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We have compiled some news, comment pieces and announcements that we hope our readers find interesting. In this installment, there are stories relating to carbon markets, housing, the use (or not) of cash, the need for economic growth in the UK, and on the capacity of artificial intelligence to aid with international negotiation but also to deceive:

Environment and Sustainability

The Prime Minister is planning to use a summit in May to align the UK’s emissions trading scheme with that of the European Union. With its overall higher cap on the total volume of emissions, the cost of carbon credits has been lower in the UK. By linking the UK’s system with Brussels’ regulations, British exporters will be able to avoid the EU’s carbon taxes but there are likely to be consequences for the UK’s ‘carbon market’, as the cost of credits could increase by up to 50 per cent, resulting in higher energy bills and higher prices on energy intensive goods.

Article

Housing and Taxation

Local authorities acquired the power as of April 1^st to increase council tax charges on second homes, the idea being that the additional charges would ultimately come to have a positive effect on local housing provision and improve local services. There are reports that many councils are not using the additional revenue to address housing problems but are in fact using it to fund everyday spending, as well as projects such as parking infrastructure, environmental grants and playgrounds, with very little going towards affordable housing.

Article

A First Review

A review of our latest publication: Inflation is About More Than Money, by Brian Griffiths:

Review

Money

It is reported that notes and coins now account for just 12 per cent of payments in the UK, yet according to the Bank of England, a record £86 billion of banknotes are currently in circulation. If this cash is in circulation but is not being used for transactions, what are the reasons? Are people hoarding cash, simply struggling to spend it or using it selectively for reasons associated with taxation?

Article

Growth

Growth in the UK over the last two decades has surely been ‘good’ growth: equitable and environmentally concerned. The problem is that growth itself has been poor, with the result that median salaries are lower than they would have been had pre-2008 rates of growth continued, opportunities are fewer, the poor are no better off, tax burdens are higher and yet public services seem under-funded. In short, we need not just good growth – but growth itself:

Article

Capital Investment and Politics

Latin America appears to be emerging as a destination for investors seeking to reallocate capital, in part owing to a shift in the politics of many governments in the region towards free markets and more limited government, with increasing shares of voters taking the view that a market economy is the best path to pursue:

Article

Artificial Intelligence

OpenAI’s GPT-4 model, a large language model, was instructed to manage a fictional firm’s investment portfolio without engaging in insider training, yet, it is reported, it proceeded to act on an insider tip about a merger and then, when asked later whether it had any knowledge of the merger, made no mention of it.  If AI models are capable of pursuing ends that are in conflict with those of their programmers, and then deceive the programmers – a trait that seems to increase and become more varied as their ‘reasoning’ processes become more sophisticated – this raises questions about the ability of AI to circumvent human control:

Article

Various AI models are being developed with a view to assisting with peace negotiations, whether by  modelling proposals for peace, for instance in Ukraine, and assessing the likelihood of agreement by the various parties involved, or by assisting negotiators by allowing them to foresee responses to proposals and so maintain momentum in talks. As ever, the results raise questions, some of which will shortly be discussed on our blog:

Article

With employers having introduced the use of artificial intelligence for selecting and screening applicants prior to interview, jobseekers are now making greater use of AI tools when applying for vacant positions, using the technology to boost test scores and generate applications. Many businesses reject applications that they believe have been created or enhanced using AI. As such, something of an ‘AI arms-race’ is developing, so we might ask whether the technology which was introduced to streamline and simplify the recruitment process has actually introduced greater complication:

Article

PDF

Introduction

Is the non-executive director (NED) an endangered species? Does it matter?

Neither corporate collapse nor corporate scandal are new. They rightly attract media scrutiny and the interest of policymakers and regulators. Illustrative examples include Thomas Cook (2019), Carillion (2018), Patisserie Valerie (2018), Northern Rock (2007) and, earlier, Barings Bank (1995). In the charity sector, Kids Company (2015) is a further notable instance. Global examples include Volkswagen (2015) and Enron (2001). Most of these cases have resulted in some type of regulatory or legal action. Proceedings have included legal actions for fraud initiated by the Serious Fraud Office, actions against auditors and – of concern here – cases against directors, often seeking disqualification under the Company Directors Disqualification Act 1986. Such action may be initiated by the Insolvency Service on behalf of the Secretary of State or, in particular circumstances, other official bodies.

What follows argues that the continued role of the NED matters not only to the individual director, to business and companies but also to society as a whole. The contention is that without effective NEDs, corporate governance will be weaker, companies more exposed and society less well served. If that is the case, then education is as important as law in enabling NEDs themselves, policymakers, media and wider society to understand and appreciate both the responsibilities and the limits of the NED role. In conclusion some recommendations will be made to this effect.

Following collapse of the well-known charity Kids Company in August 2015, the Official Receiver commenced disqualification proceedings against its directors (who were also the trustees of the charity). The judgment in the application, in Re Keeping Kids Company (2021), was delivered in the High Court by Mrs Justice Falk, who rejected the disqualification application. The judgment contains useful legal analysis and opinion drawing on past cases around the various aspects of directors’ duties and liabilities. However, the judge also drew attention to the wider implications of the proceedings, an aspect of the judgment often not referred to in legal discussion. Mrs Justice Falk reminds us of the importance of NEDs broadly and the importance of their role – both as directors and, in this case, also charity trustees – in the service of society more broadly.

Paragraph 911 of the judgment reads:

The charity sector depends on there being capable individuals with a range of different skills who are prepared to take on trusteeship roles. Most charities would, I would think, be delighted to have available to them individuals with the abilities and experience that the Trustees in this case possess. It is vital that the actions of public bodies do not have the effect of dissuading able and experienced individuals from becoming or remaining charity trustees. Disqualification proceedings, or the perceived risk of them, based on wide ranging but unclear allegations of incompetence rather than any want of probity, carry a high risk of having just that effect, and great caution is therefore required. This is particularly so for individuals otherwise involved in the management of businesses, and professionals for whom additional regulatory issues may arise: in fact, the sorts of individuals whose experience is often most needed. The result of proceedings being brought in other than the clearest of cases is likely to be to deter many talented individuals who take the trouble to understand and appreciate the risks either from charitable trusteeship at all, or at least from all but the most wealthy, well endowed, charities which are likely to have least need of their skills.[1]

This judgment is directly applicable to the wider role of the NED in the commercial sector. Society is served by highly competent, experienced and responsible business executives acting as NEDs. In doing so they deliver both commercial wisdom and competence in governance, and in a functioning market economy exercise a role that also conveys confidence in business and the economy.

The role of the NED matters perhaps more than many realise or are prepared to admit. Should we celebrate it more than we do? We should, as a society, certainly do more to understand it, its purposes and its responsibilities.

Corporate failure or malfeasance, individual culpability, professional negligence or neglect of duty rightly attract criticism and action. Nevertheless, the understandable tendency to allocate blame often fails to give due weight to both the complexity of the corporate environment and respective responsibilities for failure. It is axiomatic that NEDs should discharge their duties competently in accordance with the law and with moral intent in the service of society. However, any lack of clarity over those duties, particularly in law, or potential exposure to regulatory action as a consequence of confusion over roles or responsibilities, will not only reinforce unrealistic expectations but also discourage NEDs from taking on this important corporate and social duty.

This would be detrimental to society’s reasonable expectations of good governance. Non-executive directors are rightly held to account under law but clear expectations, both in law and more broadly, are also essential. Consequently, society too must be clear about the role it wishes NEDs to discharge, to ensure the continued flow of suitably qualified individuals.

The concern here is with law, with expectation but most of all with education.

About the author

Richard Turnbull is the Director of the Centre for Enterprise, Markets and Ethics. He holds degrees in Economics and Theology and a degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Theology from the University of Durham. He is also a chartered accountant. He has authored or edited numerous books, articles and other publications in church history and business ethics, including an acclaimed biography of the Earl of Shaftesbury. He is a visiting Professor at St Mary’s University, Twickenham and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

The author would also like to thank his colleagues at the Centre for Enterprise, Markets and Ethics, Andrei Rogobete (Associate Director) and Dr John Kroencke (Senior Research Fellow), who also contributed.

Notes to Chapter 1

[1] ‘In the matter of Keeping Kids Club and in the matter of the Company Directors Disqualification Act 1986, in the High Court of Justice’, [2021] EWHC 175 (Ch), Approved Judgment, paragraph 911.

William Wilberforce: His Life and Significance

On the 24 February 1807, the House of Commons voted by 283 votes to 16 to end the trade in human slaves in all British territory. The principal opponent of the slave trade within Parliament and a leading figure in the diverse coalition of campaigners against the evil trade was a man named William Wilberforce. He worked closely with others building a broad coalition for the common good.

Wilberforce’s faith led him to campaign not only against slavery but also for wider moral reform of society and to his involvement in a range of organisations that are still going today.

In this publication (written for an April event with CCLA) Richard Turnbull introduces William Wilberforce. 

A PDF is available here and the full text is below.

Contents

• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Early Life
• Chapter 2: Call to Public Life and Conversion to Evangelical Christianity
• Chapter 3: The Clapham Sect and A Practical View
• Chapter 4: The Campaign Against the Slave Trade
• Chapter 5: Wilberforce’s Later Life and an Assessment of His Work
• About the Author

Introduction

William Wilberforce is an iconic figure. He was the principal opponent of the slave trade within the British Parliament and a leading figure in the diverse coalition of campaigners against the evil trade in the country. Who was William Wilberforce and what lessons can we learn from him?

On 24 February 1807, the House of Commons voted by 283 votes to 16 to end the trade in enslaved people in all British territory. The slave trade had been in existence for around 300 years. Even when Parliamentary action commenced in 1789 there was still a long road of nearly 20 years before abolition. Why had it taken so long to achieve such a majority? Wilberforce first introduced an abolition Bill in 1789. For years he was blocked by vested interests, parliamentary procedures, the House of Lords, and varying degrees of both support and prevarication by the prime minister, William Pitt the Younger (1759–1806). The tide finally turned in 1806 under a new government.

Wilberforce was not perfect but he was a man of great character, resilience and faith. He suffered from ill-health for much of his life, not least very poor eyesight. He worked with others for the achievement of the greater good, forming coalitions that went beyond his own position of faith. He was described in the final debate prior to the vote for abolition as a man of ‘unwearied industry’, ‘indefatigable zeal’ and ‘impressive eloquence’.[1]

Wilberforce campaigned on this issue – and indeed many others – from the position of an explicit Christian commitment. He was perhaps the most prominent example of an evangelical Christian in Parliament at the end of the eighteenth century. He had converted to this form of Christianity in 1785 in the aftermath of a great revival or awakening which had swept Great Britain and North America in the middle decades of the century. Wilberforce believed that society needed this passionate love for Jesus and commitment to the teaching of the Bible, and nowhere more so than in the campaign against the slave trade.

Wilberforce’s faith led him to campaign not only against slavery but also for wider moral reform in society. He was involved in key evangelical organisations and a project to establish an evangelical newspaper, the Christian Observer. He also published a widely popular theological tract, known as A Practical View.

His evangelicalism was a distinctly moderate version which placed him at some odds with the wider movement, especially as time went on. He was a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1780 to 1826, representing three different seats in that time. In a period when politics and personalities were more fluid, he clearly associated with Tory groups and personalities, but always sought election as an independent. He remained a backbencher, never seeking or being offered high office. He was a significantly more complex character than is often appreciated.

