Neil Reynolds: What Gladstone Can Teach David Cameron
[Neil Reynolds is an Ottawa writer whose columns on national economic issues appear Wednesday and Friday.]
Thomas Huxley, the eminent self-taught scientist and one of the great intellects of 19th-century Britain, called William Ewart Gladstone, four times chancellor of the exchequer and four times prime minister, “the greatest intellect of Europe.” And Huxley was a critic. Beyond all argument, this great liberal champion of laissez-faire was a smart man. By the end of his more than 60 years in public service, he had acquired a personal library of 32,000 books; by his own reckoning, and he was precise in his records, he had read 20,000 of them. But he wasn’t merely smart. He was right. Democracy, he said, was a spendthrift affair. He governed accordingly.
More than any other British leader, Gladstone can instruct Prime Minister David Cameron on the way to pay down the national debt – yet win admiration and respect from a dubious electorate that doesn’t quite think he’s up to the job. With a few basic principles as his guide – all of them more practical than theoretical – Gladstone paid down the massive debt incurred in the Napoleonic Wars. With the same principles, Mr. Cameron should be able to take care of a smaller debt with relative ease.
Lord Morley, friend and biographer of Gladstone, wrote of the Grand Old Man’s “passion for economy, his ceaseless war against public profusion, his insistence upon the rigorous keeping of the national accounts.” Gladstone cut taxes repeatedly. He reduced or eliminated scores of miscellaneous taxes. Marginal rate cut by marginal rate cut, he lowered the country’s income tax rate (to 1.25 per cent). Given one more term in office, he probably would have eliminated it. (He was 84 when he delivered his final speech in the Commons.) He rescinded tariffs – often unilaterally. Indeed, by one count he abolished more than 1,000 of them – 95 per cent of Britain’s tariffs. He balanced the budget and, more often than not, produced large surpluses to pay down debt. He preferred, he said, to let money “fructify in the pockets of the people” rather than waste away in the public purse.
It’s no wonder that the British public came to adore “G.O.M.” – or, as his imperialist Tory opponent Benjamin Disraeli jealously pronounced him, “God’s Only Mistake.” Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher aside, it’s no wonder that most of his successors in the 20th century looked, in comparison, so very small and so very inadequate. Mrs. Thatcher, for her part, observed that the great Liberal statesman would have “felt right at home” in her Conservative party in the 1980s. Perhaps. By Gladstone’s standards, though, Mrs. Thatcher was spendthrift herself...
Read entire article at Globe and Mail
Thomas Huxley, the eminent self-taught scientist and one of the great intellects of 19th-century Britain, called William Ewart Gladstone, four times chancellor of the exchequer and four times prime minister, “the greatest intellect of Europe.” And Huxley was a critic. Beyond all argument, this great liberal champion of laissez-faire was a smart man. By the end of his more than 60 years in public service, he had acquired a personal library of 32,000 books; by his own reckoning, and he was precise in his records, he had read 20,000 of them. But he wasn’t merely smart. He was right. Democracy, he said, was a spendthrift affair. He governed accordingly.
More than any other British leader, Gladstone can instruct Prime Minister David Cameron on the way to pay down the national debt – yet win admiration and respect from a dubious electorate that doesn’t quite think he’s up to the job. With a few basic principles as his guide – all of them more practical than theoretical – Gladstone paid down the massive debt incurred in the Napoleonic Wars. With the same principles, Mr. Cameron should be able to take care of a smaller debt with relative ease.
Lord Morley, friend and biographer of Gladstone, wrote of the Grand Old Man’s “passion for economy, his ceaseless war against public profusion, his insistence upon the rigorous keeping of the national accounts.” Gladstone cut taxes repeatedly. He reduced or eliminated scores of miscellaneous taxes. Marginal rate cut by marginal rate cut, he lowered the country’s income tax rate (to 1.25 per cent). Given one more term in office, he probably would have eliminated it. (He was 84 when he delivered his final speech in the Commons.) He rescinded tariffs – often unilaterally. Indeed, by one count he abolished more than 1,000 of them – 95 per cent of Britain’s tariffs. He balanced the budget and, more often than not, produced large surpluses to pay down debt. He preferred, he said, to let money “fructify in the pockets of the people” rather than waste away in the public purse.
It’s no wonder that the British public came to adore “G.O.M.” – or, as his imperialist Tory opponent Benjamin Disraeli jealously pronounced him, “God’s Only Mistake.” Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher aside, it’s no wonder that most of his successors in the 20th century looked, in comparison, so very small and so very inadequate. Mrs. Thatcher, for her part, observed that the great Liberal statesman would have “felt right at home” in her Conservative party in the 1980s. Perhaps. By Gladstone’s standards, though, Mrs. Thatcher was spendthrift herself...