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Unfinished business, or a revolution for today
Historian and trade unionist Keith Flett draws inspiration from activists of the past and suggests ways to transform today’s politics
THE fight of the “Free Born Englishman” continues. Reporting on the departure of Bromsgrove MP Julie Kirkbride at the next election, the Financial Times quoted one campaigner as arguing there is unfinished business from the English Civil War.
A recent exhibition at the British Library on the fight for the vote Taking Liberties highlighted the work of the Levellers, a group in Cromwell’s New Model Army and the inspiration for the Putney Debates (see main picture) of 1647.
These raised democratic demands most of which remain unfulfilled today.
They included the separation of Church and State, the abolition of the House of Lords and the monarchy. These last were briefly achieved in the Commonwealth but reappeared in 1660.
The French Revolution sparked the fight for democracy, first with the London Corresponding Society, whose resolve to have members unlimited was an attempt to establish the right of association and assembly.
When demonstrators gathered in Manchester in August 1819 to demand the right to vote they were attacked by cavalry. At least 15 died and hundreds were wounded – the Peterloo massacre.
Just how controversial the right to association was can be seen with the case of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, Dorchester farm workers, transported to Australia for having the temerity to sign up to a trade union.
After a huge campaign of popular protest they were returned to the UK and one thing that had helped in that was after the 1832 Reform Act, Parliament had moved a little way towards democracy.
The pre-1832 Parliament had been characterised by “Old Corruption”. MPs had not represented voters in any serious way and the whole structure rested on sinecures, where money was paid for notional jobs in government.
But 1832 swept some of this away and the events that led up to it were a potentially revolutionary moment.
Dissatisfaction with the lack of real change after 1832 led to the formation of the Chartist movement.
The People’s Charter of 1837 had six demands including payment of MPs and the secret ballot and one that remains unfulfilled- annual parliaments.
From 1851 when a new programme, The Charter and Something More, was launched. there were efforts to move beyond political democracy and demand economic democracy as well.
The call that working people should get the full fruits of their labours, is less heard but hugely relevant to the lives of ordinary people.
The Chartists campaigned with petitions for the vote, with mass demonstrations, a general strike in 1839 and then in November of that year a nearly successful armed insurrection starting in Newport, south Wales.
As with Peterloo the government reacted with fury to demands for democracy and many Chartists ended up in jail.
With further Reform Acts in 1867, 1872 and several in the 1880s you might think that the fight for democracy was won. It wasn’t. Democratic demands, particularly those for annual or triennial parliaments and the payment of MPs from the local rates to make their expenditure transparent and accountable, were to be found in the Independent Labour Party from the 1890s.
Women did not get the vote on the same basis as men until 1928 after a direct action campaign by the Suffragettes.
In 2009 we can look back to the Levellers and the Chartists and see that demands for the abolition of the monarchy and the Lords and for annual parliaments still remain as outstanding business; not to mention the need to challenge the new Old Corruption of the 21st century MPs’ expenses.
What would a democratic parliament look like?
William Morris described the Commons in his Utopian novel News From Nowhere as a “dung heap” and in the era of climate change that might be a better use for it.
However, confining MPs to the average worker’s wage and publicly and centrally funding a pool of administrative assistants might be worthwhile. That would clear out the lawyers and company directors and see them replaced not by celebrities but by ordinary people with experience of what it is like to live and work in today’s Britain.
If the Lords had gone some aspect of review would be needed and here an expanded role for Select Committees might be developed.
They might include not just MPs but trade unionists, academics, scientists and professionals.
I’d like to see them have the power to investigate what multinational companies get up to, for example, and start to bring in an element of economic democracy.
Ultimately however the right of recall of MPs (which already exists in the US) would be the best democratic safeguard of the lot.
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