Chapter 1: Early Life

Wilberforce was born in Hull in 1759, to Robert and Elizabeth Wilberforce. The family were prominent merchants in the city. With Hull being on the east coast rather than west, the city’s wealth derived primarily from trade with the Baltic countries rather than the slave trade.

Wilberforce’s childhood brought him at various points into contact with Christians of the more evangelical sort, which his mother did not appreciate. At Hull Grammar School, he came under the influence of the Milner family, later a significant evangelical family. However, in 1768, after his father’s untimely death at the age of 39, his mother, unable to cope sufficiently well, sent him to an uncle in Wimbledon and he attended a boarding school in Putney. His aunt belonged to the evangelical banking family of the Thorntons, and it was partially their influence that led William’s uncle and aunt (William and Hannah Wilberforce) to embrace the evangelical faith. This influence included taking William, at the age of 11, in early summer 1771, to meet John Newton (1725–1807) in his rectory at Olney, Buckinghamshire. Newton also became a prominent anti-slavery campaigner, and years later Wilberforce would seek counsel from him. Both Wilberforce’s mother and his grandfather were unhappy at these influences and Elizabeth removed her son from Wimbledon amid family disagreements.

Back in Hull, all was not straightforward – Joseph Milner (1744–1797), the school head, had turned ‘methodist’.[2] Wilberforce would, naturally, not be able to return to the school. So, he was despatched to Pocklington, near York, to board. The attractions of Hull during the school vacation – theatre, balls, cards, gaming, concerts and plays – all proved increasingly attractive to Wilberforce. Any early religious influence was pushed out of him. He entered the University of Cambridge in 1776 but there, in essence, he wasted his time. It was, however, while at Cambridge that Wilberforce first met and formed a friendship with William Pitt, the future prime minister, and he resolved to become an MP.

Chapter 2: Call to Public Life and Conversion to Evangelical Christianity

Election to Parliament

Wilberforce, finding no real reason to remain in Cambridge for the purposes of studying, began to travel to London and attend the visitors’ gallery at the House of Commons, along with William Pitt, who was also seeking a political career. The two developed a lifelong friendship that would at times be strained by the slavery question but that, nevertheless, endured.

In 1780, an election was looming. Elections prior to the Reform Act of 1832 were very different affairs from what we are used to now. Hull, with 1,500 electors made up of the town’s freemen, was not a pocket borough (an electoral district under the control of one person or a family) – though the freedom of the town was a piece of hereditary property! With his family connections, Wilberforce’s home town offered a viable seat.

There were two seats, one occupied by the Tories and the other by the Whigs. Wilberforce stood as an independent. The costs of running in an election anywhere could be high. The electorate almost demanded entertainment, and beer was a prerequisite. Moreover, to run in Hull with its 1,500 electors would incur additional expense. Several hundred of the electors lived in London. Not only did they need to be entertained but also, if they were to cast their votes in Hull, provision would be needed for their travel and lodging expenses, not to mention a going rate to cast their vote for the right candidate. The one thing the freemen feared most was an uncontested election!

Wilberforce’s preparation and work paid off with a dramatic result: he topped the poll. On 31 October 1780, at the tender age of 21, he took his oath as an MP. We must remember that while parties did exist, much politics at this time was heavily influenced by factions (groups of interest formed around powerful people). Wilberforce remained an independent but was gradually drawn into a revived form of Toryism around Pitt. In 1784 he was elected for the county seat of Yorkshire (with an electorate of 20,000), again as an independent but unopposed by the Tories. Wilberforce remained close to Pitt but was not invited to take office, then or subsequently.

Conversion to Evangelical Christianity

Let us turn then to Wilberforce’s conversion and his adoption of the Christian faith as a living, vibrant, personal faith as understood by evangelicals at the time.

With the county election out of the way, in late 1784, Wilberforce set off on the traditional European tour for young men of his age with either an aristocratic family or a degree of status and wealth. The idea was to introduce the ambitious rising talent of the nation to the sights, the experiences and the encounters with art, philosophy, religion and culture that would come from being immersed in the daily life of Europe. These tours could last several months and were usually undertaken in the company of others. Wilberforce was accompanied on his tour by his mother, his sister and some female cousins. However, for male company he chose Isaac Milner (1750–1820), the younger brother of Joseph. Isaac was ordained, a mathematician, and a fellow and later president of Queen’s College, Cambridge. He was also an evangelical, the only downside from Wilberforce’s family’s perspective.

It was, in fact, one of his travelling cousins who gave Wilberforce a book written by one of the leading Protestant dissenting ministers of the time of the revival: Philip Doddridge’s The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul. Wilberforce needed to be back in Parliament and he and Milner left Nice on 5 February 1785. Wilberforce asked Milner whether the book was worth reading. Milner replied, ‘It is one of the best books ever written. Let us take it with us and read it on the journey.’[3]

In this way, Wilberforce began to be introduced to Christianity as a living, vibrant personal faith, as it was understood by evangelicals. The book covered the classic themes of evangelical faith, often known at this time as ‘vital religion’: self-examination, prayer, devotions, diligence and prudence, divine providence, and the certainty of death and judgement. Milner challenged Wilberforce to examine the scriptures themselves to see whether he found the same themes.

There is some evidence in Wilberforce’s diary he now felt a degree of disdain towards his own moral failings as well as those manifest more broadly in society. By June 1785, he and Milner had returned to Europe, meeting up with the women of the party in Switzerland. He objected to attending a play, refused to travel on a Sunday, and complained about the corruption and profligacy of the times. Significantly, he was also, by now, studying the Greek New Testament with Milner. By autumn 1785, his conversion was complete. He wrote:

I hope as long as I live to be the better for the meditation of this evening; it was on the sinfulness of my own heart, and its blindness and weakness. True, Lord, I am wretched, and miserable, and blind, and naked. What infinite love, that Christ should die to save such a sinner and how necessary is it he should save us altogether, that we may appear before God with nothing of our own! God grant I may not deceive myself, in thinking I feel the beginnings of gospel comfort. Began this night constant family prayer, and resolved to have it every morning and evening, and to read a chapter when time.[4]

In brief, the evangelicalism Wilberforce embraced gave weight to the scriptures and to justification (being declared righteous by God), conversion, preaching, the Christian life and divine providence. As Hannah More (1745–1833), another early pioneer, put it, this version of faith was not merely an opinion or sentiment, but a disposition – a turning of the whole mind to God.

Call to Public Life

In a letter to Pitt, Wilberforce mentioned the temptation to turn away from society and the world – perhaps to pursue ordination but certainly to withdraw from politics. The prime minister’s friendship with Wilberforce was deep and meaningful. He affirmed this friendship in responding to Wilberforce, referring to ‘the appearance of a new era in your life’.[5] Pitt urged Wilberforce to remain in public life:

If a Christian may act in the several relations in life, must he seclude himself from them all to become so? Surely the principles as well as the practice of Christianity are simple, and lead not to meditation only but to action.[6]

Pitt and Wilberforce met for two hours to discuss Wilberforce’s future on 2 December 1785. We do not know the direct outcome, but within days Wilberforce had sought a meeting with John Newton, now rector of St Mary Woolnoth in the centre of the city of London – the same John Newton that he had met as a child. Newton counselled Wilberforce to remain in public life. Nearly three years later, he wrote to Wilberforce, ‘It is hoped and believed that the Lord has raised you up for the good of his Church, and for the good of the nation.’[7]

Wilberforce was now ready to turn to new causes, purposes and actions in order to serve both God and the nation.

The Proclamation Society

Wilberforce returned to the public political arena in 1786. He was a changed man. The following year he declared, ‘God Almighty has set before me two great objects … the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners.’[8]

Wilberforce now got involved in a wide range of campaigns, activities and projects. In 1787 King George III, under the influence of evangelicals, issued a proclamation for the encouragement of piety and virtue. Evangelicals were always against sin, but particularly the sin of others. Wilberforce gathered the great and good together to form the Society for Giving Effect to His Majesty’s Proclamation against Vice and Immorality, including Members of Parliament, peers, bishops and, of course, the prime minister himself, William Pitt.

The Proclamation Society was born. Drunkenness, gambling, prostitution and public decency were all areas of concern. The non-evangelical commentator Sydney Smith snorted that the concern was only with reforming the morals of the poor. Hannah More complained of the hypocrisy of imposing restrictions on the common people concerning pleasures happily continued in the houses of the nobility. In 1802 the Proclamation Society became the Society for the Suppression of Vice, and it remained the evangelical vanguard for campaigns on matters of indecency and obscene articles and publications.

Chapter 3: The Clapham Sect and A Practical View

Wilberforce gathered around himself a wide group of evangelicals who supported and campaigned with him. This group of Christians prayed together, lived in the same immediate vicinity and worshipped together in the local church. Evangelicals in Parliament at this time were generally known as ‘saints’; the term ‘Clapham Sect’ actually derives from an article by Sir James Stephen (1789–1859) – son of the lawyer James Stephen (1758–1832), who was one of their number – in 1844. This group has a significant place in history and represents a central plank in not only the abolitionist campaigns but also those for moral improvement, philanthropy and the wider role of Christians in public life.

The origins of the group really lie with the Thornton family. John Thornton (1720–1790) was a wealthy merchant who converted to evangelicalism and inherited an estate on the southern side of Clapham Common. After his death, his youngest son – the convinced evangelical Henry Thornton (1760–1815) – purchased Battersea Rise House, on the western side of Clapham Common, while his brothers inherited the original nearby estate.

Henry Thornton consciously set out to provide the setting for a group of lay evangelical leaders for mutual encouragement and support in the aim of transforming society. He added two wings to the house (giving it a total of 34 bedrooms) and built a magnificent oval library as a meeting place for the Clapham group. He built more property on the site: houses which he let out to evangelical Members of Parliament. He secured the services of an evangelical cleric, John Venn, as the incumbent of Clapham Parish Church. Wilberforce moved into Battersea Rise House in 1792, and he remained there until his marriage to Barbara Spooner (1771–1847) in 1797, when they moved into another house on the estate. Other notable figures moved into Clapham as well: in 1797, the lawyer James Stephen (1758–1832), and in 1802, Lord Teignmouth (1751–1834) and Zachary Macaulay (1768–1838). Charles Grant (1746–1823), chairman of the East India Company, lived nearby. Others visited: Granville Sharp (1735–1813), Isaac Milner (1750–1820), Charles Simeon (1759–1836), and the above-mentioned Hannah More and John Newton. The core residents worshipped together in the parish church and were in daily contact.

They were primarily a lay group. They all brought a variety of gifts, skills and commitments to the table. Stephen was a lawyer, Grant an administrator, Thornton a banker and Wilberforce an eloquent speaker. All these skills would be brought to the fore as the campaign against the slave trade developed. Thornton gave away in the region of 90% of his income while single and 33% even when he had a family to support. Grant, Stephen, Thornton, Wilberforce and Thomas Babington (1758–1837), among others, were all Members of Parliament.

Significantly, they also worked with others, especially in relation to abolition, and several had close ties to the Quakers, who were leaders and early pioneers in the abolitionist movement. Members of the group were also the instigators of a wider variety of Christian voluntary societies and other initiatives, including the Church Missionary Society, founded in 1799, and a newspaper, the Christian Observer, first published in 1802.

