As the 200th anniversary of the Peterloo Massacre is marked on Friday one question that should be asked is whether something similar could happen again.
That is, the State turning on people peacefully protesting for democratic rights and leaving 18 of them dead and 700 injured.
Almost 60 years ago the late socialist historian E P Thompson argued that what the authorities took from Peterloo was that they could not get away with attacking peaceful protests and so didnt. Industrial disputes were different he noted.
Others might argue that events of recent decades in the UK and around the world bring that into question.
It is not a question that can be definitively answered and its one it’d be hoped never does have to be answered.
Surely however a key legacy of Peterloo is at least to ask and discuss the question, particularly as an Editorial in the Murdoch Times claimed there was no need to do so.
The Editorial and my response in the Morning Star are below
The Times 3rd August 2019
The Times view on the BBC’s commemoration of the Peterloo Massacre: Horrible Histories
This was a shameful act but the broadcaster’s treatment of it is modern left-wing mythology
“Those who cannot remember the past,” wrote the philosopher George Santayana, “are condemned to repeat it.” He might have added that those who embellish it are unlikely to offer a reliable guide to the future. The BBC invites this charge with protracted coverage this month of the 200th anniversary of the “Peterloo Massacre”, a tragic event of minor historical significance that happens to accord with a Marxist version of Britain’s past. This is not solemn remembrance but modern myth.
Some 60,000 people gathered at St Peter’s Field in Manchester on August 16, 1819, to call for parliamentary reform. Cavalry acting on the order of local magistrates moved against the crowds to, as they saw it, maintain order for fear of sedition. On the standard account, their charge with sabres left in its wake 11 dead and 400 wounded. Recent historians have estimated that, along with those who died later of their wounds, the fatalities in fact numbered 17 and the casualties more than 650. In ironic allusion to the military triumph at Waterloo four years earlier, “Peterloo” was the name given by the radical press to this horror.
The BBC is broadcasting no fewer than ten radio programmes on the massacre. These include a special Sunday Worship, a choir from West Yorkshire who “sing in solidarity with the victims of the Peterloo Massacre”, and a documentary by Katharine Viner, editor of The Guardian, titled The Massacre that Changed Britain.
The massacre was committed by a Manchester yeomanry woefully ill-prepared for policing a demonstration. This was a time before any police force had been established. Having been ordered to arrest a radical orator, Henry Hunt, they forced their way forward with the flats of their swords to disperse the crowds.
It was a shameful act. Contrary to the BBC’s demonology, however, it had no wider historical significance and did not “change Britain” beyond feeding a tendentious account by left-wing historians of Britain’s traditions of radical protest. The progenitor of this was the Marxist academic EP Thompson, whose book The Making of the English Working Class (1963) threw together wholly disconnected movements, from millenarian Protestant sects to Luddite croppers, and claimed they had been ignored by mainstream historians. Politicians such as Tony Benn and Jeremy Corbyn have since, with a ropey grasp of history, added further anachronisms to the mix, such as the Levellers and the Tolpuddle Martyrs.
The problem with these accounts is that the victims at Peterloo weren’t overlooked then and haven’t been ignored since. The reason that the BBC, along with historians and pundits, have accurate information on this atrocity is that The Times carried a 10,000-word first-hand account of it by our correspondent John Tyas, who was arrested along with Hunt. It’s because of Tyas that we know of the “hideous work” of the cavalry. Our accompanying leading article of August 19, 1819 bluntly asserted that no action of the crowd had been contrary to the law or in breach of the peace.
Successive reform acts and representation of the people acts eventually established universal suffrage for both sexes by 1928. It was accomplished without recourse to the revolution that governments had feared since 1789. For all the failings and sins in Britain’s past, an account that views an isolated outrage as a prism through which to interpret current politics is bad history.
The Murdoch Times rubbishes the paper’s own creditable history on Peterloo
Morning Star 13th August 2019
Dear Editor
Andy Hedgecock’s review of Robert Poole’s new book on Peterloo, a carefully researched volume into the events themselves and their context, concludes by pondering as does Poole, whether the massacre on that August day in Manchester 200 years ago was a one off event or something that might be repeated. Poole concludes as does Hedgecock that if the ruling class feel sufficiently threatened they might well try to attack protests again.
Perhaps this explains why an Editorial in The Times on 3rd August on the commemoration of Peterloo claimed that it had ‘no wider historical significance’. Indeed not, until the next time the State feels the need to cut protesters down.
regards
Keith Flett
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