John Bright, who was the MP for Durham from 1943 to 1947, was one of the leading politicians of his generation. Admirer and biographer Bill Cash MP, explains why.

RECENTLY on the 200th anniversary of his birth, I paid my respects to John Bright at the Friends Burial Ground, in Rochdale. John Bright was without doubt one of the greatest parliamentarians of all time. As Gladstone said in the House of Commons following Bright’s death: “He has lived to witness the triumph of almost every great cause – perhaps I might say of every great cause – to which he had especially devoted his heart and mind.”

He was driven by conscience and conviction first, his country second and, only then, his party. He was not in the remotest degree interested in office or the establishment, as he made clear in his address to the electors of Durham in 1843.

Bright was the Member of Parliament for Durham from 1843 to 1847. It was his first parliamentary seat, but he had been politically active for some time as a key member of the Anti- Corn Law League, which, with the Manchester School, drove the greatest economic change in 19th Century British history.

As Bright’s proposer said at the hustings in 1843: “We shall send Mr Bright to Parliament as the champion of Free Trade and when history records, as she will most assuredly do, the abolition of these wicked and unjust laws which have so long robbed you of your natural rights...

she will record at the same time that the men of the good old city of Durham came forward boldly, and set a glorious example to the other constituencies of the kingdom.”

Never was a truer word said.

The Anti-Corn Law League was one of the most successful ever campaigning organisations, raising enormous amounts of money – as much as £8m in today’s value – with a massive organisational ability to produce and disseminate literature in aid of “the great principle”, as John Bright put it.

Bright was its greatest orator and worked intimately in tandem with his greatest friend, Richard Cobden, to spread the campaign for free trade throughout the North, and then across the land, culminating in the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. Its legacy remains today through its justified insistence on free trade and freedom of choice in the marketplace.

Not only was free trade a lasting legacy, but the relevance of Bright to modern times is also reflected in his attitude towards the Crimean War when he was the Member of Parliament for Manchester. At that time, there was, to put it mildly, a strong jingoistic approach to war in the Crimea, against which Bright stood almost alone in the House of Commons. Yet, when he made his famous speech, which included the words, “The angel of death has been abroad throughout the land; you may almost hear the beating of his wings”, his oratory was so powerful that the House fell into complete silence.

This, however, was not a view shared by his constituents in Manchester and he lost his seat at the ensuing election, although he was later vindicated.

There are powerful analogies between the Crimean War and many of the protests against Iraq and Afghanistan.

In 1858, Bright began his second great campaign – for parliamentary reform. From his new seat in Birmingham, he led the campaign for the vote for the working class and household suffrage, which culminated in his driving Disraeli to the Reform Act of 1867, no less than he had driven Peel to repeal the Corn Laws in 1846. His campaigns were legendary and he would address as many as 200,000 people with an energy and an oratory which had no equal.

Bright was ironically a Radical, but also with a strong strain of conservatism. He was in the then Liberal party, but not always part of it.

Indeed, he broke with Gladstone over Home Rule in Ireland and Westminster sovereignty.

His dedication to sovereignty at Westminster has strong resonances today, as we witness the unravelling of the European Union.

Bright’s legacy has been largely forgotten, but there is now a greater than ever need to reconnect with the vibrancy of the democracy that he strove successfully to achieve for this country. The biography I have written – John Bright: Statesman, Orator, Agitator – sets out to remedy this amnesia. John Bright was, and remains, a man for our own times.

• Bill Cash is Member of Parliament for Stone, in Staffordshire. His book, John Bright: Statesman, Orator, Agitator is published by IB Tauris.