Tribune – Comment, news and reviews from Britain's democratic left

Tribune is about to take its annual break which means there will be no editions on August 19 and 26.  In addition, we are moving offices in the first week of September which will also disrupt publication. Our next edition will appear on September 9. We wish all our readers an enjoyable summer break until Tribune returns, refreshed and vital as ever.

17 December 2010

Riots have always been a part of British political life, for better or worse. Both protestors and the coalition should better understand that when violence is unleashed — by whichever side — the outcomes are unpredictable. Volatile force on the streets can advance or damage a cause, bring down a government or strengthen it, have a desired result or lead to a surprising one.

The general definition of a riot is a demonstration which turns violent due either to provocation or aggressive aims. The protest movement invokes Peterloo and the poll tax, but things have not always been so clear-cut.

Protests have been a counterweight to oppression, or an opportunity for plunder and revenge, or a conduit for passion and anger.

American President Calvin Coolidge said: “The only difference between a mob and a trained army is organisation.” Rioting featured in all the British revolutions which overthrew absolute rulers and created our imperfect form of parliamentary democracy. It was part of the tidal waves of history and the smaller ripples of localised disputes. The instigators were generally the oppressed.

Martin Luther King said: “A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.” But the cause was not always noble. A London mob marked the coronation of Richard I in 1189 by massacring the Jewish community. The 18th century saw riots against Roman Catholics, the Irish, dissenters, foreign actors, gin tax, bawdy houses, the naturalisation of Jews, French footmen and a change in the calendar as well as against high food prices, enclosures and greedy industrialists. In 1789, the anti-Catholic riots in London whipped up by a retired naval officer, Lord George Gordon, involved a 50,000-strong mob, raged for five days, destroyed Catholic churches and homes and left 285 dead, 173 wounded and 139 arrested — 24 of whom were later hanged.

The Gordon riots were put down by military might in defence of the intended victims.

In the decades that followed, the reverse was true. The 19th century opened with the titanic struggle against Napoleon and continued on the home front with a bloody period of civil insurrection and repression. The sheer pace of the Industrial Revolution sparked a revolt against the machines. The Luddites lost their clashes with the state and scores were hanged in 1812. An influx of veterans swelled the ranks of the unemployed once Bonaparte was finally defeated. The corn laws and a disastrous harvest caused famine among the working classes, and there was a growing clamour for electoral reform boosted by newspapers which were read avidly by the newly literate.

Riots, marches and monster rallies shook the ruling elite and pushed it into increasingly draconian counter-measures.

A march on London by the Blanketeers was ambushed before the men had travelled far from Manchester and local jails were packed.

Panicky magistrates, drunken militia and overzealous cavalry caused the Peterloo Massacre in which at least 15 men, women and children were killed and up to 500 injured. Radicals were driven underground while guerrilla violence erupted in the countryside during the 1831 “Captain Swing” riots in which threshing machines were broken and property was destroyed. Again, the state’s response was terrible — 19 rioters were executed, 644 imprisoned and 505 transported to Australia for between seven years and life. The following year, protests over efforts to block the reform bill exploded in Bristol. Two days of mayhem saw the city centre gutted by fire, cavalry charging over cobbled squares, mansions looted and upward of 100 dead.

Many working men realised their hopes of salvation lay, not with sporadic rioting, but by self-help through trade unions. Strikes, rather than undisciplined rampage, were the chosen weapon. Given the weight of political oppression, however, that route could be just as dangerous. Striking ironworkers, weavers and colliers were shot or attacked by cavalry charges.

The men of Tolpuddle were transported when they swore oaths to form their own combine.

Such suppression cowed but could not crush the embryonic trade union movement. That came together with the reformists in the so-called Plug Plot riots of 1842 — Britain’s first general strike. Events started among Staffordshire coalminers and spread to textile factories across the north of the country as workers downed tools and removed plugs from boilers to shut down plants. The fight for better pay and conditions became inextricably linked to the right to vote. Strikers clashed violently with soldiers and police, mills were besieged and burned to the ground. There was the whiff of anarchy and the authorities responded as they had always done — with mass arrests. The remaining strikers were starved into submission. But the spark of organised resistance had been lit and continued to flare for generations until both union recognition and universal adult suffrage were achieved.

It was a long and bitter struggle on many fronts, and the ruling elites gave ground just inch by inch. Flaring passion and partisan reporting not unnaturally gave rise to many working-class and leftist myths. It was not the smashing of windows, rioting or other behaviour verging on terrorism which gave women the vote, but the need for female labour to fill the gaps left by men fighting in the First World War.

Read more at:  archive.tribunemagazine.co.uk