Kmflett's Blog

From the Telegraph in 1969 to the Times in 2019 the Peterloo deniers

16th August 2025 is the anniversary of Peterloo. Perhaps Nigel Farage will support the Yeomanry who cut down protesters for the vote on that Manchester Monday. Peterloo denial has a history

On the 150^th anniversary of Peterloo The Times made no mention of the matter. The Telegraph by contrast focused on Peterloo as left-wing propaganda.

On the 200^th anniversary The Times followed the Telegraph’s line.

Telegraph 15^th August 1969

Be sure the Leftist legend of Peterloo will last a long time yet in undiminished vigour for all that any disobedient historian can do. This is not to say that the legend is wholly false that no poor under-nourished working men bled and died in St Petersfields, that the yeomanry at Peterloo were all enlightened Tory philosophers and the demonstrators all envious and deceitful radical mischief makers. That would be as absurd as the received account. History is not simple.

But it can be made to seem simple for purposes of propaganda-which to us now means Left-wing propaganda. That is one reason, perhaps the main reason why we celebrate the anniversary of Peterloo tomorrow,

The Times 3^rd August 2019

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.