Good piece by @Dannythefink. "Peterloo was a tragedy, an outrage and an emblem of the repressive obstinacy of a privileged elite. What it was not, was a turning point in British history. You can argue that it should have been ... But it wasn’t." thetimes.co.uk/edition/commen…
2. That’s not to belittle Peterloo: it’s an important counter to self-congratulatory visions of British history, in which a wise and benevolent elite carefully steered the population to political maturity – a domestic version of a story also told about the empire.
3. But the danger is that we replace one politically useful myth with another: rooted in a romantic desire to find British analogues to the storming of the Bastille & to rewrite the story of democracy as one in which a heroic people seizes power by force from a reactionary elite.
4. As @Dannythefink suggests here, the story is more complex and more interesting. It’s about a society undergoing volcanic industrial change, on a scale that had never been seen in history; that was rewriting the class system, transforming knowledge and rewiring the family.
5. It’s about a religious revolution that saw Chartists, reformers and suffragettes embracing new interpretations of scripture and waging “holy war” on old forms of authority. It’s about new scientific ideas, that both advanced and retarded the spread of democratic thought.
6. It’s about a creative paradox at the heart of the British state: its impulse to “reform, that you may preserve”, and its reverence for a constitution based not on a set of documents but on an interpretation of history – one that valorised “change” & being “wise in time”.
7. It's a story that criss-crosses forwards and backwards across Europe, America and the Empire: a story that's closely bound up with changing racial thought and the struggle for power in the world.
8. Oddly, there is no good modern history of how Britain became a democracy. I can’t promise you a “good” one, but I'm going to give it a seriously big swing. Watch this space… [Ends]
PS: the big story is not how Britain became "a democracy" but how *parliamentary* democracy fought off alternatives such as industrial democracy, direct democracy & party democracy. With parliamentary democracy under attack from left & right, a new settlement may now be emerging.
