The Peterloo Massacre changed NOTHING

Today marks two hundred years since capitalists murdered 18 Working Class people among nearly 700 injured by state-ordained terrorism in the Peter's Field area of Manchester.

The names of those murdered at the order of Manchester Magistrate, William Hulton:

John Ashton (Stabbed to death)
John Ashworth (Stabbed and trampled to death)
William Bradshaw (Gunned down)
Thomas Buckley (Stabbed to death)
James Crompton (Trampled to death)
William Dawson (Stabbed and crushed to death)
Edmund Dawson (Stabbed to death)
Margaret Downes (Stabbed to death)
William Fildes (Trampled to death, age 2)
un-named Gaunt (Beaten to death prior to birth during brutal attack on her pregnant Mother)
Mary Heys (Trampled to death)
Joshua Hyde (Murdered by being shot)
Sarah Jones (Beaten to death)
John Lees (Beaten to death)
Martha Partington (Asphyxiated)
Arthur Neil (Beaten to death)
John Rhodes (Stabbed to death)
Joseph Whitworth (Shot to death)

These names are not taught in schools.  Working Class people are taught to recite the names of the Ruling Class oppressors, from such trivia as the wives of the 'king' Henry Tudor, to the names of bourgeois politicians and other criminals who form the Establishment.  We must remember our people who have been brutalised and destroyed by our class enemy - and to hell with the official 'history' which glorifies the crimes of the exploiters and traitors.

The Peterloo Massacre is called a defining moment in British politics, but it is nothing of the sort.  The perfectly reasonable requests of those peacefully gathered in Manchester on this day two hundred years ago, have all ultimately been ignored:

Suffrage

The rotten boroughs may have been scrapped, but now elected MPs simply ignore the instructions of the voters, making the vote irrelevant.  The class which derided the ability of the Working Class to make decisions for ourselves, continues to describe us as stupid (as having inferior intellect to them by virtue of birth).  They reluctantly allowed universal suffrage, but as is increasingly obvious by the refusal to implement the Working Class orders for Britain to leave the EU ('Brexit'), due to us not 'understanding' what we were voting for(!), voting means nothing.

Democracy

(Drawing By Samuel William Fores - acknowledgements to National Portrait Gallery)

The revolutionaries who were judicially murdered in 1820 (John Brunt, William Davidson, James Ings, Arthur Thistlewood, Richard Tidd, RIP) understood the futility of bourgeois democracy, whereas the proto-trotskyite leader at Peterloo, Henry Hunt, clung on to pie in the sky reformism.  On this day we honour the memory of our comrades who were murdered by the state for daring to demand proletarian democracy, and we spit on the memory of the treacherous scum who followed the safe path and paved the way for their deaths (including those who betrayed them during the course of the kangaroo court convictions).

Taxes on Food, aka the 'Corn Laws'

The corn laws were repealed - eventually - but since then VAT on food has been introduced and the destruction of agricultural land has seen food poverty accelerate to the point where food banks are a necessity for millions of Working Class people.  Membership of the EU makes this worse, and the parasites in parliament are doing all they can to ensure the EU-wide corn laws stay in place.

A Living Wage and Liveable Working Hours/Conditions

The protesters at Peterloo wanted an end to the import of cheap labour, an end to working hours which made a life outside work impossible, and an end to mechanisation which was destroying jobs even then.  In modern Britain, we have zero hours contracts (the so-called Gig Economy) which see people forced to live in poverty with no job security whatsoever.  Those who have full-time work are forced to work overtime hours which - although officially illegal - are expected by employers.

Joseph Johnson of the Manchester Patriotic Union, wrote in August 1819 the following words:

"Nothing but ruin and starvation stare one in the face in the streets of Manchester and the surrounding towns, the state of this district is truly dreadful, and I believe nothing but the greatest exertions can prevent an insurrection."

Aside from the possibility of insurrection which is woefully unlikely due to the overwhelming apathy and despair of the down-trodden people, the words of 1819 are perfectly applicable to 2019.

It is absolutely disgusting and a mockery of the memory of those murdered by capitalists in 1819, that today in Manchester capitalist-neo-trot fanatics used the event to call for open borders, which are themselves the backbone of capitalist exploitation and the sure way to keep the people in poverty through fear of unemployment.

The Peterloo Massacre revisited at Orgreave, 18th June 1984

For those who say Peterloo was an isolated incident, it is only necessary to look back at the police brutality in the Miners' Strike to see that nothing has changed.  Like Peterloo, the authorities sent butchers on horseback to assault peaceful protesters, and then mobilised the media to slander the victims of establishment tyranny.  It is in part due to the Peterloo Massacre that the unarmed police were formed, so that the people would be somewhat safer from the brutality of the ruling regime and their paid mercenaries.  But even that small victory which doubtless saved the lives of hungry Miners in the 1980s, has now been reversed with the police routinely being better armed than the military.

Peterloo Changed NOTHING, it is up to us to make change happen

The Working Class are more exploited than ever.  Our living standards are collapsing along with our life expectancy.  Those who were murdered in 1819 have been followed by many more, and the collaborators in parliament and the media defile their names by uttering them.  We need a better future than the capitalists are willing to give us.  We are not asking for more, like Oliver Twist in the Dickensian workhouse; We are demanding more, nay, we are demanding EVERYTHING.

Don't fall for the rhetoric of the labour party, the loony trots and the pathetic social democrats. Fight for Freedom, for Socialism.  Make a difference. Join the only party that remembers those who fell in 1819, and which will ensure the crimes do not go unpunished.  Join the Socialist Motherland Party.