Clapham was an evangelical centre. However, from around 1808 the residents, Wilberforce included, began to move elsewhere. Rather than a model to be copied, Clapham represented an important landmark, gathering point and support network for the early evangelicals in Parliament, giving birth to societies, campaigns and a newspaper – and, of course, forming the centre of the campaign against the slave trade.

A Practical View

Wilberforce was not a great intellectual, but he was a persuasive speaker and communicator. He wanted to set out his Christian beliefs and he did so in an extraordinarily influential treatise, first published in 1797. The book is generally known as A Practical View, which is unsurprising given the full title: A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians in the Higher and Middle Classes in this Country Contrasted with Real Christianity. The book is, as the full title reveals, something of a child of its age and in places is turgid and repetitive. The publisher was cautious: religious books seldom sold well, some of Wilberforce’s own friends advised against publishing, and little demand was anticipated. Wilberforce, though, did have national standing and the publisher risked 500 copies on the first run. They sold out within five days. Within six months, 7,500 copies had been sold; the book was a sensation and went through 15 editions in Britain during Wilberforce’s lifetime, becoming a bestseller.

Wilberforce made clear in the introduction that the book was not aimed at the sceptic but the nominal Christian. He argued that Christianity had become a faith of a vague assent to certain beliefs and generally moderate behaviour compared to others. Nothing he argued could be further from the particulars and specifics of what he termed ‘real Christianity’. He complained, for example, that many Christians saw vice as accidental rather than habitual – temporary rather than constitutionally engrained. To Wilberforce, the Christian faith had to be an all-consuming passion, dictating the whole of life and not restricted to either good works or Sunday duty. Consider just one illustrative quote:

How dexterously do they avail themselves of any plausible plea for introducing some week-day employment into the Sunday, whilst they have not the same propensity to introduce any of the Sunday’s peculiar employment into the rest of the week.[9]

His book was received with acclaim by his friends, the Christian public and, indeed, wider society.

Chapter 4: The Campaign Against the Slave Trade

The question of the slave trade and its abolition is a fascinating aspect of English history and one particular place where the general history of the nation intersects directly with the history of Christianity. We must ask honest questions. Opinion was divided.

Did the slave trade fail because of economic necessity or moral and ideological conviction? If the latter, were evangelicals at the heart of the matter or simply one part of a complex mosaic of religion and enlightenment rationality? There was also the issue of whether the conversion of slaves was more important to evangelicals than the abolition of slavery, though that may be a red herring.

There was undoubtedly a range of pressures upon slavery. However, central among these were the activities of the Clapham Sect, gathered around Wilberforce, who was the leading parliamentary agitator. Evangelicals were neither the first nor the only participants in the abolitionist movement, but they were central in this campaign to change public opinion, through petitions, publications and meetings in chapels. The evil trade was seen increasingly as a moral affront to God. Pragmatically, the campaigners aimed in the first instance at the trade in slaves rather than the institution itself – that came later.

The Trade in Slaves

The trade in slaves, long established, was regarded by the few who troubled to think about such things, as an unavoidable evil. This changed towards the end of the eighteenth century, for a variety of reasons, as, encouraged by the abolitionist campaign, the sense of revulsion grew. The slave trade had developed from the middle of the fifteenth century. After the first Europeans reached the Americas, vast agricultural and commercial opportunities were opened up and these led to the development of the triangular slave trade, which satisfied a craving for cheap labour in order to secure commercial advantage. The Old World and the New World became inextricably linked via Africa. In Britain it was the ports on the Atlantic west coast which were the focus of the slave trade, principally Bristol and Liverpool, which became heavily dependent on these activities. In the 1740s some 200,000 slaves were transported on British ships; at least double that number in the 1780s.

Some 85% of British textiles were exported to Africa as a crucial component of the slave trade. In 1783 Pitt estimated that 80% of British overseas income derived from the trade. Because it was triangular and hence (at least to an extent) largely hidden, few slaves ever appeared in Bristol or Liverpool. Rather, goods such as textiles and rum were taken by ship from those cities to West Africa, where they were traded in exchange for slaves, who were then transported in horrendous conditions on the Middle Passage to the West Indies and the southern part of North America. Here they were sold to work on the plantations, and raw materials and other goods, such as sugar, cotton and tobacco, were purchased and brought back to Britain.

To begin with, the captains of the slaving ships would sail along the West African coast for several weeks acquiring their human cargo as they went. However, this ad hoc approach to obtaining slaves was inefficient and was soon replaced by systems of agents and factories, where slaves could be gathered together in one place awaiting the arrival of a ship.

It was primarily the conditions of the Middle Passage, rather than those on the plantations themselves, which provided the fuel for the abolitionist campaign. When the human cargo was loaded, the slaves were often hysterical with terror. They were subjected to medical examination, and the old, the sickly and those with deformities were discarded and often killed.

Those who survived this process were branded with the owner’s mark and often flogged to force them onto the ship. They were crammed into the hold and kept chained in a space smaller than a coffin. Somewhere between 350 and 600 slaves were carried per ship. The more tightly packed, the greater the opportunity for profit even if there were losses, and considerable losses there were indeed. Foul conditions meant slaves often lay in their own filth for weeks on end. The mentally unwell and the dead were thrown overboard for the sharks. Disease was rife: smallpox, malaria, yellow fever. The average length of the journey on the Middle Passage was around 100 days. Sexual exploitation was also the norm, the crew taking their pick of the enslaved women. One slaver wrote, ‘Once off the coast the ship became half bedlam and half brothel.’[10] Olaudah Equiano (c. 1745–1797), one of the few slaves who ended up in Europe, became a free man in around 1766. In 1789 he wrote his autobiographical An Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, African. In it he noted:

The stench of the hold, while we were on the coast, was so intolerably loathsome, that it was dangerous to remain there for any time … now that the whole ship’s cargo were confined together, it became absolutely pestilential … the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died … The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered it a scene of horror almost inconceivable.[11]

Before sale, the enslaved were fed quantities of food to ‘fatten’ them and had oil applied to their bodies. Once sold, they were ‘seasoned’ for up to a year to prepare them for a life of subjection and loss of liberty.

The Founding of the Abolition Society

In terms of the abolitionist campaign, there were intellectual objections to slavery, but these did not originate with evangelicals. Instead they came from philosophers reflecting on ‘the rights of man’ in the light of the American and French revolutions – essentially, the philosophers of the Enlightenment. Others objected from a more Christian perspective. The moral philosopher Adam Smith (1723–1790) and the theologian William Paley (1743–1805) were among those who opposed slavery. By 1774, John Wesley (1703–1791) was railing against the trade in human beings:

Liberty is the right of every human creature, as soon as he breathes the vital air. And no human law can deprive him of that right, which he derives from the law of nature.[12]

Here, Wesley appeals to an innate dignity based on natural law – the natural law of God.

It was, however, the Quakers who led the way in setting out the Christian case against slavery and the slave trade, bringing to bear an influence far beyond their numbers. This was partly because they had among them highly active and respected individuals and partly because they were a well-connected transatlantic community. The Quakers as a body included many influential traders and merchants. George Fox (1624–1691), the Quaker founder, had spoken against slavery as early as 1671. In 1754, the Society of Friends in Philadelphia concluded that:

to live in ease and plenty by the toil of those who violence and cruelty have put in our power is neither consistent with Christianity or common justice.[13]

The Philadelphia Quaker Anthony Benezet (1713–1784) published an anti-slavery tract in 1760 titled Observations on the Inslaving, Importing, and Purchasing of Negroes. The London Society of Friends purchased 1,500 copies and distributed them to every member of both Houses of Parliament. The London Yearly Meeting (a Quaker group) in 1761 passed a resolution declaring the slave trade repugnant to Christianity.

In 1783 the Quakers formed a committee of six members, including two well-known banking names – Samuel Hoare (1751–1825) and John Lloyd (1775–1854) – ‘for the relief and liberation of the negro slaves in the West Indies and for the discouragement of the Slave Trade on the coast of Africa’.[14]

Very quickly indeed there was collaboration with Granville Sharp (1735–1813) and Thomas Clarkson (1760–1846), the former very close to the Clapham evangelicals, while the latter became a key ally of Wilberforce and was closely linked to both the Quakers and the Anglican evangelicals. The consequence was a coming together in May 1787 to form a Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade – the Abolition Society – under the chairmanship of Sharp, with Clarkson as secretary and nine of the twelve founders being Quakers. All that was needed was a parliamentary champion.

Evangelical Writings and Campaigns

Before considering both the popular and Wilberforce’s parliamentary campaign, it is useful to reflect a little further on the manner and nature of the evangelical campaign now that the ‘saints’ were moving centre stage.

The above-mentioned John Newton, a former captain of slave-trading ships, became a public campaigner for the abolitionist movement when, in January 1788, he published his sensational and highly influential pamphlet Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade. There is no question that remorse was one of the motives behind the publication:

I hope it will always be a subject of humiliating reflection to me that I was once an active instrument in a business at which my heart now shudders.[15]

Newton’s testimony was vitally important in converting public opinion to the abolitionist cause. With his old shipboard diaries for the years 1750–1754 beside him, he described in horrendous detail the brutalising treatment and torture meted out to the hundreds of thousands or more slaves who were transported each year in English vessels, including the ones he captained: the Brownlow, the Duke of Argyle and the Africa.

In his autobiographical Authentic Narrative of Some Remarkable and Interesting Particulars, published in 1764, Newton had lamented the sins of his youth but not mentioned the slave trade. Many at this time, evangelicals included, had not considered the slave trade wrong. It was viewed by the faithful and wider society alike as morally unexceptional. In addition, Christians paid little attention to the matter. It was also profitable. However, some 25 years later, in his Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade, Newton described the trade as ‘a commerce, so iniquitous, so cruel, so oppressive, so destructive’.[16] In this work, published less than two months after Wilberforce’s announcement that he would take up the parliamentary mantel, Newton caught a moment. The Abolition Society purchased some 3,500 copies, distributing them to the members of both Houses of Parliament.

Hannah More (1745–1833) was born near Bristol and hence will have observed the British end of the slave trade and indeed the prosperity which it brought. Motivated also by her faith and links to the Clapham evangelicals, like Newton she was moved to campaign against the human evil of slavery. She too later regretted that she had not acted sooner. However, hot on the heels of Newton’s Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade, in 1788 she published Slavery: A Poem. In it she uses the techniques of poetry, rhyme and alliteration to convey her anti-slavery message. Here is one example:

Does then th’ immortal principle within
Change with the casual colour of a skin?[17]

William Cowper (1731–1800), friend of Newton, poet and hymn writer, also wrote against the slave trade. His poems were widely read. This literature was instrumental in mobilising evangelical opinion.

