 Rhaid i chi'n gweld eich seisio ar y cwmflu i Peter Lutor i'r cyfrifion ar y cwmwlu. Rhaid i chi'n gweld eich trofnol y gweithio. Mae'r cyfrifio gyda ni'n mynd i gwybod o'r hynny o'u ei ddweud o'r cyfrifion ar y cwmwlu a'r cyfrifion o'r cyfrifion ar y cwmwlu o'r cyfrifion, a'r cyfrifion o'r cyfrifion. Oni'n fwyaf ei wneud eich bod yn oed yn cael eu rhaid i'ch cyfrifion o'r cyfrifion, ond byddwn ni'n gwneud i'r pethau cyfnodd yn ysgrifennu. Rwy'n meddwl i'r ffordd yma, yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch, ac yn ymgyrch ar y cyfrifedd yng Nghymru, ac yn ymgyrch ar y cyfrifedd yma, ac yn ymgyrch ar y cyfrifedd yma yn ysgrifennu. Yn ymgyrch ar y 16 oed, byddwn ni'n meddwl y 200th anfersyr yma yma ymgyrch yn ymgyrch. On that day, in 1819, to 80,000 people, workers, men, women and children, assembled in the centre of Manchester, what is now St. Peter's Square, to demand the right to vote, to demand the right to vote for working men. The response of the establishment and the state was to send mounted drunken yeomanry with sabers slashing at the workers, men, women and children, and put down this initial movement for democracy. At the end of that day, 18 people, including a two-year-old child, had been killed and 600 people were injured. It became known as Peterloo after the Battle of Waterloo, which marked the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Now we mark Peterloo, not just because it was a despicable act of murder committed by the British state, which it was, because it was not the first nor was it the last of these acts 100 years ago. We had an even worse massacre in Amritsa in India and those of you who are familiar with the history of Ireland will know of the infamous Bloody Sunday massacre in 1972. That's just two more examples. The reason we mark this event, especially as Marxists, is because it marks a watershed or a turning point in arguably in world history, certainly in the history of the working class in Britain, the first working class in the world, because here we start to see a generalised political movement of workers setting out to attempt not just to win abstract democratic reforms, which is the starting point, but actually to give themselves the power to change society. Now, the workers movement existed before Peterloo, existed before 1819. The trade union movement had already begun to evolve in underground illegal conditions. There's a famous quote that I'm sure many of you would be familiar with. Marx said that without organisation the working class is raw material for exploitation. Already, naturally out of the class struggle certain organisations were starting to develop, but what Peterloo marks is the first generalised political movement, the development of class consciousness, which is an essential ingredient of the fight for socialism. And this laid the basis, this first emergence put down in blood by the ruling class, laid the basis and marked the starting point for a movement which continues to this day, but found but culminated in the 1830s, too well, as late as the 1850s with the movement of charters, which Marx described, which produced what Marx described as the first working class party in history. So it's well worth a studying and educating ourselves in this movement. The Russian Revolutionary Leon Trotsky actually advised British Marxist to examine and study in other things the chartist movement, because in his words he said, over the course of a decade it gives us in condensed and diagrammatic form the whole gamut of proletarian struggle. So I'm going to try in the most concise way I can to describe that gamut of proletarian struggle and some of the vital questions that were confronted by the movement. Now before I get on to charters in itself I'd like to briefly explain the kind of conditions, the context of this movement, which is of course essential for understanding its nature. At the time of Peterloo, and later on in the 1830s as well, we're talking about the golden age of capitalism in a way, the early days of unlimited relentless exploitation of the working class. Workers were being torn from the land thrown into the dark satanic mills of the industrial revolution, and in the hellfire of these conditions we start to see the beginnings of the class struggle. Of course the weekend didn't exist, it hadn't been won by the trade union movement at that time. You had instances of workers working every day that God sent. You have in some cases 24 hour working. You have women giving birth on the factory floor and then not being forced to return to work only several days after giving birth. We have starving parents selling their children effectively into slavery in the apprentice system, selling them to the cannibalistic mill owners. These are the kind of conditions that existed for the working class of this time. And then politically the vote did not exist. In fact the only people that had the vote in the United Kingdom at the time of Peterloo was 400,000 rich landowners. That was it. In a gerrymandered system of so-called rotten burras. One brief example is a place called Old Sarum in Wiltshire, which provided to the House of Commons with two MPs and had a population of one elector. I don't know how I managed it. It must have been working very, very hard. This was the kind of situation. They described it as old corruption. At this time you might have already inferred from what I said. Even the middle class, even the relatively prosperous middle class without a vote. And so these conditions combined for a mass movement of workers which also found itself at this time in these early periods in a sort of makeshift, sometimes close, sometimes not so close alliance with middle class radicals, Democrats who also wanted to win the vote. Those middle class, I don't know if you can call them Democrats, but the middle class eventually