Price of bread up 30%: The Corn Laws were an issue at Peterloo on 16th August 1819
This week sees the 204th anniversary of Peterloo a central Manchester protest for the vote but one where the price of bread was also an issue.
According to a report in the Guardian (14th August) bakery items such as bread are up 30% in price from a year ago
The demand for cheaper bread was raised at Peterloo but there can be few that think that this was the fundamental reason why thousands gathered in central Manchester on the August Monday in 1819. Bread was a staple of the working-class diet (as it still is in some areas of the world) and its cost was a symbol of wider system of oppression in which change was demanded. The change was around democracy and the vote.
Yet while Chartism was the main successor to the democratic demands of Peterloo there was another, the Anti-Corn Law League, founded and based in Manchester. Well known ACLL activists had been at Peterloo so they could reasonably claim a connection. The ACLL also had some branches of ‘operatives’- workers. Yet it was primarily an organisation of industrialists, well-funded and effective. So effective indeed that it won the battle to repeal the Corn Laws (taxes on imported wheat) splitting the Tory Party in the process.
Cheaper bread certainly followed on but so did something else- reductions in wages as employers reasoned that workers could now live more cheaply and so required less pay. That arguably was the bottom line of what the ACLL were after.
To underline their connection to Peterloo they constructed the Free Trade Hall on the site of St Petersfield. It’s now a Radisson hotel but the façade still stands.
Cheaper bread in 2023, part of a cost of living crisis, might well require the kind of democratic upheaval that was sought at Peterloo, one that could put a stop to the greedflation of supermarkets and producers
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