bureaucrats submitting themselves to elections where policy is debated – compare and contrast such a situation to that in the UK where, until recently, Climate Change/Net Zero policies were NOT debated by the uniparty.

    Post scriptum from AZ Quotes, “the greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can represent grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.” ~ Hannah Arendt

    Regards, John C.

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