The Popular Campaign

The close collaboration between religious groups around abolition was not restricted to the Anglican evangelicals and the Quakers. Baptists and Methodists were also heavily involved in the assault on the slave trade. The General Baptists were first out of the blocks, after the Quakers, and declared their support for abolition in 1787. The Calvinistic Baptists had preachers in Bristol – Caleb Evans (1737–1791) and Robert Hall (1764–1831) – writing to the press and raising funds for the abolitionist campaign. Other influential Baptist ministers in London and Cambridge also preached against the trade. Wesley, too, in 1788, preached an abolitionist sermon in Bristol. In Manchester, hundreds of Methodists signed the city’s great abolitionist petition ‘in the Chapel at the Communion Table, on the Lord’s Day’.[18] Samuel Bradburn (1751–1816), a Methodist preacher, exhorted his readers in a powerful address on the slave trade to petition Parliament, pray for abolition and boycott West Indian sugar.

The movement was a popular one, bringing evangelicals, other Christians and a wider moral concern together. The above-mentioned Thomas Clarkson travelled 35,000 miles between 1787 and 1794, setting up branches of the Abolition Society, orchestrating petitions, gathering evidence and publishing testimony. In 1789 over 100 petitions were sent to Parliament; in 1792 over 500. By this time at least 300,000 Britons had stopped consuming sugar and rum. The churches were central. Petitions, meetings, sermons and boycotts: these were the staple diet of the popular campaign. There was also a medallion, produced by the potter Josiah Wedgwood (1730–1795), with a kneeling slave in chains and the inscription ‘Am I not a man and a brother’. Wedgewood was a member of the Abolition Society, though a Unitarian.

The Campaign in Parliament

From the foundation of the Abolition Society in 1787, things began to move quickly. The publications of Cowper, Equiano, More, Newton and others were making a real impact. In the three years prior to October 1787, only four items appeared in The Times relating to abolition. In the 15 months following, 136 such items appeared. With the popular campaign gaining strength, what was now needed was a worthy advocate in Parliament.

In autumn 1786, Wilberforce had been urged during a stay with Sir Charles Middleton (1726–1813) – a Tory MP, admired naval commander and abolitionist – to take up the mantle. By late 1786, Wilberforce was seeking to educate himself around the issues of slavery. Then, early in 1787, Clarkson called on Wilberforce in the first meeting between the two men. The final piece in this bit of the jigsaw was when, at a dinner in March 1787, Clarkson, Middleton and others formally asked Wilberforce to act and, in the absence of any better alternatives, Wilberforce agreed.

Wilberforce could not have known at this point of the years of toil ahead; indeed, he seems to have thought a quick success likely. An early decision was that the parliamentary campaign would seek the abolition of the trade in slaves rather than slavery itself, as a more achievable objective.

The Gathering of Evidence

On 11 February 1788 the king directed that a Committee of the Privy Council should investigate the African slave trade. Wilberforce summoned Clarkson to London to help prepare the abolitionists’ case. It was soon clear that many vested interests were arranged against them and there was a dearth of witnesses willing to testify in the cause of abolition. Rather, witnesses claimed that the trade was a blessing, and that those slaves who ended up in the West Indies were doubly fortunate in being alive and removed to a better life. Some denied outright that kidnappings took place, claiming there was great happiness on the journey which constituted the Middle Passage. It was clear, even at this early stage in the inquiry, that the matter would need Parliament’s direct attention. Pitt announced in May 1788 that there would be a debate in the following session of Parliament, and subsequently set a date of 12 May 1789.

Prior to that debate, a Bill limiting the number of slaves that could be carried was successfully moved in the Commons but heavily amended in the Lords. It was simply an early skirmish. In the first months of 1789, Wilberforce, now assisted by the lawyer James Stephen, continued to amass evidence.

The Committee of the Privy Council which was commissioned to investigate the slave trade presented its report shortly before the 12 May debate. The arguments of the proponents of the trade were essentially, first, that life in Africa was terrible and slaves were grateful to be rescued; second, that slaves were well treated on the Middle Passage; and third, that the loss of labour without slavery would destroy the commercial position of the colonies and the nation as a whole. To give just one example from the evidence to the committee, Vice-Admiral Edwards, a former naval commander, gave evidence that

he knows of no instance of the slaves being ill-treated on Board … [and] the Negroes usually appeared cheerful and singing.[19]

In many ways, bringing the evidence together in one place helped the overall cause of abolition, although Clarkson had to work hard to put witnesses and evidence together. Despite everything, the report did leave the general impression that there were vile conditions on many, even if not all, slave-trading ships, and that there was extensive use of kidnapping and warfare as methods of securing slaves.

John Newton was, of course, a key witness before this committee – and, indeed, at roughly the same time as his Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade was published and circulated. Newton affirmed that kidnapping and warfare between tribes and nations were key means of securing slaves for onward sale to the traders. Clarkson brought other witnesses before the committee too.

Clarkson himself also gave evidence. He had spent at least two months in Liverpool and a further two in Bristol investigating the slave trade. He concentrated on two things: first, the quality of the produce available from Africa itself, which rendered the use of slaves to produce the same in the West Indies unnecessary, and second, the conditions faced by the crews of the slave-trading ships. He reported findings from investigating 88 ships which had returned to Liverpool and around 24 ships to Bristol in 1786 and 1787. It was a subtle approach. Direct trade with Africa would improve conditions on the African coast and it was not only slaves who suffered but also the crews. Clarkson was playing the long game.

Wilberforce’s First Speech Against the Slave Trade

On the day of the debate, 12 May 1789, the well-organised opponents of abolition delivered petitions from Bristol and Liverpool warning of the ruin of thousands and the loss of employment. Petitioners from Birmingham joined in as manufacturers of the goods exported to Africa; thousands were employed in these industries, other markets were not available, and the abolition of the trade would hand these markets over to the Dutch, French and Spanish.

Wilberforce had been unwell. He said that he had not prepared his speech, or even gone over all aspects of the matter, though he was well acquainted with the subject. Yet, with divine grace as he saw it, he was able to speak to the House of Commons for three and a half hours – a length neither unusual nor considered inappropriate at the time. Wilberforce was a natural, fluent and eloquent speaker. He had assiduously worked the committees and procedures of Parliament and was at ease with both the processes and the use of oratory. He relied primarily upon the testimony of others and, he argued, if this case was not fully presented and fully explained upon the floor of the House, many members would never hear the case; they would not read the material from either side.

Modern writer William Hague summarises Wilberforce’s impact:

Wilberforce would cast off his physical fragility that afternoon to deliver a speech which, even set against the centuries of debates in the House of Commons, stands out as one of the true masterpieces of parliamentary oratory.[20]

Appeals to Christian morality were very unlikely to work. Rather, Wilberforce needed to persuade the House that the abolition of the slave trade was not merely desirable but consistent with the interests of a commercial, trading, seafaring nation and empire.

His opening was disarming, referring to the magnitude of the task and his own inadequacy. He asked only for cool and impartial reason to be displayed, promising in a rather powerful paragraph that he would resist accusing others of guilt:

I mean not to accuse any one, but to take the shame upon myself, in common, indeed, with the whole parliament of Great Britain, for having suffered this horrid trade to be carried on under their authority. We are all guilty – we ought all to plead guilty, and not to exculpate ourselves by throwing the blame on others.[21]

He went through the leading features of the slave trade: in Africa many innocents were condemned into slavery, and wars were instigated and fought in order to gain slaves to sell to the traders. He deferred to the authoritative judgement of his fellow MPs and then turned to describe the Middle Passage:

This I confess, in my opinion, is the most wretched part of the whole subject. So much misery condensed in so little room, is more than the human imagination had ever before conceived.[22]

As to the singing and dancing of the slaves referred to by some witnesses to the committee, this, said Wilberforce, was only under the threat or actual use of the whip. He also added some explicitly Christian observations:

How strange it was that providence, however mysterious in its ways should so have constituted the world, as to make one part of it depend for its existence on the depopulation and devastation of another. I could not therefore, help distrusting the arguments of those, who insisted that the plundering of Africa was necessary for the cultivation of the West-Indies. I could not believe that the same Being who forbids rapine and bloodshed, had made rapine and bloodshed necessary to the well-being of any part of his universe.[23]

He sought to reassure the planters: they had nothing to fear from abolition as the population in North America was now growing and further importation of slaves was not necessary. He referred to Clarkson’s statistics on the losses among the crew, and appealed to the ideal of an honourable trade in natural products replacing the slave trade. He also appealed to justice, to international leadership and to the idea of free trade upon true commercial principles. He presented a choice to the House:

The nature and all the circumstances of this trade are now laid open to us; we can no longer plead ignorance, we cannot evade it, it is now an object placed before us, we cannot pass it; we may spurn it, we may kick it out of our way, but we cannot turn aside so as to avoid seeing it; for it is brought now so directly before our eyes, that this House must decide.[24]

Wilberforce then set out 12 statements to the House concerning the slave trade and invited the MPs to agree. These resolutions described the kidnappings, war and deaths that were occurring; the evils of transportation; and the possibility of honourable alternative trades. He avowed his end to be the total abolition of the slave trade. He was followed immediately after his speech by the two members for Liverpool, who forecast ruin and destruction. The battle was just beginning.

Biographer Robin Furneaux describes Wilberforce’s speech as ‘a rousing patriotic oration’ and ‘a polished and masterful performance’.[25] Hague describes it as ‘a comprehensive statement of the arguments’.[26] At the time, statesman Edmund Burke (1729–1797) praised the speech as ‘masterly, impressive and eloquent’,[27] and declared that it contained principles so admirable that he had never heard the like in modern oratory. The Speaker of the House praised Wilberforce, as did Pitt.

The pro-slavery forces had been thrown off balance by the tone of the Privy Council report and by Wilberforce’s speech. Now, late into the evening, the House adjourned debate until 21 May. Wilberforce’s opponents took the opportunity to regroup, realising that they would not be able to defeat his motions in a straight vote. On the resumption on 21 May, member after member rose to argue that the Privy Council report was inadequate and the House must hear its own evidence. Pitt was frustrated and Wilberforce agreed to a delay (potentially misplaying his hand). And so the long journey through Parliament began. Even if he had won the vote, Wilberforce himself subsequently pointed out that abolition would still have required an Act of Parliament. In reality, abolition was not going to happen quickly.

The Long Journey

Parliament resumed hearing evidence later in 1789 and the process continued until April 1790. Wilberforce remained ever vigilant during this period, with his life full of political activity. Clarkson was constantly alongside him, analysing, checking and exposing their opponents’ evidence. Sometimes Clarkson was despatched on long journeys to investigate or clear up a particular piece of vital evidence. In one instance he boarded 320 ships and interviewed 3,000 seamen in order to track down a single witness. Wilberforce described his own house – in Palace Yard, Westminster (he had not yet moved to Clapham at this point) – as a hotel.[28] Pitt dined there regularly; the Abolition Society, Clarkson and others worked on the campaign; and constituents, petitioners, missionaries and preachers all crowded into his house from early morning onwards. The presentation of more evidence, the continuing distribution of pamphlets and poems across the country, and the impact of Clarkson’s circulation of a drawing of the slave ship Brookes all led the abolitionists to think that, once again, the tide was turning their way.

