Roger Scruton on Peterloo: more clumsiness than malice
The late Roger Scruton who died aged 75 earlier in January was a philosopher and right-wing commentator. Sometimes, but not always the two roles merged.
He was not an historian in terms of doing research in archives, but he opined on historical matters. Notably this involved his views on Marxist historians such as Eric Hobsbawm and Edward Thompson.
However in his book England an Elegy (2000) he did opine on Peterloo. He argued:
Popular unrest was minimal in England, and the most famous episodes- the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester in 1819 and the agitation surrounding the Tolpuddle Martyrs in 1834-bore no comparison with events on the continent of Europe. The panic at St Peter’s Field, in which eleven people died, resulted more from clumsiness than malice.
Not really informed history, but its worth recalling that Boris Johnson had nothing to say on the 200th anniversary of Peterloo in August 1819. Paying tribute to Scruton on his death the Prime Minister called him the ‘country’s greatest Conservative thinker’
Jonathan Portes in the Guardian (18th January) places Scruton’s views in a wider context of bigotry:
Leave a Reply