won their vote in 1832 in the great reformat, which would later be known in the working class movement as the great betrayal. Because despite fighting and dying for the vote, the working class was again left out of the franchise. The franchise was extended now to people who owned a property of £10 or more in value, which excluded the entirety of the working population. Who, of course, owned nothing except their ability to work, which they sold to the mill owners and to the capitalist class. And so from this point on, we start to see the threads that are going to be pulled together in this general political movement of charitism. Of course, I mentioned the trade union movement already existed. After the great betrayal of 1832, it received another shot in the arm. Robert Owen, the famous socialist, returned from his projects in America. Unfortunately, I don't have time to talk about them in any detail at all. But he comes back and he issues addresses to mass meetings in places like Manchester and launches the Grand National Consolidated Trade Union. The first attempt really of building a mass national trade union in this country, at its height, had 500,000 members. The idea of this trade union was not simply negotiation and gaining better conditions for working people, the basis of trade unionism. It set about the creation of a new order of things, a socialist society, at the same time radicals, radical democrats, people like James O'Brien and Irish militant democrat and reformer, had drawn the necessary conclusion from the great betrayal that the working class and the middle class and the class of factory owners had irreconcilable interests, which meant that it could no longer and should never really have been allied. Just one quote from this James O'Brien in his paper called The Poor Man's Guardian. He said, these two classes never had and never will have any community of interest. And he actually went as far as to say, without a change in the institution of property, no improvement can take place. It's people starting to draw fairly revolutionary conclusions. And this culminates in the Chartis movement. Now I should explain what is Chartism? Where does the name come from? The name comes from a document called The People's Charter. Now The People's Charter was drafted by an organisation called the London Working Men's Association, published in 1838. And the Charter contained six points, all for political reform. And those six points I'll quote to you now from a pamphlet of theirs. A vote for every man 21 years of age of sound mind and not undergoing punishment for crime. A secret ballot or a secret ballot to protect the elector in the exercise of his vote so that his boss didn't know which way he was voting, for example. No property qualification for members of parliament, thus enabling the constituencies to return the man of their choice, be he rich or poor. And of course following on from that, the payment of members of parliament. So a working class person could actually become an MP and be able to sustain himself. That maybe sounds slightly ironic when we see the level of pay and corruption of MPs today. But it was very much a progressive demand from the standpoint of the working class. Equal constituencies, no more of these rotten borers. And interestingly, annual parliaments, and I'll quote this directly. Thus presenting the most effectual check to bribery and intimidation. And since members, when elected for a year only, would not be able to defy and betray their constituents as now. Which also rings very true to this day. Not that much has changed. Now as you can see, this is a political document. This is calling for democratic political reforms. And yet what immediately strikes you when you even take a casual look at the Chartist movement is this was inherently more than simply a campaign for the vote. This was immediately a class movement with class demands that got poured into this democratic shell you had a socialist content. And I'll give you some examples of what I mean by that. First of all, the working men's association sent out missionaries. And they literally called them missionaries. They saw themselves as almost carrying out the task of the Acts of the Apostles and the early Christians. And every town and every city they went to and delivered a speech on the principles of the charter. New political association, political unions they were called working men's associations, democratic associations popped up like mushrooms in the night. Some speakers like Henry Vincent, who went to the west of England and Wales, went to towns such as Kettering and enlisted 400 people who signed up to the Chartist movement there and then on the spot. It had an immediate massive impact. And the reason for that really was because the demands that were formulated in this charter were already being raised in a more kind of isolated localised way all over the country. Workers were already starting to strive for a generalised expression of their own interests. And alongside these mass meetings and we had meetings and assemblies of 200,000 people in Glasgow, 80,000 people in Newcastle, 300,000 people in Manchester and in Peep Green in West Yorkshire. You had a meeting of 250,000 people all listening to militant speakers extolling, yes the principles of the charter but also linking them to cluster mans. To give you an example of that, I would bring up the example of Reverend Joseph Rainer Stevens. Now from the name you can probably infer that he was a religious man, politically he was closer to being a Tory than anything else. He didn't necessarily consider himself a socialist but under the influence of the poor law, the poor law which was introduced by this new middle class government after the reform act I should mention, which basically forced people, already forced into poverty by the development