Harold Cox

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Harold Cox (Tonbridge, Kent 1859 - 1 May 1936) was a Liberal MP for Preston from 1906 to 1909.

The son of a County Court judge, Cox was educated at Tonbridge School in Kent and at Jesus College, Cambridge. He later worked as a lecturer in Political Economy for Cambridge at York and Hull. He also worked as an agricultural labourer in Kent and Surrey for nearly one year in order to discover what life for English labourers was like. He started a communistic farm which failed.[1] After working two years in India teaching mathematics he returned to England in 1887 to study for a legal profession but instead became a journalist. He was secretary of the Cobden Club from 1899 to 1904. After this he was elected as a Liberal for Preston in the general election of 1906, where he campaigned vigorously against the Unionist's proposals for Tariff Reform.

However his tenure as a Liberal MP was not a happy one; Cox was a classical liberal but the Liberal Party was moving away from this to embrace new liberalism. Cox, almost alone in the Liberal Party,[2] fought against his party's policies of old-age pensions, meals for poor schoolchildren and unemployment benefit. He exclaimed in his Socialism in the House of Commons (1907) that he was against weakening individual and group responsibility. He stepped down as an MP in 1909 because of these ideological differences. He was subsequently Alderman of the London County Council from 1910 to 1912 and then editor of the Edinburgh Review to 1929.

Cox also served on a number of committees: the Bryce Commission on German Outrages in 1915, the Committee on Public Retrenchment in 1916 and the Royal Commission on Decimal Currency in 1919.

[edit] Publications

  • Socialism in the House of Commons (1907).
  • Land Nationalisation.
  • Economic Liberty (1920).
  • The Problem of Population (1923).

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ In Who's Who 2006 and Who Was Who 1897-2005. Retrieved March 23, 2007, from http://www.xreferplus.com/entry/5342152.
  2. ^ W. H. Greenleaf, The British Political Tradition. Volume Two: The Ideological Heritage (London: Methuen, 1983), p. 96.
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