In March 1854 a Parliament of the Poor met in Manchester. Link to recording of seminar on its history
The 1854 Labour Parliament was held in Manchester at the People’s Institute in Ancoats. It lasted for two weeks.
It was neither like a Labour Party Conference or a TUC Congress, taking place before either existed.
The moving spirit was the leader of post-1848 Chartism and ally of Marx and Engels, Ernest Jones. The Parliament was focused around one of the best known nineteenth century industrial disputes, the 1854 Preston Lock-Out, which features in Dickens Hard Times.
Yet the Labour Parliament was not about trade union struggle, although it welcomed trade unionists, or about political representation in the Commons. Rather it sort to organise to find a way to change the world in favour of ordinary people.
As E P Thompson wrote in the Preface to the Making of the English Working Class: in some of the lost causes of the people of the industrial revolution we may discover insights into social evils we have yet to cure’
Seminar Details
Monday 24th May at 5.30pm Simon Hannah on the Labour Parliament of 1854.
Link to recording
Passcode: sy1i+3=X
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