of capitalism, by the capitalist system into prisons effectively, work houses, the working class called Bastilles after the political prison of the Bourbon regime in France, where families, men and women were separated to prevent them from breeding because the middle class thought that there were too many poor people. Again that rings true from the discussion we had on overpopulation and climate change. And where basically poverty was criminalised, poverty created by this capitalist system. So this Tory Reverend sees this and is immediately radicalised, subscribes to the charter and gives speeches in which he says things like he points to a local factory. This is an assembly in Cersalmore in Lancashire. He points to the chimney of the local mill and says, you see yonder factory with its towering chimney. Every brick in that factory is cemented with the blood of women and children. Reminds me a great deal of actually Marx's statement that capitalism enters the scene of history dripping blood from every poor. And he went on to formulate in perhaps the most concise way I've ever seen the real social character of charitism. He said, charitism my friends, is no political movement where the main point is you're getting the ballot. Charitism is a knife and fork question. The charter means a good house, good food and drink, prosperity and short working hours. Now you'll notice from when I quoted the charter itself it contained none of those things explicitly. But the point is from the perspective of the working class the vote was simply a means to an end. Obtaining the vote was obtaining the means yes to take control of the government, to make themselves the government and in so doing change society. And Engels actually writing about charitism in the 1840s himself actually participated in the charitism movement. He said charitism is of an essentially social nature a class movement. The six points for which the radical bourgeois are the beginning and the end of the matter, which are meant at the utmost to call forth certain further reforms of the constitution, are for the proletarian and mere means to further ends. Political power our means, social happiness our end is now the clearly formulated war cry of the charitists. So into this movement is called the demands and the desires of an increasingly organised working class expressed in this general formulation. In other words it's beginning actually to pose the question of power. We see this relationship between the democratic demands and the social demands which even today actually is obscured. Often you get this idea in the left of course there's the Stalinist theory of two stages where you have to first fight for bourgeois democracy and then fight for socialism. But even outside the question of Stalinism you do see this idea of looking at the vote as almost like an abstract moral demand of we need the vote because it's a nice thing. And in many of the commemorations of Peterloo it was treated in that regard. However for the workers that fought in Peterloo in the charitist movement for the vote they saw it as a means to attaining power. And we see this expressed even further on in the first petition of 1839. Now the idea was raised first of all okay we have this charter we want to make it the law of the land. How do we do that when we have absolutely no representatives in parliament? Now in the British constitution at the time I suppose we still have it now I imagine. You could even though you were unrepresentative the subjects of Her Majesty could pose some petition to the powers that be asking them to address certain injustices. So the charitists thought okay well we'll put together an immense petition of signatures from all over the country of working men and women. They were campaigning only for work votes for men but women took part in the charitist movement and there were thousands of signatures on that petition from working women. And we will present it to them and what's more and this is a very interesting development. We will elect representatives delegates from mass meetings in all of the cities and proletarian centres of the country to form a convention to oversee the presentation of this petition. Now they chose the word convention very deliberately. They picked that word from the Jacobin Convention of the French Revolution. That is the body they wanted to emulate. And so they elected these delegates in meetings of thousands and hundreds of thousands to converge on London later they moved to Birmingham in order to present this petition and address the question of well what do we do next. It might be said that actually this convention which was essentially the beginnings of a workers parliament delegates being elected by the working class was elected on a larger franchise and had a wider democratic mandate than the actual parliament itself at that time which was elected by about 700,000 people. But already you start to see a divide emerging. A divide which is both political but also geographical and a class divide ultimately. Some of you may be familiar with the factions if you like the wings within the charitist movement of the moral force charitist and the physical force charitist. So by convening of this convention and a run up to it we start to see this divide emerging quite clearly. On the one hand the London working man's association and its paper the London dispatch was part of what you call them I suppose the moral force faction if you can call it that. The moral force faction put forward the idea that the purpose of the petition is to mobilise public opinion and when the powers that be in parliament see that public opinion is dead set on this certain goal will be forced would have to exceed to the request because it can't go against public opinion that was the idea. Whereas the other wing of the movement if you like epitomised