PETERLOO MASSACRE,1819: Rise Like Lions!

Two hundred years ago, on 16 August 1819, one of the defining events of working class history in Britain occurred; the Peterloo Massacre. 

A crowd of 60-80,000 working-class men, women and children gathered in St Peter's Fields, near Manchester, demanding radical reforms in the face of rampant political corruption, and ruin and starvation for the people. 

The ruling authorities - magistrates, politicians and military officers, fully endorsed by the UK government - replied with a savagery that profoundly changed the outlook of the masses in the days and years that followed. 

At least 15 were killed and 700 wounded as the cavalry of the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry charged, swords drawn, hacking left and right into the crowd, under the orders of magistrates safely ensconced in a nearby mansion, who feared the entirely peaceful, well-disciplined crowd would challenge their economic and political monopoly of power. 

The first to die was two-year-old William Fildes, knocked from his mother's arms as one of the cavalry galloped to St Peter's Fields, intent on helping to put these protesting workers back in their box.

Political corruption remains today - if modified compared to 1819

Corruption and Famine

The demands of the mass rally arose from bitter anger at their treatment by those in power, especially in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, which ended in 1815, and in its wake led to a very brief boom in textile manufacturing, followed by deep and chronic depression. 

Whilst the mill owners and other rising capitalists continued to luxuriate in wealth, mass unemployment, starvation and actual famine stalked the country, including Lancashire, the main centre of textile weaving and spinning. 
The Corn Laws of 1815 exacerbated the conditions of mass starvation, imposing tariffs on foreign grain imports, forcing food prices up and the quality of food down, triggering outbreaks of famine. 

Rotten Boroughs

Propping up the inequality and mass hunger was a political system stinking of the worst corruption.  

Voting rights were restricted to adult male owners of freehold land above a threshold rental value. This tiny, narrow franchise - part of the shoddy compromise between the landowning and capitalist classes in the decades after the English Civil War - totally excluded the wealth producers, the working class, those rightly described by many historians as "the manufacturing class". 

For instance, Manchester and surrounding towns had a population of a million, but the whole county of Lancashire had just two MPs, returned by a tiny handful of the propertied class. 

Of 515 MPs across England and Wales, 351 were sent to 'the Mother of Parliaments' by a minuscule 177 rich individuals - and every single one of Scotland's 45 MPs relied on the same system of patronage. 

In at least two separate seats, two MPs (in each) were elected in a 'rotten borough' by one, single, solitary voter! So twice as many MPs as voters! 

Next time you get a lecture from a Tory, or employer, or lickspittle defender of the wonders of capitalist democracy, it might be worth acquainting them with this slice of rotten, corrupt reality. 

Peaceful Demands for Democracy

The 60-80,000 who assembled, after marching in well-drilled formation from neighbouring towns and districts, carried banners with slogans like Universal Suffrage, Vote by Ballot, Annual Parliaments, No Corn Law, Liberty and Fraternity, Unity and Strength. 

They were entirely peaceful, but put the fear of rebellion into the corrupt, cankered hearts of the rich and their magisterial agents. They amassed troops from Special Constables and several cavalries, thousands of armed men in total. 

"The Tory party in arms" feared revolution and assaulted peaceful meeting 

Business Mafia on Horseback!

These sabre-wielding militias were enlisted from the class of tradespeople, shopkeepers and especially publicans, described at the time by one local newspaper as "the fawning dependents of the great, with a few fools, who imagine they acquire considerable importance wearing regimentals." 

More recent historians have described them more succinctly: "The local business mafia on horseback", or, in another case, "Young members of the Tory party in arms."

Next time you're assured British democracy is a God-given blessing we should be grateful for, it's worth remembering the struggles and martyrdom workers went through to even win the elementary right to vote every few years - and the armed savagery in opposition to basic democracy of "the Tory party in arms", the "business mafia on horseback". 

From Peterloo to Chartism

The horror and outrage at the massacre in St Peter's Fields - dubbed the Peterloo Massacre in bitter ironic reference to the Battle of Waterloo, just four years earlier - spread beyond Lancashire to the whole country. 

But it met with an escalated bout of repression, including the arrest and prolonged imprisonment of those who organised and spoke at the Peterloo rally, such as the radical orator, Henry Hunt. He was slapped in jail for 30 months. Workers were sacked, leaving their children to starve, for merely attending the rally. 

But repression cannot hold down the working class indefinitely. Henry Hunt contributed to a new force in the decades after Peterloo, the Chartist movement, Britain's first working class political party. 

Gradually, through mighty battles, general strikes and attempted insurrections included, this movement squeezed incremental reforms on the right to vote from a capitalist ruling class that fought brutally to retain a monopoly not just of economic but also political power. It took over a century after Peterloo to win full suffrage for the working class, for women as well as men. 

Democracy Today - a Good Idea!

Today, of course, we live in a very different world - in some respects! 

Past generations fought and suffered to win the limited democratic rights of today. The demands for universal suffrage and vote by (secret) ballot have been conquered, at a high price for earlier generations of fighters. 