On 18 April 1791, Wilberforce moved in the House of Commons a motion for the abolition of the slave trade. This time he spoke for four hours. He sought to show how the evidence presented to Parliament supported the claims he had been making. Of course, even more evidence had now been amassed. The anti-abolitionists largely dropped their claims that the trade was humane and argued instead for its expediency. Wilberforce dealt with the arguments of commercial ruin faced by the planters and the ‘nursery for seamen’ argument (that the trade trained up seamen for war), as well as presenting the moral arguments for abolition. Pitt and the Whig statesman Charles James Fox (1749–1806) both spoke in support. However, as Furneaux comments:

Wilberforce’s speech was a powerful indictment of the Trade and many of his arguments were unanswerable; this did not, of course, prevent them from being answered.[29]

The opponents rehearsed their arguments. Delay had given them momentum. The new MP for Liverpool, Colonel Banastre Tarleton (1754–1833), claimed that at least 5,500 seamen depended on the trade. Other speakers, while accepting that the trade had undesirable aspects, asserted that abolition was not in the national interest. Wilberforce, deep down, knew he would not carry the day. He closed his speech with:

Never, never, will we desist till we have wiped away this scandal from the Christian name, released ourselves from the load of guilt, under which we at present labour, and extinguished every trace of this bloody traffic, of which our prosperity, looking back to the history of these enlightened times, will scarce believe that it has been suffered to exist so long a disgrace and dishonour to this country.[30]

The House was divided. Wilberforce was defeated by nearly two to one: 88 votes for abolition, 163 against.

Wilberforce reiterated that he would never abandon his work and that he was confident the slave trade would ultimately be abolished by the people of Great Britain. He cannot have known that abolition still lay some 16 years ahead.

The Road to Abolition

The defenders of the slave trade celebrated Wilberforce’s defeat. In Bristol church bells were rung, bonfires lit and a half-day holiday declared. It seemed like four years of toil for nothing. Yet, this was not the case. The marshalling of the evidence, the changing moral mood in the nation and the increasing strength of the campaign across the country all played to the strengths of the abolitionists. The argument from the pro-slave-trade side was now increasingly reliant on the claim that the time was not right for abolition, rather than the idea that the trade was moral and humane. This probably meant that the moral arguments of the abolitionists would eventually win the day.

Petitions began to flow in. Some 500,000 people signed one petition or another out of a population of some 8 million, meaning that one in sixteen appended their signature. There was renewed hope. William Grenville (1759–1834), a noted abolitionist, became Pitt’s foreign secretary in 1791.

There was now pressure on Wilberforce not to bring forward his motion again. Pitt himself thought it could not proceed. But Wilberforce pressed on with his abolition motion, on 2 April 1792. Here he linked faith and liberty, the latter springing from the divine essence. It was, once again, a masterful speech. In the early hours of 3 April, Pitt rose in support of Wilberforce. In a marvellous piece of oratory, Pitt set forth a vision of a free, prosperous and trading Africa, arguing that Britain had a responsibility to ensure the continent could enjoy the same freedoms and opportunities that Britons did.

Tactics set in again. Pitt’s tacticians moved an amendment to insert the word ‘gradually’ into Wilberforce’s abolition motion. The amended motion passed the Commons by 230 votes to 85 – the Commons for the first time voting for abolition – but it was bittersweet, and Wilberforce described himself as hurt and humiliated while being congratulated from all sides of the House.[31] He resolved that ‘gradual’ must be as quick as possible, but in the event ‘gradual’ was to mean ‘very gradual’. He later described this word as a cloak under which the defenders of the trade hid.[32] The government proposed abolition of the slave trade from 1 January 1800. Wilberforce opposed this and managed to get the date changed to 1 January 1796, which he thought a good achievement, though one of his bishop supporters did not as he feared it would lead to the loss of the entire Bill. There was a further problem: the House of Lords, which forced a delay by demanding that they hear evidence directly at the bar of their own House.

It was around now that the Clapham group came together. In 1793, Wilberforce’s motion to effectively renew the 1796 abolition date was defeated in the Commons by 61 votes to 53. He tried to bring in alternative Bills but was defeated either in the Commons or in the Lords. His motion for abolition in 1795 also failed. Pitt was distracted by war with France.

Thomas Clarkson, exhausted by the campaign, retired from public life. The ‘saints’ gathering at Clapham now brought some resilience to the campaign. As modern writer John Wolffe has noted, their campaign against the slave trade ‘exploited their respective talents: Wilberforce’s parliamentary eloquence, Stephen’s legal acumen, Thornton’s business skill, and Macaulay’s capacity for gathering and ordering evidence’.[33]

Yet they had to be patient and tenacious. Wilberforce brought abolition Bills to Parliament year after year between 1794 and 1799 only to see them rejected. The Lords remained opposed and now Pitt and his administration had become somewhat less sympathetic. Wilberforce did not bring abolition Bills between 1800 and 1803 and the Abolition Society ceased to meet.

The Great Achievement

The ‘saints’ had not given up. In May 1804, the Abolition Society met for the first time since 1797. The attendees consisted of Wilberforce and Sharp with eight other evangelicals and Quakers, including Stephen and Macaulay, and Clarkson (who emerged from retirement). The Anglican evangelicals assumed a more dominant role and, in truth, they were probably better placed than the Quakers to drive abolition through Parliament. The addition of Irish members to the Commons was helpful to Wilberforce. These members helped a Bill through in 1804, but it lapsed before it could reach the Lords, who remained unlikely to pass it in any event. Appeals were made again to the public. Clarkson set off on the road once more in search of evidence, and in 1805 Macaulay issued a pamphlet, The Horrors of Slavery. However, Wilberforce and Clarkson were both pragmatists and wanted to keep the focus on the slave trade, rather than slavery itself, as a more achievable target.

Stephen came up with a new tactic: the ingenious idea of introducing abolition by stealth and perhaps gaining government support. His plan was to move against foreign ships which sailed under neutral flags, arguing that the flags of neutral nations lent support to Britain’s enemies in the Napoleonic Wars, especially France and Spain. The hidden genius in the scheme was that it would also debilitate much of the trade in slaves. If Britain’s navy moved against French, Spanish and neutral shipping, then a significant proportion of the slave trade would be disrupted as all three of these methods were used to transport slaves, including some British slaves. With Pitt’s death in 1806, there was a new ministry, known as the ‘Ministry of All the Talents’, under Grenville and Fox, both committed abolitionists. The government agreed to introduce the Slave Importation Bill. The abolitionists simply treated the Bill as a piece of ordinary government business. In May 1806 it passed into law, removing up to 75% of the slave trade.

The abolitionists now resurfaced and went for the kill. The tide was turning. They announced their intention of introducing an abolition Bill. Pamphlets flowed again from the pens of evangelical abolitionists, who now sounded ever more loudly the idea of divine judgement upon the nation. Sharp referred to hurricanes over the Caribbean plantations as judgements from God. Stephen, too, referred to the threat from France as a sign of divine anger against Britain for its involvement in the slave trade. France’s own punishment had been the revolution. A government motion in the remaining days of the 1806 session – which stated, ‘This House … will, with all practical expedition, proceed to take effectual measures for abolishing the said trade’ – passed 114 votes to 15 in the Commons and 41 votes to 21 in the Lords. Wilberforce put forward an address to the king calling for general abolition, which was carried without a division.

In 1807 Wilberforce published his Letter on the Slave Trade, summarising his arguments of 20 years:

Providence governs the world. But if we are not blind to the course of human events, as well as utterly deaf to the plain instructions of Revelation, we must believe that a continued course of wickedness, oppression, and cruelty, obstinately maintained in spite of the fullest knowledge and the loudest warnings, must infallibly bring down upon us the heaviest judgements of the Almighty.[34]

Grenville himself introduced the abolition Bill in the Lords. Wilberforce listened in the gallery. Grenville paid effusive tribute to Wilberforce:

I cannot conceive any consciousness more truly gratifying than must be enjoyed by that person, on finding a measure to which he has devoted the colour of his life, carried into effect – a measure so truly benevolent, so admirably conducive to the virtuous prosperity of his country, and the welfare of mankind – a measure which will diffuse happiness amongst millions, now in existence and for which his memory will be blessed by millions as yet unborn.[35]

The die was cast. The last bastion would fall. Grenville thought he had enough votes: 56 he reckoned, or perhaps 70, and in the event the Lords carried the abolition Bill by 100 votes to 34. In the Commons, there was now a sense of inevitability. At one point the solicitor general, Sir Samuel Romilly (1757–1818), contrasted Napoleon and his responsibility for so much bloodshed with Wilberforce, responsible for the continued life of so many of his fellow beings. The House erupted in applause and cheering while Wilberforce sat, head in his hands, tears streaming down his face.

Wilberforce summed up in debate, closing with the plea that Parliament

must shew to the people, that their legislators … were forward to assert the rights of the weak against the strong; to vindicate the cause of the oppressed; and that where a practice was found to prevail, inconsistent with humanity and justice, no consideration of profit could reconcile them to its continuance.[36]

The triumph was overwhelming. The vote passed by 283 to 16.

They were nearly there but not quite. Some sought to move rapidly against slavery itself, but Wilberforce counselled caution. The abolition Bill still faced amendments to iron out inconsistencies, and there was a potentially dangerous moment when the government fell from power over Catholic emancipation, which was supported by Grenville but not the king. But there was no going back for any reason and no real threat from the new administration. On 24 March 1807, William Grenville, on his last day as prime minister, obtained the consent of George III for the abolition Bill. At noon on Wednesday 25 March 1807, the Speaker of the House of Commons announced the enactment of the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. From 1 May that year, its provisions would take effect. The trade which had taken millions of Africans to the colonies of the British Empire was now outside the law.

The 1807 Act was a stunning achievement for the abolitionists, but it was, of course, far from the end of the story. Illegal slave trading and enduring exploitation of slaves continued apace. It was not until 1833 that Parliament legislated to emancipate 800,000 slaves. This was just three days after Wilberforce’s death, but he had lived to hear of the likely passage of the Bill.

Chapter 5: Wilberforce’s Later Life and an Assessment of His Work

Wilberforce was never very healthy. He married Barbara Spooner in May 1797 after a whirlwind romance. His friends were alarmed but the couple had 35 years of deeply happy marriage and six children. The Clapham group largely disbanded in the period after 1807 and in 1813 Sharp died, followed two years later by Thornton. Wilberforce handed over the leadership of the anti-slavery movement to the evangelical Quaker and MP Thomas Fowell Buxton (1786–1845). He retired from Parliament in 1825 and died on 29 July 1833.

How might we assess Wilberforce, his work and his faith? He was a man of real depth of Christian faith and character, with a broad range of public, moral and Christian concerns. He was tenacious in his campaigning, his painstaking gathering of evidence and his parliamentary tactics. He deployed secular and Christian arguments and collaborated across many divides.

William Wilberforce was a giant on the British public stage without whom the slave trade would not have been abolished when it was. He was, under God, a great statesman.