by the northern star which is a paper set up by the physical force charitist leader Fergus O'Connor again another Irish militant former barrister who then committed his life to the charitist movement. They advocated a different purpose they were they were perfectly fine with putting forward a petition mobilising public opinion so on. But they believe that without the force without the ability to back it up without the threat of physical force to even overthrow the government or force it to exceed to its demands no ruling class would ever do as it's told effectively. One one charitist Robert Gammage who who actually wrote a book on the history of charitism explained that what is government itself but physical force every government is based on physical force and no ruling class has ever simply given up his power and privileges without the threat of force. This kind of movement this wing of the movement was concentrated in the proletarian heartlands of places like Manchester the west riding of Yorkshire the cold districts of south Wales and parts of Scotland. And you could see the kind of the class content of this on these mass demonstrations where you had banners being carried with the skull and crossbones on a black flag with slogans like tyrants take heed or ashton demands universal suffrage or universal vengeance or another one saying remember the bloody deeds of Peterloo. One thing that we have to remember is sometimes when we look back on it in history we think of moral force and physical force as being these equal sides in the movement. The very relative strength of these sides depended on the development of class struggle in you know over the course of this movement. And at this time the physical force charitists had an overwhelming majority in the movement and in the convention and wherever in the most kind of developed factory areas and where the proletariat was thickest the physical force demands were also the most extreme if you like. Also in the east end of London the democratic association led by Julian Harnie was if you like on the extreme far left of this movement calling directly for insurrection. So this workers parliament convenes and that the first and presents this petition the position was presented sorry on the 14th of June by the charitist Thomas Atwood and it managed to gather 1,280,000 signatures. By the way online petitions did exist at this time this was literally pieces of paper that people had accumulated from every part of the country slapped onto a giant roll and carted into a parliament at the head of a procession of tens of thousands of people. The next question that arises the debate and decision in parliament wasn't going to take place until the 12th of July so the decision for the convention which is now a sitting workers parliament is what do we do in the event that parliament rejects it. One small minority said well the convention should now dissolve having presented the partition because all it's supposed to do is just present public opinion. That was rejected and that small minority immediately left the convention thus meaning it shifted even further to the left if that term is appropriate here to the physical force faction. A resolution was eventually passed that if the petition were rejected on the 12th of July the only way forward to force the charter to become the law of the land was to adopt what they call ulterior measures. Those measures included things like organising a run on the banks should have been interesting. The exclusive dealing which meant only buying things from shopkeepers actually supported the cause. Arming and a universal succession of labour or what you might call what they called a sacred month or grand national holiday. In other words this workers parliament resolved that if the actual parliament the ruling class parliament the dictatorship of capital did not agree to reform itself they would start on a month long general strike in which they were arming and training workers. In other words this was preparing for and calling and insurrection. This makes another point that not only was charitism more than simply a political democratic movement it was a class movement it was also at its essence a revolutionary movement. Which is something we really need to hold on to in this country because I've spent my whole life being told from historians and from the media that there is no revolutionary tradition in this country. Okay we had the English revolution that was a bit of a mistake chopped the king's head off whoops. But in terms of the history of the working class the working class is genetically coded to be gradualist a bit liberal to be honest very reformist and all very calm stiff up a lip all this kind of thing. Now there's a grain of truth to every lie I'll come on to that question but here in the history of charitism we see the real revolutionary history of the British working class. So long story short Parliament unsurprisingly rejects the petition in the debate Lord John Russell a Wig MP said that universal suffrage could never be passed because it would necessarily mean the equalisation of property the robbery of the property from the rich to give it to the poor. He also said it would lead to the abolition of the monarchy in the House of Lords. Those demands weren't in the charter but he was reading into it exactly what Engels read into it later. Engels said that the six points of the charter he wrote this in 1848 would be sufficient to overthrow the Queen the House of Lords and the whole of the British Constitution. It's very interesting to see it's not the first nor the last time that the ruling class were drawing the same perspectives as the Marxists anyone who reads the Financial Times today can see elements of that. It also is a great rebuttal of the historians who today say no it wasn't a revolutionary movement. The