Kmflett's Blog

In the Making of the English Working Class E P Thompson noted some of the issues that made William Cobbett angry about what he called ‘The Thing’ in the unreformed pre-1832 Parliament:

The anger of Cobbett, we need only think of the things which made him angry:  the fat contracts, the squalid scandals of the Royal Dukes, the soaring rents and taxes and the impoverishment of the rural labourers

200 years on a Guardian Editorial rightly notes that Jeremy Corbyn is still rightly angry about the Thing which identifies in a very similar way to Cobbett

“tax dodgers, dodgy landlords, bad bosses and big polluters”