In Faith in Markets, Benedikt Koehler (PhD), a fellow of the Institute of Economic Affairs, has brought together a series articles that consider the ways in which Christianity, Judaism and Islam have encouraged adherents ‘towards behaviours that tended to market economics’ (page 7). The collection discusses the three major Abrahamic faiths and also a contains a chapter looking at eastern religious traditions more broadly, but the focus in this review is on the Judaeo-Christian tradition specifically. The first part of the book considers the mutual influences of religious practice or belief and the market, with three of the chapters in this section being written by the volume editor himself. One of these shows how the teaching of Moses revolutionised the economic behaviour of the Israelites and was unique in basing economic norms on theology. Extending the Sabbath principle to economic life, together with a ban on usury, Moses implemented what amounted to an egalitarian approach to commerce and a de facto system of welfare. Of particular interest in this part of the book was Koehler’s chapter addressing the development of property rights in early and mediaeval Christianity. This piece provides a fascinating overview of the dispute between the Franciscans and the Papacy on the subject of ownership, showing how Pope John XXII established a view, supported by scripture, that grounded property rights in the divine will, independent of and prior to any rights granted by the state – a view which contrasted with the earlier tendency among both pagan and Christian thinkers to link property rights with human convention. Esa Mangeloja and Tomi Ovaska continue the examination of Christian thought in their discussion of the common-property-based economic and political system of Thomas More’s Utopia, showing that the work is in fact full of economic concepts and that Utopia lends itself to a proper analysis in economic terms, just like other economic systems.

The second part of the book consists of chapters that highlight difficulties or paradoxes in the teaching of each of the Abrahamic faiths as they interpret or apply ancient authorities and again, my focus is on the Judaeo-Christian context. David Conway’s contribution examines the manner in which, by rigidly applying the provisions of the Pentateuch regarding poor relief and education, Israel’s ultra-orthodox communities (Haredim) have created an unsustainable welfare burden for the state. This is the result of low labour market participation caused in part by publicly funded specialist schooling, in which men engage in near-perpetual religious study while ordinarily core subjects such as mathematics are not taught – thus exacerbating the employment problem. This arrangement is traced to the requirement in the Hebrew scriptures that those without means be provided for and that the Levites be supported by a tithe in return for their provision of education in national history and divinely mandated law. As honoured in contemporary Israel, however, these obligations place a huge strain on the public finances and ignore the spirit of the original laws themselves, which favoured economic activity, required recipients of poor relief to work where possible and sought to restore those who had fallen on hard times to economic independence and liberty as soon as possible.

In a very engaging chapter, Martin Rhonheimer considers the subject of social justice, beginning with the modern tendency to use this concept in the criticism of inequalities of wealth. The author agrees with F.A. Hayek, that the notion of ‘justice’ makes no sense when applied to the outcomes of economic systems because they are simply outcomes of a particular order and are not aimed at by any individual or group. However, he adds that it does make sense to talk about the systems themselves as just or unjust, insofar as they are devised or at least allowed to persist by human beings. In short, if the rules of the system are unjust – for instance by discriminating against a particular group such that that group cannot engage in economic activity on equitable terms – then we can change the rules in the interests of fairness. Moreover, we quite legitimately use the term ‘just’ in relation to freely acting individuals, insofar as their actions have some positive bearing on society. Rhonheimer’s point is that ‘social justice’ refers to the social or common good, and we would consider businesses, charities and voluntary organisations who contribute to this as being involved in the exercise of social justice as virtue. Thus, while the term ‘social justice’ might have no purchase in distributive terms (with reference to ‘outcomes’), it certainly can be applied to economic orders, organisations and individuals – and it is here that the tension in Christian thought emerges. Rhonheimer contends that the teaching of the Catholic Church has moved away from an understanding of social justice that is broadly compatible with this perspective, towards a view that is closer to the contemporary ‘distributive’ attitude. As such, it has in recent decades become more inclined to favour redistributive social policies and seems less inclined to take account of the very real benefits of a market economy in contributing to the common good. Thus, the Church’s traditional teaching recognised social justice as a moral virtue from which actions conducive to the common good flow, but we must now wonder how easily this sits with its increasingly ‘(re-)distributivist’ view of ‘social justice’ and the statism that this implies.

Overall, this collection contains several interesting studies and for the most part, the writing is very accessible, though some chapters – such as that considering Utopia – would require a degree of prior knowledge in order for the reader to fully appreciate the proffered analysis. More difficult is identifying a general argument or unifying narrative that runs through the book. The individual chapters have previously appeared in the journal Economic Affairs and some reflect the brevity of the article format, but more significant is the overall feeling that they have not been entirely integrated so as to compose a single, unified volume. As can be the way with edited collections, while each chapter is interesting, the book as a whole lacks a clear sense of overall purpose to pull the individual studies together. Perhaps, however, given the subject, this would be to ask too much in this case. Since it deals with three of the world’s largest religions and is not limited to a particular historical period or geographical region, it would be impossible to give more than a series of studies demonstrating different ways in which the Abrahamic faiths have steered their adherents towards practices that tend to market-oriented behaviours and outlooks. A unified account that shows how this occurred frequently and consistently over the centuries would require a much longer book – most likely in several volumes.

While perhaps lacking a sustained argument to bring the entire book together, as a collection that provides thematically organised snapshots of certain strains of thought and practice within major faiths, while considering tensions that have arisen in relation to market principles, this volume will appeal to those with interests in the overlap between religious and economic thought and practice.

‘Faith in Markets: Abrahamic religions and economics’, edited by Benedikt Koehler, was published in 2023 by the Institute for Economic Affairs (ISBN: 978-0-255-36824-7). 240pp

Neil Jordan is Senior Editor at the Centre for Enterprise, Markets and Ethics. For more information about Neil please click here.

Written by Harvard Business School professor Max Bazerman, Complicit: How We Enable the Unethical and How to Stop is published by Princeton University Press and features glowing praise from notables such as Cass Sunstein and Steven Pinker. Given this background, one expects a far different book than the one that it is.

The basic idea of the book is that when people think about the cause of unethical actions, they often fail to consider the many people who enabled the actions through various degrees of complicity. Relatedly, those who enable bad actors don’t think about their own role and the aggregate role of others in similar positions. At the outset, Bazerman claims, “In contrast to past accounts of these stories, Complicit will focus on the overlooked importance of others who were complicit in the bad behaviour.” (page 6) This is a sensible perspective, and one that I hoped would be investigated with sensitivity and precision. However, the book deals with an interesting ethical topic in a way that staggers in both senses of the word. 

The book consists of 11 chapters divided into three sections. After an introductory chapter, the first seven chapters present readers with profiles of complicit actors arranged by the type of complicity. Bazerman begins the book with two chapters on those who are most clearly complicit in extremely unethical acts (“true partners” and “collaborators”). As the book progresses through the second section, the degree of complicity declines with five chapters on “those who benefit from privilege, those who are true believers, those who defer to authority and loyalty, those who rely on their trust of others, and those who create and accept unethical systems” (page 12). The final section has one chapter on the psychology of complicity (though this is also covered in some of the chapters) before ending with two applied chapters: one on dealing with complicity on a personal level and another on developing institutional strategies to prevent complicity.

The march through the case studies might have worked if the case studies weren’t as high-profile and there were more of a focus on each example. Or, perhaps, if they were interspersed with the potential methods to stop a particular type of complicity shown in an example. Instead, the reader is left lurching as the author discusses, among others: Hitler, Trump (my worries began when the two were separated by seven words and a semi-colon in the introduction), the Sacklers, Weinstein, Elizabeth Holmes and Adam Neumann, along with many somewhat lesser-known figures. There is great range in the type of misdeed committed and the types of complicity that enabled the misdeed. The institutions in which these figures operated, and the incentives faced by those surrounding them varied considerably as well. Despite the often-enthralling stories presented, the reader is left adrift without much real explanation or robust ideas about how to stop complicity.

Much of the book is written in a way that suggests genuine concern with the misdeeds presented in the case studies and the various degrees of complicity that enabled them. This is often good, but in some cases, like the chapter “Benefiting from Privilege,” it reads like an older colleague trying to signal his ability to adjust to a changing landscape. This is part of a broader identity crisis for the book, which covers a lot but explains little about each of the wide range of ways that complicity can present itself in different contexts.

I held out hope for more specifics to be dealt with in the final chapters (pages 157–216) but was for the most part disappointed. These chapters dealing with the theoretical explanations for complicity and tangible steps that one can take to reduce it are themselves as meandering and full of journalistic anecdotes as the earlier chapters. After another bizarre introduction about Hitler and Trump, the first chapter of this final section of the book suggests it will elaborate on the psychological reasons for complicity. While it offers some detail and academic research, the things offered as explanations include the perceived differences between commission and omission, fear of retaliation, and a slippery slope of smaller misdeeds slowly escalating. These basic explanations might be sufficient had they been pursued in some depth, but they are dealt with cursorily. The following chapter offers some more tangible insights into strategies at the individual level for stopping complicity (reducing the risks to speaking up, deliberating more in advance, recognizing blind spots, and enlarging our circle of concern). But here again, the second part of the chapter is padded out with profiles of whistleblowers and others who actively overcame the tendency to become complicit. The final and perhaps most interesting chapter looks at the structural reasons for complicity and organizational tactics for preventing it.

Despite the weaknesses of the book, there are sections that are of real interest. Besides the most famous and compelling stories of Theranos and Purdue Pharma, the comparatively less well-known examples from later in the book may offer more relevant examples for readers. For instance, it is interesting to learn about the level of complicity involved in the Volkswagen emissions testing scandal, where senior members of the regional German government and trade unions were aware of the fraud but overwhelmed by their interests.

Separately, Bazerman’s personal role in the still ongoing scandals in psychology and behavioural economics where researchers such as Dan Ariely managed to secure global fame and permanent positions at top universities with research that is now clearly discredited in some cases because of outright data fraud. The personal email correspondence with his fellow coauthors (including Ariely) that Bazerman reproduces offer a new and interesting look at the topic. But even here he steers clear of the more interesting questions about the broader institutional context of the academy.

The most interesting parts of the book are those that deal with complicity encouraged by systems and relatedly institutional solutions to complicity. Part of Chapter 8 deals with the compelling topic of goal setting in organizations namely how explicit goals can overwhelm more tacit ethical standards and how conflicts of interest can create ripe situations for complicity. In some situations, the systemic problems were intentionally created, but in many of these scenarios, they only occurred because of accidental confluences of interests rather than conspiracy. Both are of interest and ripe for hard thinking about solutions. The most thoughtful solutions are offered in Chapter 11, but I came away thinking that the viability of any institutional solution requires a specificity that couldn’t be achieved by the scattershot approach of the book.

Sadly, even the more useful and relevant aspects of the book are drowned out by the repeated and sustained focus on lighting rods. A search of the text reveals that variations of “Trump” appear in the main text of the book nearly as much as any variation of “complicit.” “Nazi” appears 26 times. Even beyond this, after all the pages over which Bazerman has journalistically recounted the many, many examples of complicity, there is bizarrely little sustained explanation or ideas for how to structure organizations to prevent complicity. Readers should not seek out Complicit.

“Complicit: How We Enable the Unethical and How to Stop” by Max Bazerman was published in 2023 (UK) by Princeton University Press (ISBN: 978-0691236544) 264 pp.

In their recent book How the World Became Rich (published 2022), the economic historians Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin provide an accessible introduction to the best – often competing – explanations for sustained economic growth. The obvious difficulty of this approach is that it can seem scattershot, but Koyama and Rubin weave disparate threads into a cohesive lay of the land.

This is an important task. Academic economics has become increasingly inaccessible to those outside the field. The advanced methods used by practitioners on highly specific questions yield valuable insights in academic journals and books, but rarely inform popular narratives that in many cases offer more heat than light.

