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Peterloo bicentenary - the irony of it

Today is the two-hundredth anniversary of the Peterloo Massacre, when a peaceful meeting at St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, was violently dispersed by the military. Eighteen people were killed and over 600 injured. The meeting was set up to air people’s many and well justified grievances, most of which had their origin in the enclosures of agricultural land, a process which began in 1760 and resulted in the displacement of the English peasantry, who were deprived of their livelihoods and forced into city slums where their only means of supporting themselves was to work long hours in terrible conditions for penurious wages.

An important object of the protest was the Corn Laws, which was one of the objects of the St Peter’s Fields protest. The Corn Laws were a body of tariffs and other regulations intended to restrict the importing of cheap foreign wheat and other food, which put up the cost of the food on people’s tables. The massacre was followed by a cover-up. An important event in the wake of Peterloo was the founding of The Manchester Guardian, to continue the campaigning. The Corn Laws were finally abolished in 1846.

But victories for freedom are never more than provisional. The Corn Laws were reintroduced surreptitiously in 1973 when the UK joined the then EEC, since the Common Agricultural Policy operates in precisely the same way, and has the same aims and purpose, as the Corn Laws.

Here comes the irony. The Guardian, the lineal descendent of the Manchester Guardian, has taken a leading role in the campaign against leaving the EU, despite the evidence of forty years that the organisation is impervious to reform. Only yesterday, there was an article in the Guardian by Polly Toynbee, arguing that British farmers would be ruined without these latter day Corn Laws – exactly the same argument that was used to maintain the Corn Laws for a quarter of a century after Peterloo. I am alone is seeing this irony?

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