In the lesser famine of 1782-83, the government ordered the closure of the ports in order to prevent the export of foodstuffs in order to deal with the famine.
However, by the 1840s and 50s, free-market ideology and lassez-faire economics had become the dominant ideology of the British government, especially under the Whigs, and they truly believed that the solution to almost every ill was the application of lassez-fair capitalism and non-interventionism was the best way to solve this kind of problem.
Trevelyan was not an interventionist, he did not support tarrifs, and I find it ludicrous, given his antipathy towards state intervention and lassez faire economics, that he would have supported the corn laws or tarriffs.
As I said before, the British government wasn’t exporting food out of Ireland, Irish merchants were doing that because in a free-trade enviroment were the gov’t refused to put restrictions on trade as they had done in the past under such circumstances, it was simply more profitable to these food merchants to sell their products on the world market.
What the British government should have done is what they did in previous famines. Shut the ports and forced the merchants to dispose of their food on the Irish market for the duration of the crisis. They did not do so because they were ideologically committed to free trade and the notion that free-market conditions would make food the cheapest it could be and therefore solve the problem of the famine, but they were wrong. Their ideology blinded them to the reality of the fact that massive state intervention was required to alleviate the crisis....
Please explain this, comrade:
If the British government were committed to the free market, why did it not permit a free market in land and why did it not permit a free market in labor?
More to the point, why did it not allow cheap Indian grain to be sold on the open market in Ireland?
Why would a government allegedly committed to free markets restrict market activity in land and labor and grain?