ruling class certainly thought so and it was rejected by 237 votes to 48. So what they're going to do Thomas Atwood who was a moral force charter said let's have another petition an even bigger petition. James O'Brien replied in quite a witty reply he said you may as well send a petition to the Rock of Gibraltar it'll get the same result. But then we have the question of this workers parliament which is effectively laying the foundations for it's a precursor to a soviet really. I don't want to be too I don't want to overemphasize thing but what we have is workers representatives being elected to change to overthrow the Constitution and change the law of the land in opposition to the bourgeois state. What's it going to do is said we're going to have this month long strike and the date in many areas in Manchester in particular the call was coming out name the date they were ready to go. And the date was set for the 12th of August a month long secession of labour. But at this point we see the question of the general strike. I think there's a discussion on the 1926 general strike going on right now which will address the same thing. A general strike of this nature and all out general strike for as long as a month it poses the question of power. Especially in the context when you have extreme deprivation and increasing militancy in the working class areas and an elected workers parliament trying basically to force the bourgeois state to do its bidding. What we're really talking about is the working class saying to its bosses its rulers everything that happens here happens because of us. Not a wheel turned not a light bulb shines without the kind permission of the working class. We're the ones that run here things here which is of course revolutionary but it's effectively also a declaration of war against the existing order. Something that the ruling class again fully understood because they set about arresting all the Chartist leaders as quickly as they could. Now the Chartist leaders mistakenly or not started to have doubts about whether they'd be able to carry this off. They wondered whether the strike would hold out and they worried about the bloodletting which would ensue if they actually carried it out. So under this pressure they reduced it to three days and then out of gratitude the bourgeois state arrested every single one of them or any that they could get their hands on. And so this movement petered out for a time but here we also see another question being posed. One that we can learn a great deal from and must learn a great deal from. That just because the leadership has been decapitated or the leadership has retreated does not mean that the burning rage and desperation and revolutionary consciousness that has developed below suddenly just dissipates. And we see this again in 1926 but that's not what this talks about. That the situation at that time one delegate to the convention reported in his area I think he'd come from Manchester. The deprivation and starvation because of unemployment was so terrible that one mother had had so little to eat that she'd ceased to produce milk. And she was nursing a child and when the child tried to feed from her breast all it drew was her blood. That was the situation that existed for the working class of that time. They weren't going to just go back home and what resulted from that was the heroic but tragic insurrection of Newport in 1839. We're actually days away from the 180th anniversary of this again watershed in British working class history. On the 4th of November 10 up to 10,000 working men who'd armed themselves with guns, homemade pikes, basically like a big spear and their tools like pickaxes assembled in order. This was not a drunken rabble. This was basically military formation and decided to march into the town in order to free one of the arrested charters leaders a man named Henry Vincent. They marched in formation into the town. They were met by police and special constables, kind of like the bee specials in the north of Ireland, basically, you know, temporarily hired thugs for the state. They repelled them by force and these people fled into the nearby Westgate hotel where there were soldiers waiting and from the shelter of the building fired on the insurrectionists killing 10 and dispersed them. And with this heroic attempt to take matters into their own hands is dispersed and defeated. Now, subsequently, some historians have tried to claim it was basically just an act of madness, a riot. But I think one witness of this can tell us a great deal about the intentions of this movement that this wasn't simply an isolated act of desperation. That many of the people who took part in the Newport insurrection considered it to be the beginning of a nationwide insurrection. And actually insurrections were being planned and even were attempted in places like Sheffield and Bradford. Now, the witness that I'd like to call to the stand is a chartist by the name of George Shell, who's an 18 year old worker who set out to take part in this insurrection. He left a note to his parents in which he said, Dear parents, I hope this will find you well as I am myself at this present. I shall this night be engaged in a glorious struggle for freedom and should it please God to spare my life, I shall see you soon. But if not, grieve not for me, I shall have fallen in a noble cause, farewell. He died in the course of that attempt to insurrection. John Frost, who was a leading chartist who led the insurrection, another leading chartist like Zephaniah Williams, were arrested and charged with high treason. But another interesting thing happens at the trial, they are convicted of high treason. High treason is pretty much the most serious thing you can do as far as the bourgeois state is concerned. They're sentenced to being hung, drawn and courted. Now, does