Peterloo Massacre and the echos of history.

Sunday saw a great turnout to commemorate the 190th anniversary of The Peterloo Massacre in Manchester.

This piece is mostly about some resonances today, but first a small bit of background:

On 16th August 1829 at least 15 people lost their lives and 600 were injured at the hands of the Yeomanry.

Why? Because they had the nerve to speak up for their own rights in a peaceful demonstration numbering 60,000.

The events took place more or less between Manchester Central (GMex) and the Midland Hotel

Here's more detail from the Wiki entry

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterloo_Massacre

A vibrant campaign exists to ensure that an appropriate memorial is finally instituted, hopefully long before the 200th anniversary. Currently the only formal recognition is a blue plaque.

Although many Mancunians are familiar enough with Peterloo, many are not. It's history is fascinating and hugely important. Thus the underwhelming formal recognition to date represents a denial of history and a whitewash.

The council have agreed to a substantial memorial but the nature of it is by no means settled. The campaign is rightly concerned that it not be some modernist or or post-modernist abstraction. Instead it should depict the event realistically, as well as being educational and respectful.

Around 200 people marked the occasion on Sunday with music, poetry, naming of the dead, wreath laying and reproduction banners from the time. Alongside this, members of the crowd wore "liberty caps" from the time and raised them on poles, mirroring the original demonstration.

Liberty caps had been a powerful symbol from Greek days as well as The French Revolution.

There were a broad range of people at Sunday's marking, but the events were specifically and deliberately historical and commemorative rather than political.

Nonetheless, some political similarities and differences echo down the generations to the Manchester, UK and world of the 21st Century.

From Palestine to Peru people still frequently lose their lives standing up for their most basic rights.

Although it's no secret that things are far from perfect in this country, we must never forget the sacrifices made to bring about the progress we have seen. We must neither be complacent of our own liberty or forgetful that other lacking it.

Nonetheless, people are still killed through the auspices of the state in this country and the habit can too often be for the establishment to lie and cover things up. 190 years of progress may be cold comfort for the Tomlinson and De Menezes families. There are other cases too.

If Sunday's events had been more overtly political I have no doubt that those partaking would have been photographed by Forward Intelligence Teams and put on any number of databases for being "troublemakers".

For all their talk of respecting democracy we have a government that would fingerprint and eye scan everyone of us for a database that will monitor us for lives via 50 categories of data.

Manchester is the chosen place for trialling the ID card system / National Identity Register, a pretty sickening irony.

And injustice against everyday people still reigns even in these fairly peaceful (if heavily monitored) times. We are encouraged implicitly and explicitly to blame migrants for problems while international finance oligarchs walk off with scores of billions in front of our faces.

We are still watching a massive transfer and consolidation of power and wealth in to the hands of a small elite, all predicated on the massive future debts of us and our children.

The effects of the governments sell out to failed corporate and banking ideology have barely got going yet. When they do they will be highly unpleasant and long lasting.
Don't expect any decent analysis from the corporate owned establishment media when it all kicks off. Do expect them to blame poor people. Plus ca change.

But finally, for now at least, I'd like to be positive about the chances for more unity among progressives. Sadly this is all to necessary in the face of a relative rise in the success of fascism.


Cutting a long story short, history shows that when a vacuum comes into existence when the establishment faces crisis in credibility.

Broadly speaking, that vacuum can be filled by a progressive / radical narrative or a reactionary one.

Few on the broad left would disagree that we have collectively failed in recent years to work together sufficiently despite some differences.

Manchester has set a good example through bodies such as Convention Of The Left, and slowly this kind of model seems to being emulated elsewhere.

In terms of the specific struggle against grass roots fascism in areas like North Manchester I would refer readers to my speech to UAF on this blog.

In finishing for now, I'd like you to think about the idea of 60,000 people protesting in Manchester today. Although people came from far and wide this represents around 30% of the cities population at the time. Today that would be 135,000 people.

The largest Manchester demo I can remember was 10,000 for the anti-Iraq war demo in 2003 (where guilty-by-association elected Labour figures also managed to get their second faces at the epicentre of events)

We all know where you can find scores of thousands gathered for a cause in Manchester today. It's still August but the round ball game is just back in season.

As we marked the events of Peterloo, the Sunday streets of Manchester were busied by people resplendent in shirts advertising one of the failed economic monoliths of the last year - AIG.

Nothing wrong in liking football of course, even if I haven't the time to detail the misdeeds of AIG. But is it a good thing that people don't seem to feel as much need or desire to demonstrate and be otherwise politically active any more?

Many will say they just don't have the time through working too hard: servicing debt which profits the banks and paying taxes which go to the er... banks. Perhaps serfdom never truly went away.

There is still a strong activist contingent in Manchester but the relative decline nationwide represents a worrying submission and apathy - the sort of disempowerment that leads to the erosion of rights which 15 people died for one Monday on the streets of Manchester, not so many lifetimes ago.