But unless we win economic democracy there can never be full-blown political democracy.  

Two hundred years on, we may not be suffering famine in this country - but that's the cruel fate of millions in the global South, and here in the fifth-richest economy on earth, we have mass reliance on food banks. It's sobering to register that one of the causes of this is the fact real wages have declined more and for longer in the last ten years than in any decade since Peterloo! 


We may have the right to assembly - so long as the ruling powers deem it safe to allow us to exercise that right. Police assaults on striking miners' demonstrations in 1984/5 were a harsh reminder of the limitations of even that right, so long as we have a capitalist  minority in ownership of the main centres of wealth. Likewise, their kettling of anti-capitalist protesters on numerous occasions since. 

Orgreave: Capitalist state was mobilised to smash miners' union 

Workers in Chains - Still!

The (anti)Combination Acts passed 20 years before Peterloo were torn to shreds by mass workers' resistance, but the whole array of anti-union laws - introduced by Tory governments, retained by Labour governments - still make this one of the most repressive countries in the developed world. 

The rights fought for by the pioneers at Peterloo and in the Chartists are still often denied to workers, such as the growing number of employers who refuse to permit let alone recognise and negotiate with workers' collective trade unions. 


We may have the right to vote in this country,  but we don't really have the right to decide.

The working class majority population are still dictated to by a few capitalist monopolies: a few big banks; the Big Six energy companies; private shipyard owners who throw skilled dedicated workers on the scrapheap; one-man capitalist dictators like Jim Ratcliffe of INEOS who threaten to shut down the whole Grangemouth plant and hold the Scottish government to ransom; Jeff Bezos of Amazon, or the Walton family (ASDA owners) who threaten workers with the sack if they don't surrender to their dictats, and likewise instruct governments on what they must do, even when it subverts the will of those who elected the governments.

Break the Chains!

In saluting and honouring our dead and maimed predecessors at Peterloo and elsewhere, we should redouble our determination to fully achieve real democracy. 
Including workplace democracy, economic democracy, as well as an end to political rule by a rich, powerful elite. 

We need to relentlessly expose the corruption and inherent exploitation and inequality of capitalist rule. We need to paint a picture of a socialist democracy, where those who produce the wealth of goods and services also collectively own and control that wealth, taking concrete steps to eradicate poverty and inequality. And use that vision to inspire others to rise like lions. 


As a modest contribution to that effort, I wrote the book, Break the Chains. It strives to arm activists with arguments for socialist change, and elaborate the case behind a whole package of 21st century policies that would transform the lives of millions.

Introduction to Break the Chains

I quite consciously referenced the Peterloo Massacre in the Introduction to Break the Chains - and just as consciously quoted Percy Bysshe Shelley's inspirational poem, written in anger at the Massacre.  

In Shelley's phrase, the working class still, 200 years later, need to "Rise, like lions after slumber/In unvanguishable number!" 
Never forgetting that - even more so than in the world of 1819 - "Ye are many - they are few." 

Copies of Break the Chains available HERE

CAPITALISM ISN'T WORKING!

"Observers might conclude that the DWP had been tasked with designing a digital and sanitized version of the 19th century workhouse, made infamous by Charles Dickens." 

"As Thomas Hobbes observed long ago, such an approach condemns the least well off to lives that are 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short'". 

These are just two of the many devastating sentences in the recent UN report on Britain by their rapporteur on extreme poverty, Professor Philip Alston. 

In terms of facts and figures, there is not that much new in his account of poverty and inequality in the fifth-richest economy on earth. It's more the source and force of presentation of this searing condemnation of the state of Tory Britain that has hit the headlines - and inflamed the feelings of Tory Ministers like Amber Rudd, who whinge that it's not representative of the UK, 2019. 

In fact, this short, sharp, 20-page Report - based on far-reaching research and two weeks of face-to-face meetings with people affected - is all too realistic, all too accurate, and therefore all the more an indictment of the life-crushing poverty and inequality that is in the bone-marrow of capitalism. 

Poverty and Destitution 

One in five of the UK population (14 million people) live in poverty - 4 million of them at least 50% below the poverty line. 

A further 2.5 million are less than 10% above the official poverty line; one emergency away from falling into the pits of penury. 

'Destitution' is a word sometimes demeaned by over-use. The official definition of destitution is having less than £10-a-day after housing costs, or having to go without at least two essentials such as shelter, food, heat, light, clothing or toiletries during a one-month period. An incredible 1.5 million citizens of the world's fifth-richest economy experienced destitution in 2017! 

Some of the symptoms of this appalling state of affairs, identified by the UN Report, include "a shocking rise in use of food banks [a four-fold increase since 2012 - RV] and rough sleeping...falling life expectancy for some...denial of benefits to the severely disabled...impoverishment of single mothers and people with mental illness..." 

 

'Systematic Immiseration' 

But Professor Alston rightly points the finger at the Tory government for consciously driving people down into the muck and misery of poverty. It's not the natural order of things, nor some god-given condition. 

