The Sun.
London, England, 1839-09-10 00:00:00

BIRMINGHAM POLICE BILL.

AT a Meeting of the TOWN COUNCIL of
the BOROUGH of BIRMINGHAM, held in the Com-
mittee-room of the Town Hall, on the 3d of September instant;
The MAYOR in the Chair;
It was resolved as follows :
_ _

That the Act, which has just passed through Parliament, in-
tituled " An Act for improving the Police of Birmingham,"
is, in effect, a measure of confiscation of almost the whole, and,
certainly, of, by far, the most important of the municipal rights
of this newly-created Corporation.
That the measure in question was introduced unsolicited and
unsought by this Council : an assertion, to which it will not be
enough to say in answer, that the Mayor had previously ad-
dressed a letter to the Secretary of State for the Home
Department, suggesting the expediency of assisting the bo-
rough with a loan, for the purpose of establishing a more
efficient police; since that letter was not, nor did it pro-
fess to be, written by the authority or with the privity of
the Town Council; but was, on the face of it, merely a
private inquiry as to the probable course of the Govern-
ment in the matter to which it related :—whilst the intima-
tion which it contained that, if the answer were favourable,
the Town Council should be convened to consider the subject,
told, as plainly as words could speak, that, as yet, the Council
had not expressed any opinion with respect to the proceeding.
That, moreover, so far was the letter An question from sug-
gesting, or, even in the most distant manner, hinting at the
appointment of a Government Commissioner, or the establish-
ment of so odious and unconstitutional a force as a Government
Police, that it distinctly pointed out the Town Council as the
recipients of the loan, and the only proper authority for apply-
ing it to its intended purpose.
That, however the Government may now choose to put a
different construction on this communication from the Mayor,
it is plain that it was, at first, distinctly understood in this
sense, and in this sense alone, by the Home Secretary, who,
accordingly brought a Bill into Parliament authorising a loan
of Ten 'Thousand Pounds to the Town Council. Nor was it
until Sir Robert Peel, and a deputation from the Birmingham
Tories, in perfect consistency with their known hostility to
popular institutions, and the representative principle, had sig-
nified to him their wishes on the subject (wishes apparently
too much like command), that he abandoned his original mea-
sure, anti substituted in its place another, which, if it. were
not contrived on set purpose, was, at all events, obviously cal-
culated to afford a triumph to the opposite party, by taking
away the authority, and disparaging the character of the new
municipal system.
That the measure, thus introduced by the Government, on
the suggestion of its political opponents, is obviously founded on
false pretences :—For, though the reason for passing the Act,
as alleged in the preamble, is, that " doubts are entertained as
to the authority of the Corporation to levy rates ;" (doubts, be
it observed, which never ought to have existed, and never would
have existed, had only proper caution been exercised in framing
the Charter ; ) yet, instead of adopting Lord Brougham's sug-
gestion of limiting the duration of the Act to the continuance
of those doubts, it fixes, for this purpose, an arbitrary and un-
necessarily long period of two years, and " from thence to the
end of the next Session of Parliament." Words of an alarm-
ing import, and showing an already half-formed intention to
renew the measure on the expiration of the appointed time.
That, as a further proof of the disingenuousness which has
characterised the whole of this proceeding, it is worthy of ob-
servation, that, when Lord Brougham proposed to vest the
appointment of the Commissioner in the Town Council rather
than in the Government, the suggestion was resisted bz Lord
Duncannon, on the strange ground, " That the Town Council
had petitioned for a police :—" a ground as has already been
shown, false in fact, and, even if true, absurdly inconclusive
as an argument ; since it is surely one thing to have a police,
and another to have a Government Commissioner at the head
of it.
That, no sooner did the Council become acquainted with the
real nature of this measure, than they indignantly repudiated it,
as a marked insult to the intelligent Burgesses of this town, than
whom, no where can men be found better fitted far the duty of
self-government—as an outrage to the representative principle
—and as a violation of that system of municipal polity, which
has ever been deemed, and by none professedly, more than by
the present Ministers, to lie at the foundation of—and to be the
best security for—NATIONAL LIBERTY.
That, unless this usurpation be firmly resisted at the threshold,
this Council truly believes, and now warns the people of Eng-
, land to that effect, that the precedent just created will not
prove barren ; but that, upon one pretence or other, all the Mu-
nicipal bodies throughout the country, will, before long, be
stripped of their rightful privileges and authorities, and reduced
to a state of slavish submission to the general Government.
That, for the above reasons, this Council does now, strongly
and emphatically, PROTEST against the attempt, thus made,
to engraft one of the most pernicious institutions of Conti-
nental tyranny on the true English system of popular repre-
sentation ; and hereby declares its conviction, that it is in duty
bound to avail itself of all just and lawful means to relieve this
town, and to guard the country, at large, from a measure so
despotic and unconstitutional.
By Order of the Council,
W. REDFERN, Town Clerk.