everyone know what that means? That's a particularly creative, medieval punishment where you're hanged by the neck, you have your bowels torn out and then eventually they cut you in quarters for some reason. I don't know why they do that last part, but it seems a bit over the top to be honest. These people are the last people sentenced to being hanged, drawn and courted in the country. But the wave of revulsion that followed that sentencing and a petition, even bigger than the first one, of two million signatures, meant that the establishment actually backed down and commuted the sentence to transportation for life, a much softer sentence than that. Because if they carried it out and made a public display of martyring these people, then what they would have seen was Newport replicated across the entire country. That's how revolutionary this period was. I think the situation hinged basically on a knife edge. But with the defeat of this interaction, the first phase of chartism comes to a close. But often the cases that the working class often learns through defeats. The class struggle sadly contains more defeats than victories. But we see developments in organisations in class struggle and consciousness as a result of this process. And one incredible step forward which is made, again, from experience is the formation of the first working class political party in history. The defeat of the convention and the insurrection demonstrated in practice the need for a national organisation to coordinate. One of the problems, obviously, the fact that communication was much more difficult this time clearly plays a role. But the hope of the insurrectionists in Newport was that that would be followed by workers across the country. What certain chartists like Fergus O'Connor drew from that was it would be necessary to have a party in order to coordinate, in order to generalise and lead and direct this movement. That party was formed in 1840 at conference in Manchester and it was called the National Charter Association. And it was a political party of the working class. It had sub-paying membership. The subs were initially two pence a quarter, which for starving workers was a genuine sacrifice used to pay where possible a full-time secretary and an apparatus. You had an elected executive, you had branches, branch meetings that also put on discussions, lectures, Sunday schools for children. And it even also had an unofficial organ, the Northern Star, the paper that I mentioned. Effectively, it almost was the ischra of its day. And what I mean by this is that it carried reports of chartist meetings, assemblies of strikes of reports from class struggles everywhere and polemics on all the key tactical and theoretical questions of the day. It contained many of the elements that Lenin would later write about in a more theoretical sense, the need for a worker's paper basically as an organiser. It contained these instinctively through practice already. It was the property of Fergus O'Connor. It wasn't owned and directly controlled by the party, which we see now as a limitation. But we see already this moving towards a new form of organisation. And it actually, at its peak in 1842, it had as many as 40,000 members and 400 branches across the country. Bear in mind this is a party that doesn't just stand for votes for working people, but stands for the physical overthrow of the government if it doesn't grant it. This is a mass revolutionary party in the United Kingdom. And the line it took actually contains many lessons for us today. People talk about this period as if it's another planet, that we can't learn anything because, I don't know, we're more civilised now or something like that. It's actually not the case at all. We can learn a great deal from the position the chartist took because they took an independent working class position to some of the great questions of the age. One such question was the question of the Corn Laws and free trade versus protectionism. I don't have time to go into detail about this question, but the Corn Laws basically banned or regulated or set tariffs on the import of foreign corn, meaning that the price of British corn was artificially high and so the farmers and landowners basically took a nice big cut to sustain their riches. This is something that enraged the middle class manufacturers because it raised the price of bread, therefore raised wages and also set limits on their ability to trade, which they don't tend to like. That meant that they had their own political movement to repeal the Corn Laws, but of course it also meant that the workers were suffering because of the higher price of bread. In the 1840s in particular, the Anti-Corn Law League, which was a bourgeois movement to repeal the Corn Laws, started making overtures to the working class saying, suffrage is one thing, we can talk about that later, but if we repeal the Corn Laws here and now, your living standards will immediately improve. So join with us, repeal the Corn Laws, lower the price of bread and then let's talk later on about political reform. Where have we heard this before? I need to be careful that it's not... I don't want to crudely suggest it's exactly the same thing, but today we also have a split in the ruling class about its trade policy and how best to exploit the working class in the form of Brexit. I'm not going to crudely say like one's the free trade side, one's the protectionist side, it's a bit more complicated than that, but you effectively have two wings of the ruling class reaching out to the workers and saying join with us. It's free trade for the workers, it's Brexit for the workers. What was the position that Chartism took on, the question of Brexit was the question of the Corn Laws. It took an independent class position which can be formulated very simply. Free trade and repeal the