The book is divided into two main sections and eleven chapters. After an introductory chapter (including among other things the hockey stick graph of per capita income), the first section is divided into five chapters on the high-level explanations: geography, institutions, culture, demography, and colonisation/exploitation. The second section deftly weaves these categories of explanation and historical facts to explore four topics in chronological order: why did sustained economic growth that resulted in the world becoming rich occur first in Northwestern Europe, how was Britain’s Industrial Revolution different from what came before, the Second Industrial Revolution and the rise of the United States and Soviet Union, and Asian economic growth in the last seventy years.

The first section is as good an introduction to the existing explanations as one can hope for. In presenting these explanations, Koyama and Rubin exhibit the kind of judgement one fears they might not when they write that “the goal of this book is not to privilege our preferred theories at the expense of others” (page 10). They present the strengths of, for instance, geographical explanations for some types of variation in comparative economic development but also the obvious, fundamental problem of the timing of the rise in real incomes for geographical explanations.

On the controversial and increasingly influential debate on the role of colonisation and exploitation in the Industrial Revolution, the authors are quite firm: the most influential and most incendiary claims overpromise. Colonisation, especially in places like the Belgian Congo, terrorised and extracted wealth from natives and their land but provide little explanatory power for the great increase in the rate of innovation and real per capita income.

In the chapters on culture and institutions, the authors introduce explanations that were discounted by earlier (perhaps more familiar) materialist explanations. “To understand the causes of growth,” they summarise Douglass North as thinking “one has to study the incentives that led individuals in some societies to build factories and invest, to go to school, and to acquire new skills” (page 38). They then summarise the work of the last decades on the roles of various institutional features like the rule of law, property rights, and political institutions in economic growth.

On cultural explanations they show the weakness of broad arguments like, for instance, the supposed fundamental incompatibility of Islamic culture and economic growth while also showing the real, path-dependent effects of institutional features (like bans on printing presses, and the ability to use slave soldiers rather than cede power to feudal lords and parliaments) themselves influenced by cultural and religious features of Islamic society (the subject of Rubin’s previous book).

This is representative of a particular strength of the book: it is supported by contemporary research on economic history both before the Industrial Revolution and outside of northwestern Europe that is little known outside the field.

The book is most interesting in the second section, particularly in chapters 7 and 8. Rather than simply dismissing geography, colonisation, or demography in some quest for a monocausal explanation, the authors weave it into their nuanced chronological narrative about first how and why sustained growth began in Britain and then how it spread until much of the world had escaped poverty.

By the 18th century, the authors argue, there were a collection of preconditions for sustained economic growth in northwestern Europe most particularly in the Netherlands and Britain. For instance, many of the common institutional explanations for “Why Britain?” also apply to the Netherlands. These explanations are not wrong in the sense that they were necessary, but they were obviously not sufficient for the increase in commercially important innovations and then the resulting rise in real income per person. Among other things they show that, compared to the Netherlands, Britain was better able to fund wars (and therefore not smother economic growth with high rates of taxation) and better able to reform institutions to sustain an unprecedented rate of economically viable commercial innovation (as distinct from scientific discoveries, many of which were made elsewhere).

Drawing on recent research they show two of the main explanations for how Britain stood apart and turned these preconditions into innovation and industrialisation. Past periods of rising incomes were snuffed out by Malthusian dynamics (discussed in Chapter 5) and they stress the crucial difference in the 18^th and 19^th century Britain that allowed escape: “Above all else, the major revolutionary change during the Industrial Revolution was an increase in the rate of innovation” (page 150). One theory of this increase is a more materialist theory about it being the rational response to relatively high labour costs and relatively low energy costs. The second is more dependent on specific ideas and cultural attitudes about innovation, science, and human progress. While these ideas may have been widespread throughout Europe, only Britain had both the skilled craftsmen that industrial innovation required and the institutional preconditions.

Britain’s Industrial Revolution started the climb out of widespread poverty with positive knock-on effects for the rest of the world, but its cause is not the only important question covered in the second section. In the span of just 40 pages Koyama and Rubin race (perhaps too quickly) through the resulting benefits of innovation and industrialisation in Britain and then the (uneven) global diffusion of economic growth.

The authors rightly stress the important distinction between innovations, which determine economic growth at the frontier, and the diffusion of these productivity-enhancing innovations, which determines the ability of less developed countries to catch up with the wealthiest ones. Catch up growth is not simply a question of adopting new technologies, but rather (among other things) having the right set of institutions to enable their adoption. Chapter 10 delves some of the examples of successful convergence emphasising the culturally and politically contingent nature of reforms that enable it (and the past barriers to convergence).

Koyama and Rubin have managed to condense these and other issues into just 240 pages. This is mostly for the better. However, the limited length and scope of the work necessarily rules out a rich, compelling historical narrative. The prose does not stir and some conceptual references could be better explained, but these criticisms are insignificant compared to the successes of what the book does do. Its own claims and its assessments of existing work will be interesting to a wide range of readers.

Others may be disappointed by the lack of easy answers for the remainder of the world that still struggles with extreme poverty:

“We know what has worked in various historical contexts. But merely transplanting what worked elsewhere to poverty-stricken societies isn’t the solution. Context matters. Culture and the historical past matter. So do demography and geography” (page 224).

Koyama and Rubin don’t offer an easy answer; they offer to introduce readers to the best ideas surrounding some of the most important questions in human history.

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“How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth” by Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin was published in 2022 by Polity Press (ISBN 13: 9781509540235). 259pp.

John Kroencke is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Enterprise, Markets and Ethics. For more information about John please click here.

In the last few years, increasing numbers of people across the political spectrum and across the developed world have begun to recognize the effects of restrictive housing rules on high housing prices in many global cities. In these cities, the physical cost of producing an additional unit of housing is lower than the value at which one could sell it for, but people do not produce more because of regulations. And importantly, the implications of restricted housing development don’t end with elevated prices, as those prices create economic and social ripples. 

Cities are many things, but they are primarily labor markets. As successful cities become more expensive, prospective employees and founders are prevented from moving there. Because there are agglomeration and other network effects, firms want to locate near one another and related businesses. Compared to the counterfactual where moving to successful cities was easier, we are both poorer and growing slower. 

Too often analysis of this problem stops there and assumes by some magical thinking that pointing at the issue is the same thing as solving it. Once the basic problem is outlined, questions of political economy become central. Why is housing restricted? What can be done about it? How do places without housing shortages operate? Thankfully, a number of activists are engaged in the difficult task of reform. 

The purpose of this essay is to assess the two major approaches to reforming housing policy: one which seeks to use political power at a higher level to disempower locally imposed restrictions, and the second which seeks to use higher-level power to bypass mid-level veto players and let small groups upzone themselves. 

Logic of blanket decisions from above 

YIMBY is an acronym standing for “Yes, In My Back Yard” and designates a pro-housing movement supportive of increasing the housing supply in cities. It’s often contrasted with and sets itself in opposition to NIMBY-ism (“Not In My Back Yard”) where residents oppose proposed development in their local area. The YIMBY position supports increasing the housing supply as a response to escalating and unaffordable housing costs. 

Many of the recent YIMBY successes in the United States have relied on state preemption to upzone large swathes of the state. Urbanist Nolan Gray made the case for this approach in a 2017 article where he argued that local policymakers are biased in favor of narrow interests that ultimately harm the aggregate. On the other hand, “State policymakers are often removed from the parochial interests of NIMBY neighborhoods groups… They are also judged on the performance of the state as a whole. This means that they can take a broader view.” Unlike more legally complex issues of federal preemption, state level preemption is conceptually clear: “given that local governments are ‘creatures of the state,’ state policymakers can, in a sense, regulate the regulators, determining how local governments can and cannot operate.” 

This approach has had legislative success in California, Minnesota, and other states that have sought to force municipal governments to allow more houses. One of the most successful elements of these reforms has been related to accessory dwelling units (also known as granny flats or casitas). Additional reforms have targeted increased density near existing public transit, minimum lot size requirements, and floor area ratios (FAR). 

On the other hand, this approach relies on the ability of NIMBYs not to collectively organize and limit the imposed liberalization, whether through their state legislator or by amending the state constitution. In recent months the latter has received more attention after the continued success of YIMBY bills. 

In the rest of the world, much planning is done at the national level. In Japan, for example, this seems to have a positive effect, but there are a number of other differences in political economy that may limit the lessons that can be derived. Additionally, planning in the United Kingdom is mainly national, and the situation is if anything worse there than in the United States. This is in part due to the discretionary nature of the UK system, which state action has been unable to remove.

Logic of allowing opt-ins or opt-outs

In the UK, another approach has had more political traction but is also receiving attention in the United States. Rather than shifting the level of decision making up, advocates of hyperlocal zoning argue that the city or block level is more appropriate. The argument is rooted in both the political economy literature (Ostrom, Coase, Ellickson), law in other sectors, and pragmatic political concerns. The latter was strengthened with the recent failure of the UK government’s attempt to engineer planning reforms from the national level and the departure of former Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick. His replacement Michael Gove has signaled support for allowing hyperlocal upzoning. 

The details of any policy would likely be based on the Strong Suburbs report from last February in which it was proposed that residents of streets (not homeowners) would be allowed to vote on whether to expand the buildable space on their street. Should a supermajority of 60% of residents vote to approve the change, homeowners could expand their homes in line with an architectural design code submitted prior to the vote. Beyond the protections determined by residents, the proposal itself places limits on densification and alteration. For instance, it only would apply to buildings erected after 1918, and the max number of floors residents could allow would be determined by existing density. 

Homeowners would be incentivized to liberalize their neighborhoods through the direct financial benefits that would accrue to them because the market value of added space is higher than the physical cost of the extension. Furthermore, the rules set by them and limited by the proposal itself limit the spillover effects of neighboring development.

Other empirical support for this type of approach can be found in existing examples from the United States, Korea, and Israel. In each of these cases, locals’ concerns were taken seriously (or at least more seriously than in the competing approach), and there was an ability for hyper-local districts to vote on rule changes and/or opt out. The idea is that allowing the most resistant subset the option of not opting in–as well as the option of opting out–will make it easier to form a winning coalition for reform without exciting the blocking activity of veto players. Still, John Myers argues that in the examples of Korea and Israel, insufficient attention was paid to local concerns, which gave rise to political resistance and the limitation of the reforms. 

This article was originally published in Metaculus Journal.

John Kroencke is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Enterprise, Markets and Ethics. For more information about John please click here.

Despite criticising the actions of big business being a favourite pastime of many a business minister, John Kroencke writes that wider opinion of big business is actually more favourable than we might expect. 

Like many I rely on Amazon. In fact, there is rarely a week where a package doesn’t arrive on my doorstep. While I feel compelled to keep this quiet among certain Guardian-reading crowds in London, recent polling conducted for the Centre for Enterprise, Markets, and Ethics has found that clear majorities of the British public trust big British businesses and even multinational firms.

A whopping 69 per cent percent of the British public tends to trust big UK businesses. A slightly smaller 61 per cent of the public tends to trust multinational businesses. Despite well founded fears that younger generations are turning away from the market, for those between 18 and 34 years old this measure rises to 73 per cent (72 per cent for large domestic businesses). Perhaps surprisingly only 52 per cent of those 55+ trust multinationals. For cosmopolitan London this measure rises to 71 per cent over the 62 per cent for England as a whole. While there is a sizable difference between the 61 per cent trust in for multinational business and 88 per cent trust in family businesses that does not diminish the results.

