A third scandal of 1845 was associated with the poor law, one of the most controversial aspects of the ‘Condition of England Question’. When appalling abuses in a workhouse in rural Hampshire led to a public enquiry, MPs and their constituents alike were riveted by reports in the national press. The poor law was administered from the metropolis through official correspondence that ran to tens of thousands of letters each year. Press reports and a later select committee of the House of Commons revealed that the boundaries between official (semi-public) and private letters were sometimes blurred at critical moments in the Andover story. As in the Mazzini debates in the Commons, however, such letters were often the most solid evidence available. Troubling parallels between all three scandals of 1845 that are under review in this part were used by the Revd Sydney Godolphin Osborne, the most lively contributor of letters to The Times on the subject of the Andover workhouse, thus twisting the tail of Sir James Graham, the beleaguered home secretary of the day.

In the autumn of 1845, as news of a potato blight came in from various parts of Great Britain and Ireland, the prospect of famine in the ‘second island’ began to loom. By December, Sir Robert Peel was convinced that his government would have to save Ireland by abolishing the Corn Laws, that shibboleth of the Tory landed class. Having failed to take his cabinet with him, he stepped aside, only to be reinstated by the queen when Lord John Russell failed to form a Whig ministry. Six months later the Corn Laws were abolished and the Tories were out of office. This chapter examines the private political letters exchanged between Peel and Sir James Graham, Richard Cobden and John Bright of the Anti–Corn Law League, and other leading players, on the brink of the ‘great hunger’ in Ireland and the eventual resignation of a prime minister.

The chapter begins by detailing the massive economic support packages announced as the first COVID-19 lockdown was imposed and the accompanying promise to provide the NHS with ‘whatever it takes’. It shows how Conservative small-state ideology was jettisoned and a ‘magic money tree’ found that pushed up the annual budget deficit from £55 to £355 billion, 17 per cent of GDP. It will suggest that, in the light of this, people might question how necessary the preceding years of austerity had been, arguing that austerity in fact lowered economic growth, failed to pay down any of the massive debt from the financial crash and was based on flawed analysis.It will strongly refute the idea that the unprecedented costs of the lockdown must now be ‘paid for’ and the reckoning must come soon. Using detailed historical comparisons and arguments about the peculiar opportunity that negative real interest rates provide, it shows that we can accommodate a rise in the national debt without yet more austerity cuts to public services. The costs of the pandemic response can and should be treated in the same way that the one-off costs of war were in the past – paid off over the long term.