British Parliament

British Parliament is presented in Poor Things not through a neutral account of its procedures but through a sustained argument about whom political power serves. In Harry Astley’s lessons to Bella Baxter, Parliament appears as a place where laws can protect wealth, free trade can be enforced through imperial power, and reformers may seek change even while doubting the institution’s willingness to permit it. The resulting portrait is polemical: Parliament is both a mechanism of social order and the object of competing plans to change that order.

Political authority and class

Harry links parliamentary authority to the interests of property. He argues that wealthy people use acts of Parliament to deprive the poor of homes and livelihoods, while unearned incomes grow through stock-market speculation and property owners avoid productive work. In this account, legislation does not stand apart from economic power; it helps preserve the advantages of those who already possess it. The lesson makes political institutions part of Bella’s explanation for why a society rich in industry can still leave people hungry and insecure.

His account of the response to unemployment after the Napoleonic Wars gives this argument a concrete setting. With large numbers of people unemployed and hungry, a parliamentary committee discussed the crisis, and the government feared revolution. Robert Owen, a socialist factory owner, proposed that businesses whose profits exceeded five per cent use the surplus to improve workers’ food, housing, and schooling rather than undercut competitors. Harry contrasts this proposal with the Malthusian claim that better-fed poor people would have more children. He then describes a wider system of barracks, police, prisons, and deliberately grim workhouses, where families could be divided and people might choose exposure and death over entering. His account presents repression and deprivation not as accidental failures but as conditions that, in his bitter formulation, helped keep revolution at bay.

Legislation, freedom, and commerce

Harry challenges the idea that political freedom can be understood apart from slavery. He points to ancient Greek and Roman governments, and to the founders of the United States, as societies that debated freedom while maintaining slavery. He then recounts the beginnings of the British slave trade: in 1562, Sir John Hawkyns took enslaved Africans from the Portuguese and sold them to the Spanish in the New World. Parliament made the trade a criminal offence in 1811. The sequence lets Bella recognize the importance of abolition, while Harry complicates any simple account of national virtue by setting the prohibition beside the earlier participation in the trade.

He similarly recasts free trade as a political definition of freedom that serves commercial power. In his explanation, the ability to buy cheaply and sell dearly anywhere depends on the army and navy. British merchants first excluded French competition from the Indian cloth trade; after British manufacturers adopted machinery, British interests sought Indian cotton and wool while preventing others from buying Indian cloth. Harry invokes a governor’s report that the plains of Dacca were littered with weavers’ bones as an image of the human cost of that change. Parliament’s commercial policy, in this telling, is inseparable from military force and from the reshaping of livelihoods beyond Britain.

Famine and the costs of policy

Harry’s account of Ireland makes the consequences of commercial doctrine still more immediate. He says that eight out of ten Irish people depended on potatoes, while rents were paid to landlords descended from English invaders who held the richer land used for growing corn. When potato disease brought famine, a proposal to close Irish ports until Irish grain had been consumed in Ireland was rejected because it would interfere with free trade. Soldiers instead ensured that grain reached the ships. Harry attributes nearly a million deaths and the departure of a million and a half people to the resulting catastrophe.

The episode makes Parliament’s rejection of the proposal a decisive political choice in Harry’s indictment: the protection of trade takes precedence over keeping food in the country during famine. His account also echoes his earlier description of domestic poverty. Whether the subject is unemployed workers in Britain or starving peasants in Ireland, policy is measured against its effects on people with the least power to influence it.

Reform and the limits of Parliament

Harry describes socialism as a parliamentary route to change. Socialists, he explains, seek election so they can tax surplus wealth and legislate for productive work, decent conditions, food, housing, education, and health care. Bella responds warmly to this program. But Harry immediately sets out the opposing argument: Parliament is an alliance of monarchs, lords, bishops, lawyers, merchants, bankers, brokers, industrialists, military men, landlords, and civil servants, united in protecting their wealth. In his view, socialists elected to that institution will be outmaneuvered, bribed, or reduced to ineffectiveness.

He contrasts this strategy with communists who would organize across classes, wait for a severe financial crisis, take power temporarily, ensure that people had what they needed, and then disband. The contrast does not establish a neutral verdict on either movement; it stages the problem of whether an institution built around established interests can be used to transform them. Bella’s enthusiasm for social improvement and her resistance to Harry’s cynicism keep that political debate open rather than allowing his analysis to become the novel’s unquestioned conclusion.

Narrative significance

Parliament’s significance lies in the range of scales that Harry brings under its name: laws governing commerce and slavery, decisions made during famine, proposals for workers’ welfare, and the broader authority to shape people’s material lives. His lectures join public institutions to everyday conditions—food, work, housing, education, and family separation—so that political economy is not an abstraction but a force felt in bodies and households.

The account is also explicitly mediated by character and argument. Harry offers Bella a severe interpretation of history and politics; Bella questions his division of people into moral types and refuses to accept his conclusions without qualification. Parliament therefore functions both as the object of a radical critique and as a test of the critique itself: the reader sees the force of Harry’s examples while also seeing that his certainty does not settle what forms of action or hope remain possible.