He accuses the Tories in scathing language: 

"Much of the glue that held British society together since World War Two has been deliberately removed and replaced with a harsh and uncaring ethos... There's been a systematic immiseration of a significant part of the population... Austerity has deliberately gutted local authorities [on provision of libraries, youth facilities, parks and other services], leading to unheard-of levels of loneliness and isolation." 

Alston identifies the cruel abomination of Universal Credit as one major cause of this suffering - an accusation made flesh and bone by one of the community activists he met in Scotland, Ruchazie's Jamie Clark: 

"I've seen people get into two months' rent arrears while they wait 8 weeks for their first payment of Universal Credit. In that time they've been threatened with legal action by their housing provider. I know from personal experience the impact it has on your mental health and family life when you live in fear of eviction because you can't pay the rent."

Warning the Exploiters 

But Alston also rightly highlights that "60% of the people in poverty are in families where someone works." 

That's 60% of 14 million people, left stranded in poverty because a family member or members suffers poverty pay and/or insecure contracts; victims of a system that has systematically robbed wages in favour of profits. 

As Alston warns, alongside "massive disinvestment in the social security network", this low-wage economy has "created a highly combustible situation that will have dire consequences."

As well as lambasting the Tories for their track-record, their ideologically-driven austerity agenda, the UN rapporteur is hereby warning the ruling capitalist class of the social and political upheaval they are storing up. 

'Capitalism Isn't Working' 

An even more stark version of the same alarm call has been issued by Nobel prize-winning economist, Professor Sir Angus Deaton, in his far-reaching report on inequality in the UK, for the Institute for Fiscal Studies. 

"There's a real question whether democratic capitalism is working, when it's only working for part of the population", the IFS report cries out. 

It goes on to warn that widening wealth gaps "make a mockery of democracy", with the assessment that "people are more troubled by inequality than at any time since the 1940s." 

'Deaths of Despair' 

This major new study shows that the share of household income going to the richest 1% has tripled in the past 30 years, as Britain has become one of the most unequal societies on earth, after the US. Deaton describes the contrast between "runaway incomes for high earners" with the rise in what he calls "deaths of despair" - early deaths through addiction and suicide - linked to poverty, social isolation and mental health problems. 

Since the 2008 bankers' crisis, such 'deaths of despair' have rocketed from 30 to 61 per 100,000 for men, and from 15 to 26 per 100,000 women. 

The capitalist economist's devastating picture of growing, galloping inequality lacks any substantial proposals to overcome it, but concedes "Falling trade union membership may have removed constraints on wage dispersion, increased the surplus going to executives, or more generally reduced the political clout of ordinary workers against other dominant groups." 

Emergency Measures Against Poverty and Inequality 

These two authoritative reports condemn the Tories and capitalism as a system for failing the millions; deliberately! So what possible solutions to poverty and inequality can we advocate? 

The meek and mild recommendations of the UN Report to restore local authority funding, reverse benefit caps and scrap the two-child limit are welcome and necessary, but wholly inadequate in the teeth of a social and human catastrophe. 

The benefits system needs to be fundamentally overhauled, to transform it into a genuine 'social security system' for those most in need, or at times of greatest need. 

Going beyond that, the battle for a decent wage and secure jobs is critical. For an immediate £10-an-hour minimum wage for all over 16, scrapping the lower youth rates, as an emergency step towards a real living minimum wage. And for a guaranteed minimum 16-hour week for all who want it, abolishing the poverty and mind-bending insecurity of zero-hours or short-hours contracts. 

For a Legal Maximum Income 

Equally, the trade union and socialist movement needs to take serious action against inequality, around the demand for a legal maximum income, initially set at no more than 10 times the minimum wage. 
That would help reverse the rising tide of extreme incomes for those who take but don't make wealth - and add to social cohesion and well-being.

Along with progressive taxation of the rich and big corporations, such fighting demands would vastly strengthen the organised trade union movement - which the IFS report acknowledges is one of the pivotal requirements to combating inequality. 

As we've written before, it's no accident that inequality was at its narrowest in Britain when the unions had over 13 million members, with collective bargaining covering the big majority of workers - the mirror opposite to today's situation. 

Democratic Ownership 

If we are to challenge the widening gap in wealth, health and life expectancy itself, we need the audacity to question the whole source of such appalling inequalities: the ownership of wealth and its means of creation. 

It's not 'democracy' that isn't working, it's capitalism - a system of ownership of wealth and power that excludes the vast majority of the population from any meaningful democracy, let alone a secure lifestyle. 

Why should a handful of bankers, a few hundred industrial corporations, and shrinking numbers of fabulously rich landowners dictate the lives of billions of people across the globe? 

We need to build a socialist party and trade union movement that campaigns for real democracy - democratic public ownership of land, industry, finance and services - with a plan of sustainable social production that creates hundreds of thousands of homes, decent jobs, clean energy and free public transport. 

There's no question about it: capitalism is not working. Our task is to organise for its replacement, in defense of both people and planet. That's the democratic and socialist future that fills the thinkers of capitalism with dread.