REMEMBERING PETERLOO AND THE STRUGGLE FOR LIBERAL DEMOCRACY

by danielbarker on 19 August, 2019

Published on Liberal Democrat Voice by Paul Hindley |

Paul Hindley

Liberalism has a long and complex history. Sometimes that history has been bloody. This weekend there is a range of eventshappening in Manchester to mark the 200 year anniversary of one such episode in liberal history, the Peterloo massacre.This was when a large gathering of tens of thousands of people calling for political reform in St Peter’s Field in Manchester on 16th August 1819 was forcibly charged by soldiers on horseback. This resulted in 18 people being killed and hundreds being injured. The name of the massacre aimed to mock the British victory at Waterloo that had happened four years earlier.

Peterloo is an important reminder that we cannot take liberalism and democracy for granted. Our modern political rights and freedoms had to be fought for and even at times face authorities prepared to use lethal force in order to suppress democratic sentiments. 200 years on, liberal democracy is still a luxury that many countries and parts of the world do not have. From China to Syria, from Russia to Zimbabwe and from Saudi Arabia to North Korea, activists the world over are to this day struggling, fighting and even dying for the political rights and freedoms that we have in Britain in 2019.

Peterloo is important for liberals, but it is also important to socialists and progressives of all kinds. We liberals must be unafraid to defend our history. We must not abandon radical moments of British liberal history to socialists and extreme leftists. The political philosophy of the radical liberal thinker, Thomas Paine, helped to inspire the protesters at Peterloo. Peterloo was about liberty, freedom from oppression and people’s political rights. In short, it was about political reform. All of these things form the core tenets of liberalism. 

In 1819, only 2% of the population could vote (mostly the landed gentry) and working people in cities like Manchester lived in industrial levels of poverty and squalor. Both of these issues would be remedied by Liberals over the century that followed. The Great Reform Act of the Whig Prime Minister, Earl Grey in 1832 swept away the Tory rotten boroughs. William Gladstone gave the vote to millions of agricultural workers in 1885 and under the government of David Lloyd George in 1918, universal male suffrage was achieved, as well as the first voting rights for women. In regard to the industrial poverty, Liberals helped to abolish the dreaded protectionist Corn Laws, advanced the rights of workers (including legalising trade unions and legitimising collective bargaining) and created the welfare state.

Liberalism isn’t a bland passive philosophy of an establishment. It has challenged establishment power in multiple countries and advanced radical political change for over 300 years. Liberalism forged the American Revolution and the early years of the French Revolution. Liberals and liberal principles were a factor in the European Spring of 1848, the Russian February Revolution of 1917, the revolutions in Eastern Europe that ended the Cold War and more recently in the Arab Spring.

British liberal democracy has been the result of over 200 years of campaign and struggle by ordinary people and committed reformers; from the protesters at Peterloo to Parliamentary Radicals and Liberal Party MPs; from the Chartist movement to the Suffragists and Suffragettes. Our modern democracy is the product of everyone from working class activists to privileged middle class politicians. As liberals, we must see this as part of our political heritage and shared history. 

The journey that began at Peterloo on that fateful day 200 years ago has still not been completed. Despite the progress that has been made, Britain’s liberal democracy still needs much improvement. The Liberal Democrats should pick up the mantle of Peterloo and call for radical political reform, this must include: Votes at 16; introducing proportional representation; replacing the House of Lords with a democratic second chamber; a codified constitution; and supporting federalism for the regions and nations of the UK. We should also support ways of introducing democracy into the workplace; Greater Manchester after all is also the home of the cooperative movement.

As our television screens are being filled with images of Hong Kong democracy activists campaigning for the same rights and freedoms that the protesters at Peterloo were arguing for 200 years ago, we must remember that the struggle for liberal democracy has been a long and hard one. The Communist Party elites in Beijing look upon Hong Kong’s democracy protesters the same way that Britain’s Georgian elite did to those who called for democracy in the early 19th century. Let us hope that Hong Kong’s road to democracy is much more peaceful than that at Peterloo (or Tiananmen Square).

This weekend, I will be recalling those who were killed in the Peterloo massacre and how fortunate we are to have a liberal democracy, even in 2019. At a time when populist nationalism is rising around the world, not least in our own country, we need to hold to the values of Peterloo, now more than ever. Liberalism continues to be a very dangerous idea to those in power, we forget that fact at our peril.

* Paul Hindley is the Northern Vice-Chair of the Social Liberal Forum and the former Chair of Blackpool and Cleveleys Liberal Democrats.

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