William Cobbett

William Cobbett (9 March 1763 - 18 June 1835) was an English pamphleteer, journalist, Member of Parliament and farmer born in Farnham, Surrey. He and a popular agrarian faction argued that reforming Parliament, abolishing "rotten boroughs", restraining wanton foreign activity and increasing wages would promote domestic peace and ease the poverty of farm labourers and smallholders. He backed lower taxes, saving, reversing enclosures of commons, and resisting the gold standard of 1821. He sought an end to borough-mongers, sinecurists and "tax-eaters" (overpaid, sometimes corrupt bureaucrats, public servants and stockbrokers), and dismissed British Jews in a typecast by the same token.