We have squandered the legacy of the father of free trade

THE Euro elections have put everyone to sleep. Missing is any kind of debate, far less rational argument, about how a successful free trade area, which made Europe prosperous and peaceful, has been subverted into a bureaucratic machine for corporate subsidy and personal pilfering. Sad, because today is the 200th birthday of the man who invented free trade.

"The Corn Laws take from the poorest of the poor to give to the richest of the rich," wrote Richard Cobden. The prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, crumpled in the Commons. He turned to a colleague to say: "You may answer this, for I cannot." By the sheer power of argument, temperate but passionate, courteous but deadly, Cobden broke the power of the landowners and opened up the British markets to free trade. Which also makes him the father of globalisation.

It is Cobden’s 200th birthday today. I know of only one commemorative feast, at his surviving newsletter, The Economist. I am perplexed that the great free trader and leading advocate of liberalism has almost sunk from national memory. He ought to be a hero to diverse groups. He devised the Anglo-French Treaty of 1860, which has a better claim as the origin of the EU than the Schuman Plan of 1950.

This noble man is more than a whiskered, respectable Victorian. He offers a model to those rascals seeking election to the parliament that perambulates between Strasbourg and Brussels who invite our interest this week. I’m clear he would urge them to abandon their futile lives and demolish the malignancy of the Commission. If the Corn Laws were evil, what adjective fits the Common Agricultural Policy? The CAP is an iniquity whose poison is spread over the third world.

Richard Cobden was born the fourth child of 11 in rural poverty. He lifted himself from a penury that would have crushed a lesser soul. He educated himself by reading and travelling. He became a calico trader and generated enough security to begin the first great political pressure group - the League. Within seven years of its creation he had broken the Conservative Party and its protectionist principle.

His assault on tariff barriers created the prosperity that flowered after 1846. Even today, most politicians will argue that free trade must be reciprocal. The great Cobdenite trick was to remove barriers unilaterally.

I can hear Cobden’s ghost raging against the Iraq adventure. He loathed all of Lord Palmerston’s military outings. The notion that free trade was a cause for pacifists leaves Cobden difficult to place. I see him as a leftie - a radical leftie. Yet his policy ideas seem distant from the control freakery of our modern lefties. He saw his task as overturning the feudal powers of pre-commercial life. Free trade was egalitarian. That was as important as the affluence it generated.

His tussle to break the CAP of his day left Cobden penniless and in broken health. A national subscription was opened, with millions throwing in their farthings and pennies. Can we now imagine such a gesture of affection or regard for any of our politicos? Commemorative china and other memorabilia were prized as more than mere souvenir junk but as badges of enlightenment.

But for Cobden’s interventions, Britain would have supported the Confederates in the American Civil War.

When Cobden expired in 1866, the national grief was such that we can barely comprehend. We are not used to our public figures being heroes. Gladstone’s eulogy was so generous that Mrs Cobden expressed astonishment. She had supposed her husband to be a kindly man. "I had not realised I was married to a national saviour and paladin," she confessed.

In some senses, the arguments for free trade are triumphant. In another sense we see them ignored. No party looking for our Euro-votes argues for free trade. They offer permutations of protectionism. The EU is the spirit of black-hearted mercantalism born again. What we need is a contemporary Richard Cobden.