No Longer the Farmers’ Friend? The Conservative Party and Agricultural Protection, 1880–1914

Abstract

Throughout the nineteenth century the Conservative Party was frequently and justifiably referred to as the ‘farmer’s friend’. Eighteenth-century Tories had been proud of their ‘country’ politics, and their early nineteenth-century successors introduced and for 30 years defended those most obvious symbols of government support for the farming community, the Corn Laws. Sir Robert Peel’s conversion to free trade in 1846 was seen by the bulk of his party as a betrayal of the Conservative Party’s traditions, interests and ethos. In many respects Peel’s apostasy in 1846 only served to strengthen the Conservative Party’s identification with the farming community and vice versa. As a consequence the Victorian Conservative Party remained above all else the political arm of the landed interest – drawing its leadership from the aristocracy, its parliamentary cohorts from the county squirearchy, and finding its most rock solid electoral support in the English counties. But in the last quarter of the century doubts arose as to whether the relationship between the Conservatives and the farming community either would or could continue to be mutually satisfactory. The problems posed by the agricultural depression of the last quarter of the century, and a resurgence of protectionist opinion in farming circles, placed severe strains upon what had once seemed a natural and unbreakable alliance.