Harold Cox

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

The son of Homersham Cox, a County Court judge, Cox was educated at Tonbridge School in Kent and was Scholar and later Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge where he took a mathematics degree in 1882. He later lectured on Political Economy for Cambridge University Extension Society in 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. He spent two years in India teaching mathematics in the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College (now Aligarh Muslim University) at Aligarh and returned to England in 1887 to read for the Bar, and became a student of Gray's Inn 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 during the passage of the Liberal welfare reforms. Cox, almost alone in the Liberal Party, 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. G. P. Gooch, a Liberal MP in support of such reforms, said that Cox "was the only man on the Liberal side who clung to the doctrines of laissez-faire in their unadulterated form. While we saw in the state an indispensable instrument for establishing a minimum standard of life for the common man, he dreaded the slackening of moral fibre as a result of getting “something for nothing”."

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