Corn Laws is all good in the abstract, but without the charter it will only mean worse conditions for the working class. First the charter and then we'll talk about the repeal the Corn Laws and what does the charter mean? It means first power and then when the working class has control of the situation they will decide how best to repeal the trade laws and that way the workers will gain the benefit of that if there's any benefit to be gained instead. And charter speakers from the NCA went to anti-Corn Law meetings, put forward resolutions and amendments calling for the charter explaining that actually if we repeal the Corn Laws then the price of bread will lower, but also so will wages and you'll be exploited all over again. Which again, this is moving towards an instinctive beginnings of Marxist economics in a way based on working class experience. And they carried them. They won over anti-Corn Law meetings on the basis of their arguments. In fact the Corn Law League actually had to stop having to tick it the event to stop charters from getting in. They were winning the argument. They stood in elections. In elections where no working class person had the vote. You might think that was a stupid thing to do, but in those days before the ballot you had a show of hands vote and then a vote by poll of the actual qualified electors. And so charters, candidates would go onto the platform and expose the lies about the Tories and the Whigs, put forward a working class proposal for the charter and in many cases would win on the show of hands. Of course the people who showed their hands didn't necessarily have the right to vote. And so those candidates would either have to withdraw or they'd usually lose by a very large margin when it actually came to the poll. But of course the political impact that's making, the demonstration of just the complete lack of democracy was very powerful. There were many other things I could say about the NCA but I do have to hurry up. This culminated in a second petition. A second petition was drawn up and submitted in 1842. That petition managed to gather over three million signatures. And there's another special feature, not just the size of the petition, but also the nature of it. It wasn't the same, it didn't have just the same wording as the first position. Now in addition to the six points of the charter it contained explicitly demands like getting rid of the national debt, saying it was basically just the people paying the capitalists, the user, its rights of interest, abolition of the poor law, the abolition of the Metropolitan Police, which they believe was unconstitutional. I haven't seen any Supreme Court overturning that, that would be good. For shorter hours, for higher wages, they even called for the repeal of the Union with Ireland. They were calling for the liberation of Ireland basically from British imperialism. This led Marx to believe that the victory of charitism was the way in which we could see the liberation of Ireland. The distinctive internationalism of the working class, which again is often buried when historians talk about the history of the British working class, is there on clear display. And this petition garnered three million signatures when the population of Britain and Ireland together was about 25 million. This is an enormous petition. It was so physically enormous that they couldn't even fit it through the door of the houses of parliament. First they tried to take the door apart and then when they couldn't do that they had to take the whole petition apart and present it in some... a giant tower of paper in front of the desk of the poor people who had to read through it. Now unsurprisingly, that was also rejected by more or less the same margin. One MP by the name of Macaulay said, universal suffrage amounted to nothing short of the confiscation of the property of the rich and the end of civilisation. Of course, his civilisation, yes. He said civilisation is based on private property, which isn't wrong at very proceeding angles, and therefore universal suffrage for working men who will naturally want to confiscate and expropriate the rich would mean the end of civilisation. This shows how insightful the bourgeoisie were at this time. It also shows the class nature of the political demands of charters. It's rejected, but again, with the rejection and defeat on the political front, the workers moved rapidly into an extremely militant plane in the industrial front. What we see in 1842 is the so-called plug plot and explain what that was. In early August, manufacturers in Lancashire started cutting wages, as they do. The response of the working class was to come out. In the first mill, when workers left the factory on strike, they walked down to the next one down the road, said, we're coming out, called the workers out, we joined them, and eventually you had processions of thousands of workers starting to arm themselves as well, going from factory to factory and saying, we're shutting this down. If the boss said, no you're not, they'd wrench out the giant plug that kept them, because obviously there was steam power, they pulled the plugs out of the boilers and they didn't operate. That's why it was called the plug plot. Eventually, this culminated in Manchester and a 50-mile radius around the city being at a complete standstill. That's a big thing in and of itself. Manchester was the beating heart of British industry at that time. It spread beyond the Manchester-Lancashire area. It spread to Staffordshire and the Potteries. It spread to West Yorkshire. It spread to the coal fields of South Wales and in Scotland around Dundee. That last basically was all out. Now an important question arises which was explicitly put to the movement. Is this going to be a strike to increase wages, which is how it started? Or is it something more? The strikers