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Thomas Babington Macaulay
Born
Thomas Babington Macaulay against Talfourd's Copyright Bill, February 5, 1841
Talfourd's bill would have stretched copyright to sixty years after an author's death. Macaulay answered with a closely reasoned case that copyright is a monopoly, "a tax on readers for the purpose of giving a bounty to writers," worth paying only as far as it buys new books. The Commons threw the bill out by 45 votes to 38, a result his biographers credit to him. A year later he won again: the House came round to his alternative term of forty-two years from publication, and the law that passed was remodeled around it. Few speeches have so direct a paper trail from argument to statute.
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William Ewart Gladstone
Born
William Ewart Gladstone's reply to Disraeli's budget, December 1852
Disraeli closed the budget debate late at night with a fierce speech, and Gladstone rose at once to answer it, to a storm of cheering and counter-cheering. The division, taken in the early morning, went against the government by 305 votes to 286, Lord Derby's minority ministry fell, and Lord Aberdeen formed a Peelite and Whig coalition with Gladstone at the Exchequer. His early biographers say his speech turned the vote. Other accounts give more weight to Irish members who deserted the government over its income tax plans, so read it as the speech that sealed a defeat rather than one that conjured it from nothing.
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William Joynson-Hicks, 1st Viscount Brentford
Born
William Joynson-Hicks against the revised Prayer Book, December 15, 1927
The Church of England's revised Prayer Book needed the approval of Parliament. It came from the bishops, the Church Assembly had approved it and the Lords had passed it, so the Commons was expected to follow. Joynson-Hicks, Home Secretary and a leading evangelical, attacked it as a drift from the Church's Protestant principles; the Bishop of Durham wrote that he made the speech of his life. The Labour member Rosslyn Mitchell followed with a vehement speech also said to be very effective. The Commons rejected the book that night, and rejected a reworked version in 1928. A rare case of argument on the floor overturning the settled plans of an established church.
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Leo Amery
Born
Leo Amery in the Norway Debate, May 7, 1940
Amery sat on the Conservative benches, so his attack on Neville Chamberlain came from the government's own side. He ended by pointing at Chamberlain and borrowing Cromwell's words, "In the name of God, go," the last of them in a near whisper. The next night 41 members who normally backed the government voted with the opposition and an estimated 60 more Conservatives abstained, cutting a notional majority of 213 to 81. The government technically won, but Chamberlain resigned on May 10. Amery himself thought he had helped push Labour into forcing a division at all, a reminder that a speech can matter by making a vote happen.
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Wolfgang Schäuble
Born
Wolfgang Schäuble on moving the capital to Berlin, June 20, 1991
After reunification the Bundestag had to decide whether parliament and government would stay in Bonn or move to Berlin, on cross-party motions rather than party lines. A survey of members four days before the vote put Bonn well ahead. Schäuble, the interior minister who had negotiated the unification treaty, made an urgent, passionate appeal to his colleagues to take the step. Berlin won by 338 votes to 320. Many who were there credit his speech with a decisive influence on the result, and press reports said the mood turned after it; the votes of eastern German members also tipped the balance.
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Carol Moseley Braun
Born
Carol Moseley Braun on the Confederate flag insignia, July 22, 1993
Jesse Helms had offered an amendment renewing a federal design patent for the United Daughters of the Confederacy insignia, which featured a Confederate flag, and the Senate's first vote went his way when her motion to table it failed. Moseley Braun, seven months into her first term, took the floor to say "this vote is about race" and that the Senate should not approve that flag, threatening to filibuster until the room froze over. After hours of debate the Senate voted again, and enough senators reversed themselves, 27 by one contemporary count, that the renewal was rejected. Few modern cases show a floor speech moving votes so plainly, on the record and in one debate.
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Nancy Pelosi
Born
Nancy Pelosi before the first bailout vote, September 29, 2008
With markets falling, the House took up the Wall Street rescue, and the Speaker's closing speech blamed the crisis on "a right-wing ideology of anything goes," with no supervision, discipline or regulation. The bill failed 228 to 205. John Boehner said her remarks sent Republicans who had planned to back it the other way, and the Republican whip, Roy Blunt, said a dozen Republicans switched to no after the speech. Democrats replied that Republican leaders could not deliver even a third of their own members. Nobody has named the members who switched, so this is the contested case: proof that a speech gets the blame when a vote fails, if not proof that it decided it.
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Hilary Benn
Born
Hilary Benn on air strikes in Syria, December 2, 2015
Benn closed the debate for the opposition while disagreeing with his own leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who opposed the strikes, with Labour members given a free vote. His case that ISIS had to be confronted drew applause from all sides of the chamber, and Stella Creasy tweeted that his speech had persuaded her. Sixty-six Labour MPs voted with the government, and the motion passed 397 to 223. It would have passed without them, so Benn earns his place for the minds the record shows he moved, not for the result: a member saying in public, on the night, that a speech had persuaded her.
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