Leeds
As proprietor and editor of the Mercury Baines became an important figure in the affairs of Leeds. An obituary in 1848 noted Mr Baines took a part in the formation and support of many, if not most of the public institutions of Leeds. In early youth he was a visitor of the Benevolent, or Strangers' Friend Society, to which he always continued a warm friend. He assisted to establish the House of Recovery, the Dispensary, the Lancasterian School, the Philosophical Society, the Mechanics' Institution, the Literary Society, the New Library, the Tradesman's Benevolent Society, the Leeds and Yorkshire Insurance Company, our Provident institutions, our Waterworks…- in short, nearly all the institutions for public utility and benevolence established in Leeds within the last half century.
He also became an important figure in Leeds politics, although as a Dissenter and a Reformer he was effectively excluded from Leeds Corporation which until the 1830s was a 'closed corporation'; vacancies were filled by election by the existing members of the corporation; they were Tories and generally Anglicans, and hence so were their successors. One area of political life from which Reformers and Dissenters could not be excluded was the vestry meeting of the (Anglican) parish church - all property owners (including Dissenters and other non-conformists) had to pay church rates and rate-payers were entitled to attend and vote. Baines fought a prolonged campaign to impose strict economy on church outgoings, starting in 1819 with a demand that accounts be published, and finally in 1828 managing to secure the election of churchwardens committed to economy.
In the decade before the Great Reform Act 1832 Leeds was not a parliamentary borough but was included in the Yorkshire constituency, now returning four MPs (normally two Whigs and two Tories, normally unopposed). In the 1830 General Election, Baines organised West Riding reformers to ensure that their interests were reflected by the choice of Lord Brougham and Viscount Morpeth as Whig nominees, a selection seen as a defeat of county Whigs by "Bainesocracy" of Leeds. On the Whigs coming to power, Brougham became Lord Chancellor, necessitating a by-election: this time the Whigs of rural Yorkshire forestalled the West Riding and secured a more traditional candidate: Sir John Vanden-Bempde-Johnstone of Harkness Hall, near Scarborough.
Baines was a leading light in reform agitation in Leeds, and was commissioned by Lord John Russell to determine whether qualification in borough constituencies could safely be set as low as £10 (rates paid a year). Baines found that in Leeds a £10 franchise would give the vote to the middle classes but still exclude the working classes: the results of Baines' investigation were reported by Russell in parliamentary debate as showing that "the £10 qualification does not admit any person who may not safely be intrusted with the elective franchise". As the reform crisis of 1831–1832 developed, Radicals (who wanted a more thorough-going reform: significantly wider suffrage, annual parliaments and the secret ballot) broke away from the Leeds reform organisation (the Leeds Association, set up by Baines and his associates) and founded the Leeds Radical Reform Union, pressing for Whig reform bills to be more thorough-going with a minority holding that they should be opposed (as a half-measure intended to choke off thorough reform). Baines strove to minimise the Radical breakaway, and to retain Radical support for moderate reform, by his own actions, by encouraging formation of a rival Leeds Political Union, by editorials in the Mercury and by ensuring that Radical meetings and manifestations were reported upon unfavourably by the Mercury. The Leeds Patriot, a Radical paper, soon found itself under attack from Baines, responding that "veracity has no charms for Mr Baines, when he has an object to carry...he will stoop to the meanest prevarication and the most contemptible falsehoods".
In the expectation that the Reform Bill of 1831, would pass, and would establish Leeds as a two-member borough constituency, the Leeds reformers chose two candidates in August 1831: John Marshall (whose father, also John Marshall was a leading Leeds millowner and had served as an MP for Yorkshire), and (at Baines's urging) Thomas Babington Macaulay, a gifted Whig orator with a national reputation, but no previous connection with Leeds. When elections for the first reformed parliament eventually took place in December 1832, the two Whigs comfortably defeated the sole Tory candidate Michael Thomas Sadler despite active support for Sadler from the Leeds radical reformers. Sadler had taken up the issue of factory reform; the Mercury (which had printed Richard Oastler's first letter on "Yorkshire Slavery" (the over-working and ill-treatment of children in the West Riding textile industry) before cooling on the issue) denounced this as a Tory trick to lure the gullible away from the Whig reform programme. (Baines and the Mercury were to hold similar views on the anti-Poor Law movement of the late 1830s; the underlying cause of working-class discontent was the Corn Laws, and all efforts should go into removing the underlying cause, rather than palliating its symptoms). Years of activity by Sadler and his brother in Leeds meant that much was known for and against him, and the Mercury was assiduous in reminding its readers of the 'against'.
The Tories and their Radical allies had attacked Macaulay as a placeman and a stranger: interested in Leeds only as providing him with a seat in Parliament; interested in a seat in Parliament largely as a means of securing comfortable sinecures for himself and his family (whose government appointments were currently yielding them a total annual income of over £4000). The Macaulay family was seriously financially embarrassed, and Macaulay soon decided that income from posts held only for so long as the Whigs held power was insufficiently secure. He resigned from parliament and went out to India in 1834 as a member of the supreme council of India, on an annual salary of £10,000. Baines was the Whig candidate at the ensuing by-election; there was a separate Radical candidate, but Baines's chief opponent was the Tory Sir John Beckett. Beckett was Leeds-born and educated; the Beckett family bank was pre-eminent in Leeds ("The Rothschilds and Barings of Leeds") and was recognised to have acted in the interests of Leeds as a whole in past crises, but Sir John had pursued a legal career away from Leeds, culminating in his appointment in mid-1817 (soon after his marriage to a daughter of the Earl of Lonsdale) as Judge Advocate-General, and consequent entry into Parliament in 1818 in Cockermouth, one of his father-in-law's pocket boroughs. As the Mercury pointed out, he had been Under-Secretary of State at the Home Office from 1806 to 1817, the Mercury going on to claim that it was from him that Oliver had received his instructions These and other accusations against Beckett were widely placarded across Leeds. Beckett (unlike Sadler) directly addressed Baines's accusations at the earliest opportunity in a good-humoured speech. Baines was elected, but his majority over Beckett was only thirty-one. Better Tory organisation for the 1835 general election saw Beckett displace Marshall, but at this and the 1837 general election Baines topped the poll; he stood down in at the 1841 election because his health was deteriorating.
