PROTEST & PROGRESS - Peaceably if we May, Forcibly if we Must

From the perspective  of the 21st century, we have little remaining sense for just how ground breaking the upheaval of the British Industrial Revolution was. As the first Western country to become fully industrialised, people from other countries were flocking to visit Great Britain to observe for themselves, to learn of the latest innovations, see what was actually going on in its streets and market places.

Whenever you are the first to do anything, you are the one who makes the mistakes that others learn from. The ones you have to go back on later to correct. Things happen that you do not anticipate. It's you who encounters unexpected economic consequences. How do you respond to increased social tensions? What happens when your drive to modernise the economy, ignores the welfare of its own working class citizens? When riots or disease break out in the insanitary conditions of cheap urban slum housing? Britain was the first country that had to find answers to these questions. Essentially, how do you maintain social order in a rapidly developing technologically led economic boom? And the rule of the British Parliament at this time was definitely not fit for that purpose. It was basically a closed shop of privileged, extremely well off individuals, looking after their financial investments and property portfolios. Their responsibilities towards the social fabric and collective cohesion came very low down the list of its priorities.

Marx and Engels

Frederick Engels arrived in Manchester in 1842, sent by his family to work in the family mill there. This move had been designed to extract him from the political radicalism he'd become actively involved in back in Germany. Though Engels spent his days dutifully working in the family firm, in the evening, with the help of Mary Burns who knew the city well, he ventured out to investigate for himself how working class factory workers lived and survived in these newly urbanised conditions. What eventually resulted from these nocturnal adventures was a highly influential pamphlet - The Conditions of the Working Class in England. One of Engels newer politically radical friends, Karl Marx, inspired by this document, came to stay with him. And together they began formulating a more radical socialist alternative to the rampant capitalism they saw ruining and debasing working people's lives in Manchester. This project eventually produced the Communist manifesto.

The Luddite Riots in the early years of the nineteenth century, were notable because they were the first real sign of the working class protesting their dissatisfaction with the conditions of their new urban life. The industrialised northern towns were becoming the magnet for a wide range of radical political, economic and social theories. Ordinary working people were politicised on the streets by reading pamphlets and broadsheets, and hearing public talks, about these ideas. They were increasingly more prone to noisily demanding better work conditions, pay, and the right to vote. Manchester, became a particularly intense hot bed for a broad range of these radical campaigning groups, and politically out of the box thinking. The sort of ideas being proposed by Engels and Marx, would eagerly feed into this.  A new economic reality demanded a new politics, and a truly representative people's democracy lay at the centre of that.

In the aftermath of the Peterloo Massacre of 1818, voting and electoral reform continued being campaigned for. They initially held out a hope for the Reform Act of 1832, but this failed to extend voting rights. It was also followed by The Poor Law of 1834 which robbed the poor of the most basic access to financial support, and made the workhouse their only option if they fell on hard times. So in 1838 a new and more politically astute voting reform group was formed, The Chartist Movement. This very quickly became a huge nationwide campaigning organisation. Initially focusing on staging large and impressive mass protests in Salford, Birmingham, Glasgow and London.  

Chartist meeting Kennington Common 1848

They presented a petition to Parliament asking for universal (male) sufferage, the abolition of the property qualification for candidates, regularised elections every four years, equal sized constituencies, yearly Parliaments, MP's to be paid a statutory salary. These may sound perfectly reasonable to us today. But from 1838 to 1848 the Chartists presented three such petitions to Parliament to no discernable response from government. The Houses of Parliament in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth, was stuffed to the gills with nobility, landowners and businessmen. It was inherently corrupt and self serving. Getting this legislative assembly think in a visionary and democratic manner about its own electoral reform, was always going to be a tall order. 

Chartism's peaceful protest marches began to regularly get more out of hand. Frustrated fringe groups within it began to advocate taking more violent action. This appeared to play into the governments agenda to discredit Chartism and to ignore the eminently reasonable requests of its aims. After the 1848 petition failed to be adopted by Parliament for the third time, the whole Chartist Movement seemed to lose heart and slowly faded out of existence.

Manchester had always been the powerhouse stronghold of Chartism. Chartists there had successfully blocked some of the actions of the cities Tory dominated civic administration. Seen in retrospect, Chartism was in many ways the political precursor of the Labour Party. Many former Chartists did later become active socialists. Another legacy of Chartism was that it introduced and trained many ordinary working class people in how to be politically active and to campaign effectively for change. 

Though it did not appear to achieve it's stated aims within the ten or so years of its existence, all but one of its original proposals did eventually become law, the last being achieved in 1911. Parliament then and now, likes to think of itself as being the primary instigator of legislation, and does not wish to be seen being pushed or coerced into action by external protests or pressure from its own citizens. So once the Chartist Movement had dissolved, piecemeal legislation did begin to slowly appear, that were almost word for word what Chartism had demanded. Chartism's mass protests and strategy did succeed in changing the legislative mood within Parliament, leaving an abiding influence upon the future direction of electoral reform. It was the first modern movement to pioneer mass nationwide protests as a way to keep applying political pressure, for demanding social or political change, and this became the blueprint strategy for subsequent protest groups.

Next Episode - Fetter Not A Brother's Limbs