This polling conducted for the Centre for Enterprise, Markets and Ethics by Savanta ComRes polled six audiences between 10th May 2021 and 5th August 2021 to secure their findings: the general public, regular churchgoers, business leaders, Muslim and Jewish people, and Church leaders. They also conducted in-depth interviews between 10th May 2021 and 5th August 2021 with ten Anglican and Catholic bishops. The total sample size was just short of 3,500 people.

Why might the public support multinationals and big business more than many journalists, church leaders (only 30 per cent of whom tend to trust multinationals) and politicians? One reason is that while they may love to support their local businesses, the convenience, reliability, and price offered by larger businesses is simply difficult to deny. We may pick and choose what we are willing to pay more for whether it is a local café or butcher, but we do so in the context of relying on big business for the heavy lifting. Even Meg Ryan’s character, Kathleen Kelly, in 1999’s You’ve Got Mail buys her coffee from Starbucks while watching her small bookstore lose out in competition with a larger chain retailer.

Interestingly although once mainly the product of people on the left-wing like small bookstore owners on the Upper West Side, multinational and big business bashing has increasingly been advanced by right-wing politicians as well. In the United States, there is an active effort to regulate Big Tech and Amazon, in particular, is the target of scorn. In the UK, the concerns of multinationals were dismissed with the Prime Minister’s infamous “f*** business” comment in 2018. And more recently it was floated that Amazon and other online retailers may be the target of future policy in a misguided effort to ‘save the high street.’

It is perhaps worth distinguishing between big businesses of the regulated sort and those that maintain their edge despite competitive pressure. While anti-tech claims are becoming louder, tech concentration seems to benefit consumers and there is obvious dynamism in the field. Previous market leaders like Myspace and Nokia faded away at great speed when the product they offered was outclassed by new entrants. The quality of these new products was not a direct result of their funding as we can see in the failure of some high-profile products released by big firms. For instance, when Amazon released its smartphone, it went nowhere for the same reason. Coronavirus drove many new users to Zoom and not just to previous leaders like Skype and Microsoft Teams.

While politicians may inveigh Amazon for its supposed harms, a poll from this summer found that Amazon was more popular than the Supreme Court, NATO, the Center for Disease Control and other major American institutions excepting the armed services. More than just being unpopular, however, efforts to go after Big Tech risk reducing competition by limiting the ability of mergers and acquisitions that allow firms to compete with one another. The bipartisan bill introduced by Amy Klobuchar (Minnesota) and Tom Cotton (Arkansas) doing just that in the United States conveniently allows the large retailers Target (Minnesota) and Walmart (Arkansas) to engage in the practice while limiting their competitor Amazon and other Big Tech firms.

While they may be more popular than expected, multinationals shouldn’t feel too secure in popular opinion saving them from efforts to regulate them. The efforts to regulate them are increasing and trust of the public is tepid. While a majority trust multinationals just 8 per cent say that they trust multinationals a great deal and 11 per cent for large UK businesses compared to 23 per cent for family firms.

This article was originally published on Comment Central.

John Kroencke is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Enterprise, Markets and Ethics. For more information about John please click here.

Those following the news in the U.S. and U.K. have strained to find much of intellectual interest in contemporary policy debates. Sure, there are ever-widening cultural battles and an array of topics on which one can admire the slogan-jousting of a few hired hands, but there is a seemingly small market for reasoned discussion about the nuts and bolts of policy. Even worse, there is little desire to think beyond direct, intended consequences. In this context, Ezra Klein’s recent article in the New York Times about supply-side thinking was a breath of fresh air. In the article, Klein argues that the American Left should concern itself more with economic growth and supply side issues rather than just redistribution or subsidies for those with low incomes. He sees in both federal and state policies a nascent transformation that he dubs “supply-side progressivism.”

It is worth quoting his argument:

progressives are often uninterested in the creation of the goods and services they want everyone to have. This creates a problem and misses an opportunity. The problem is that if you subsidize the cost of something that there isn’t enough of, you’ll raise prices or force rationing. You can see the poisoned fruit of those mistakes in higher education and housing. But it also misses the opportunity to pull the technologies of the future progressives want into the present they inhabit. That requires a movement that takes innovation as seriously as it takes affordability.

While Klein presents an optimistic case for a pragmatic left, there are many worrying trends. For one, some on the political left are drifting towards dangerously radical environmental thinking seen in groups like Extinction Rebellion. These individuals damage their purported cause by diverting attention from appropriate responses to the challenges of environmental degradation. While the dangers of environmental damage including climate change are obviously real (and the precise nature of some of the tail risks are difficult to calculate), the carbon-intensive economy is not something that can just be abandoned without consequences. Trade-offs exist and must be navigated. Innovation is needed to find the supply-side alternatives to damaging fuel sources.

While extreme ideas like degrowth may provide an attractive cause for many on the environmental left it is a clear example of a scenario where the medicine is far worse than the disease. Advocates often fail to deal with obvious problems in their moral thinking. As Kelsey Piper writes in a piece evaluating degrowth and prominent proponent Jason Hinkel, “The things degrowthers care about — leisure time, health care, life expectancy — are strongly correlated with societal wealth. The generosity of a welfare state and the availability of transfers to a state’s poorest people are also strongly correlated with societal wealth. Innovation, discovery, invention, and medical technology improvements are also strongly correlated with societal wealth.” The standard pro-market moral case against redistribution or other interventions that may threaten future growth, is that they are more morally complicated that advocates think because they risk future gains for the intended beneficiaries. This argument is even more important in the case of degrowth where the purported moral case is focused directly and explicitly not just reducing the rate of future economic gains, but on reducing the size of the economy and the myriad benefits it brings.

Almost as troubling as the core proposals of degrowthers are their critiques of other widely held benefits of a dynamic, forward-looking, enterprise economy. For instance, while the role of innovation in contributing to better outcomes including reducing climate change and mitigating its effects may seem obvious, many committed degrowthers decry “solutionism” or the idea that technology offers a way out of the problems. This concept allows them to discount any proposal short of their extreme ideas, sometimes with clear negative effects on their purported cause. For instance, a former member of Extinction Rebellion Zion Lights emphasizes the anti-nuclear mindset among other things that led her to leave the group, recognizing that to deal with climate change might entail embracing nuclear. Even Angela Merkel, a physics Ph.D., was persuaded to end nuclear power in Germany in the wake of the Fukushima meltdown. The consequence of this decision was that one of the most environmentally-minded countries emitted more greenhouse gasses.

While I’ve mostly written about the political left it is worth stressing that many of the same critiques apply to the contemporary right. The government under Boris Johnson has shown little interest in thinking about serious reforms to the underperforming National Health Service or other types of regulatory changes that led many on the right to support Brexit. Instead, governments and politicians both here and in the US are interested in a politics of increased spending, borrowing, and taxes. Many across the political spectrum are unhappy with the performance of the status quo and desire a return to supply-side thinking. I hope they all succeed.

John Kroencke is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Enterprise, Markets and Ethics. For more information about John please click here.

Housing reform efforts in both Britain and the United States have tended to get caught in the quagmire of fractious politics. For years, figures on the left have called for below market rate or social housing. Those in the free-market camp have called for easier private market development rights. Renters have emphasized the outsized returns that homeowners have benefited from over the last decades. Homeowners have emphasized their rights (perceived and real) to control the nature of local new development. The sound and fury of competing claims has meant that the status quo has continued to rule the day and every year the total shortage is exasperated as fewer housing units are built than they would be under less restrictive rules. Despite these familiar arguments there are in fact many reforms which both allow new housing and benefit existing homeowners.

Accessory Dwelling Unit Reforms in the United States

In the United States— where land use planning is done at the municipal and state level- multiple accessory dwelling unit reforms have passed in recent years. Under these rules homeowners can build an additional unit in their back garden, convert a garage, or subdivide an existing home into two or more units. While the laws impose limits on things like the size of the units and their distance from neighboring plots of land, they have been a huge improvement on the status quo.

Data from recent years in California shows that thousands of homeowners have taken advantage of this change with about half of them retaining the living space for their private use and the other half renting the newly created spaces out on the market. Additionally, many of those who choose not to rent out the space on the market use it for elder relatives, siblings, children, or friends.

The housing shortage means that as more and more people desire to live in places with little ability to build, the prices are bid up above the construction cost. Because of this, newly permitted space can be incredibly profitable for homeowners both as a stream of new revenue for those who choose to rent out the space but also in the resale value of the home.

Potential Reforms in the United Kingdom

While there haven’t been reforms of exactly this type in the UK, there is great potential for mutually beneficial reform. Unlike much of California, London and other cities in the UK were developed far before top-down planning systems emerged. As such, one useful starting point for thinking about these types of reforms is to look around at the type of development that was allowed in past decades before researching which factors stop current contemporary markets from responding in similar ways.

In a recent briefing paper for Create Streets, Dr. Samuel Hughes does just this for mansard roof storeys. Mansard roof storeys are distinct from a standard loft conversion because they feature a roof line with two slopes. The steep lower slope of the roof allows most of the added interior space to be unrestricted in height while the shallow upper slope limits the added height to the exterior. The general effect of this ingenious architectural feature is to provide the most increased interior volume within the smallest envelope.

While in the Georgian, Victorian, and Edwardian eras it was entirely natural for residents to add additional space as land prices rose, this practice has been stopped by subsequent regulations. With these changes some streets were ossified in transition: some terrace homes had already built mansard roof storeys while others hadn’t, leaving what Hughes calls a sawtooth effect. Hughes proposes that residents on streets already exhibiting this sawtooth effect should have the right to add mansards of their own. Perhaps more importantly he proposes a rule that would allow the residents of parapeted houses built between 1700 and 1918 decide by simple majority at the street level if they wish allow mansards on their street. As part of the proposal, Hughes provides a basic design guide that would limit the pitch, height, and other aesthetic aspects of any mansards allowed by the two mechanisms.

While this proposal would make new mansards much easier, the system does occasionally allow them. For instance, as Hugh Graham describes in the Times the residents of Fitzroy Road in leafy Primrose Hill London were allowed to eliminate the existing sawtooth effect on their street in the last decade. The additions were only approved in joint- every one of the remaining eleven freeholds had to agree to build additions matching the preexisting mansard on the twelfth terrace house.

As a result of this permission, thousands of square feet were created in an expensive part of London with no downside. For places like Primrose Hill where the floor space is valued so highly, the construction costs of the additions yielded a return of around one thousand per cent.

This recent briefing paper follows up on a February 2021 Policy Exchange proposal from Hughes and Ben Southwood which allow even more street level based bottom-up planning for post-1918 structures.

While the oppositional politics of housing reform dominates the pages of newspapers, there is great hope for mutually beneficial housing reform in both the US and the UK. 

John joined the Centre in 2021 after finishing his Ph.D. in Economics at George Mason University. He spent the 2020-21 academic year as a Final Year Fellow at the Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University.

His role involves research on family business as part of the Centre’s Ethics and Theology project and contributions to the wider work of the Centre. As part of this, he will complete research on the role of the great estates in the private provision of land planning and other work on the role of markets in housing and environmental issues. John’s past research has focused mainly on the history of economics and housing.

A native of California, John looks forward to travelling around the U.K. and Europe.