Around 200 people attended the commemoration to mark the 195th anniversary of the Peterloo Massacre in central Manchester today. Amongst those attending were over a dozen who walked the entire eleven and a half mile route from Bolton, retracing the steps of the many hundreds of Boltonians who made the same journey on the 16th August 1819. Others marched from Rochdale, Salford, Stockport and elsewhere in Greater Manchester. 15 people were killed and over 200 injured at Peterloo following a cavalry charge on a peaceful demonstration of more than 60,000 calling for universal suffrage and the repeal of the Corn Laws which had led to high food prices and more widespread poverty amongst the working class. The beneficiaries of the Corn Laws were the nobility and other large landholders who owned the majority of farmland. Landowners had a vested interest in seeing the Corn Laws remained in force, and since the right to vote was not universal, but rather depended on land ownership, they, and those they voted into Parliament had no interest whatsoever in repealing them. Peterloo was the first occasion in which ordinary working class folk anywhere had mobilised in such large numbers to demand both the right to vote and the repeal of legislation considered against their collective interest as a class. The response from those in power, who were self-evidently spooked by such a large assembly of their social inferiors, was its violent and murderous dispersal. We remembered the dead, whose names and circumstances of their death were all individually read out. They died in pursuit of the common good and the type of thing most of us now take for granted. It is only right and fitting we commemorated their courage and sacrifice each year and for us to assert that they did not die in vain.
Posted on: Sun, 17 Aug 2014 20:01:55 +0000
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