Those who do not learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them. For this reason, socialists take the study of the past struggles of working people very seriously. We seek to apply the lessons that have been learned from the past to the ongoing and inevitable conflicts across the globe between the interests of capitalism and those of wider society, be they workers, peasants, small traders, the unemployed, the old, the vulnerable and the weak.

In 1820 six men, convicted of treason, were publicly hanged and then beheaded outside Newgate Prison in the City of London. The crime of which they had been convicted was plotting to assassinate the entire Cabinet as it sat enjoying a working dinner. This attempt at a violent coup d'etat is now largely forgotten, tucked away as a footnote in the history books. It deserves to be better known.

In 1815 at the Battle of Waterloo the forces supporting Napoleon had finally been defeated but at an enormous cost. Tens of thousands of British men had been killed or seriously injured. Tens of thousands of others who had fought and somehow survived found that far from Britain being the better, freer, more secure country they had been promised, what they came back to was economic depression and the same grinding poverty which had afflicted their parents and the generations before them. Inevitably, the experience caused them to ask serious questions about the nature of the economic and political system under which they lived.

As so often happens after war, the economy went into sharp recession with the collapse of orders for military and naval equipment and munitions. Jobs disappeared as a result. Wages were forced down while prices and taxes rose. Yet there were many fat cats who had clearly done very well out of the wars which had gone on almost continuously for over twenty years.

The heavy industries, particularly dependent on war demand, were the hardest hit. Iron, for example, fell from £20 a ton to just £8. In Shropshire, one of the cradles of industrialisation, 24 out of 34 blast furnaces went out of production causing thousands of ironworkers and colliers to be thrown out of work. Raging inflation blighted the lives of ordinary people as the price of stable necessities spiralled out of reach of their pockets. The burden of taxation was severe as the government tried to payoff the debts it had incurred in the war effort, much of which had been incompetently handled.

Political power

In the situation there was a ready audience for those radicals who argued that the hardships facing working people and their families were because they were excluded from political power. Radical agitators and publicists demanding political reform, and in particular a widening of the franchise, elicited an unprecedented response from the common people which sent alarm bells ringing among the ruling class of the time.

Political power was in the hands of a tiny minority of society, a ruling class composed of rich landowners, bankers and merchants and some wealthy industrialists. By no means without antagonisms among themselves, they were, however, at one in their determination not to surrender one iota of political power to those they regarded as the ignorant, swinish and unwashed masses.

Nevertheless the British ruling class was feeling jittery and insecure. The successful uprising of the American colonists and the more recent events in revolutionary France had demonstrated how ordinary people could be a force for enormous change. Their actions had raised thoughts and expectations in Britain about liberty and justice, not as abstract ideals but as means by which they could gain some control over their lives and set about tackling the desperate conditions which were their everyday experience.

Their readiness to act is shown by, among other things, bread riots in 1795, machine wrecking (especially in the East Midlands) in 1811 and 1812 and ongoing years, and riots provoked by the introduction of the Corn Laws in 1815. These laws were a piece of naked class legislation designed solely to benefit Britain's large country landowners. Their effect was to inflate the price of bread and even the industrialists hated them because they caused workers to demand increased wages. The extent of opposition to the Corn Laws is shown by the fact that protests occurred in places as far apart as Bideford, Birmingham, Bridport, Bury, Ely, Glasgow, Merthyr Tydfil, Preston and the West Riding of Yorkshire.

Although these events may have been immediately spurred by hunger and a sense of outrage about official callousness, they were increasingly being combined with demands for political reform. Experience is the best teacher and experience was demonstrating that the answer to the justifiable demands of the working class could only lie with a decisive change in the nature of political power.

The only answer of the ruling class to this political ferment was repression. Habeas Corpus, the legal challenge to arbitrary imprisonment, was suspended in 1794 and again in 1817. In 1819 what were derisively known as the "Gagging Acts" were passed. These prohibited most large political meetings; gave magistrates sweeping powers to enter private premises in the search for arms; prohibited drilling and military training by civilians; strengthened the laws against "blasphemous and seditious libel", i.e. criticism of the government; limited the time available for a prisoner to prepare their defence in a court case and increased the stamp duty on newspapers and cheap pamphlets, thereby deliberately hitting the radical press.

The government intercepted and opened the mail of known radicals and made widespread and systematic use of provocative agents and spies who were infiltrated into the radical movement. They therefore had a well-honed intelligence system. Spies gathered evidence that was admissible in court while provocative agents set up situations in which the participants were likely to be caught red-handed. A particularly notorious case was that of "Oliver the Spy" who infiltrated the Luddite movement in 1817 and whose activities caused several machine-breakers to go to the scaffold.

The poet Shelley, sympathetic to radical causes, wrote in 1817: "...so soon as the whole nation lifted up its voice for parliamentary reform, spies went forth. These were selected from the most worthless and infamous of mankind, and dispersed among the multitude of famished and illiterate labourers. It was their business, if they found no discontent, to create it. It was their business to find victims, no matter whether right or wrong."

 "Orator Hunt"

On 16th August 1819 a huge political protest meeting gathered in St Peter's Fields, Manchester, to be addressed by "Orator Hunt", perhaps the most persuasive of the radical speakers. A huge crowd, possibly as many as 80,000, squeezed into the restricted space available. The crowd contained many women and some children. When Hunt was about to start speaking, he was arrested and the angry response of the crowd caused the magistrate in attendance to panic. He read the Riot Act, which required the crowd to disperse, and when they did not respond, he called up the yeomanry, a middle class mounted militia.

They rode into the crowd, hacking indiscriminately left and right with their sabres and exacting a terrible toll. 11 were killed and about 400 injured, of whom many were women. This event has of course gone down in history as the "Peterloo Massacre". It was evidence of what the authorities would do when faced with a situation that frightened them. The unleashing of this ferocious state violence did much to widen support for the idea of radical reform among many who had previously been unconvinced.

There was no radical political party as such, nor a cohesive national movement. There were organisations with impressive names such as the Hampden Clubs and the Society of Spencean Philanthropists which brought together some middle class elements, mainly intellectuals and small businessmen with substantial numbers of skilled and often self-educated craftsmen such as printers and shoemakers, for example. Skilled workers in trades threatened by technical innovation such as the hand-loom weavers, were at the forefront of the movement in the textile manufacturing districts.

The political education and the organisational and speaking skills of the radicals gave them an influence out of proportion to their actual numbers. Few of them thought that violence was the way to achieve their objectives. They mostly believed in peaceful persuasion, in the common sense and reasonableness of their arguments.

An example of radical oratory was this from Henry Hunt addressing a huge open-air meeting in London in 1816: "What was the cause of the want on employment? Taxation. What was the cause of taxation? Corruption. It was corruption that had enabled them to wage that bloody war at the expense of all but themselves. Was not our loaf taxed? Was not everything we ate, drank, wore, and even said, taxed? These taxes were imposed by a tiny minority who thought nothing of oppressing the people and subsisting on the plunder wrung from their miseries."

Disaffected elements

This was all good rabble rousing stuff but it was not enough for some disaffected elements among the radicals. It was especially not enough for Arthur Thistlewood. He was a natural maverick who had been in France at the height of the revolution there. His experiences led him to combine a desire for root-and-branch political change with a number of personal grievances that made him greatly embittered. He became convinced that it was futile to think that peaceful persuasion would make the ruling class surrender substantial elements of political power to the working and middle classes. This analysis in itself was of course correct but not in the sense that Thistlewood understood it.