held a conference in Manchester with over 300 delegates, 358 delegates on 12 August to decide on this question. Of those 358 delegates, 320 voted, again workers representatives in a embryonic Soviet if you like, a gigantic strike committee decided that this strike was going to stay out until the charter became the law of the land. So from a spontaneous response to the bosses cutting wages, this became perhaps not entirely nationwide, but certainly not simply a regional and almost nationwide all out general strike for the overthrow of the British constitution, a political strike. It reminds me of May 1968 in France. We had Renault workers and workers on strike shouting Gouvernement populaire, popular government, workers government. This is what we see in 1842. But the problem is what was the role of the NCA. The first workers party in history. The NCA did not predict this, they did not lead this sadly and actually when the strike first broke out the charter's leaders like Hani who was himself was on the extreme left they said no you shouldn't because this will provoke a confrontation we're not ready for and it will end in bloodshed. Now they later saw their mistake and issued a proclamation in support of the strike for which they were rewarded with being all arrested again by the British state. But this effectively left the movement without leadership. Spontaneously the workers had organised and again posing the question of power directly to the capitalist state. But without a clear angles explained in his book The condition of the working class in England in 1848 he explained that the workers had shown that they were able and ready to come out and change society but in his words if it had been from the beginning an intentional determined working men's insurrection it would surely have carried its point because it didn't have a clear aim because it didn't have this organised leadership that could also help to spread the strike across the country it reached a point of perhaps not paralysis effectively became stuck and in the face of increasing repression eventually the workers had to go back to work but as we know the working class can't simply stay out on strike without a clear aim in mind and again an historic opportunity was lost. Now it's easy for me many many years later to say oh they should have done this they should have done that. What needs to be remembered is that this was the first time that this was being carried out in Britain in many examples this was the first time this was being carried out in the world and after this high point we see the charter movement begin to go into decline it has some successes Fergus O'Connor was actually elected as an MP even though the parliament wasn't reformed in 1847 for Nottingham we also see another petition being presented in 1848 off the back of a revolutionary movement across Europe I'm sure many of you are familiar with that year the year the Communist Manifesto comes out the year of the French Revolution in February 48, German Revolution British charters were watching foreign events they gave solidarity to revolutionaries in other countries in Europe and they sought to link their movement to their own but that petition was again rejected it claimed 5 million signatures it's believed that really the genuine number was about 2 million still an immense petition but the movement eventually fizzled out if you like there's more that can be said about this period of charters I'm not doing it full justice but I'm already running out of time but the NCA continues to exist continues to be a party of thousands of people and actually I now want to talk about the yes we see kind of the decline of charters I should mention that after the disappointment of 39 and 42 people start moving to other movements the repeal of the Cornwall movement starts to become increasingly popular the tables are turned if you like you have movements to educate the workers t-totalism co-operativism all of which have a place in the workers movement but of course as O'Connor explained from the NCA without the pursuit of power as long as the capitalist establishment continues to exist these movements can be isolated and they can ultimately be frustrated by the co-operative movement today but these start to gain popularity at the expense of charters and so many people following this have said oh charters has failed then eventually it resulted in nothing they didn't win the vote the vote was delivered by a liberal government in 1867 therefore charters was a failure I don't think that's right at all as Engels pointed out charters effectively changed British history and even changed British culture the world in class was so terrified by this revolutionary period by the threat that charters imposed it began a policy of offering concessions where and when it could in order to keep the workers on a on a looser leash if you like we're also talking about a period in which British manufacturing and British capitalism was at its most powerful and most successful ever in the 1850s and 60s it dominated the world economy it was able to provide an improvement in living standards for a layer of the working class and on that basis the Union of course became a bit more moderate as a result of this improvement in conditions and so the ruling class was able to introduce concessions but there's an important point to remember here they didn't just introduce the vote because conditions improved they introduced the vote when they did because charters was already dead the National Charter Association effectively ceased to exist in 1857 when Ernest Jones when the leadership decided to enter into some kind of allegiance with the middle class if there had been a charters party still there if there had been an independent working class party even of a few thousand who were putting forward these kind of ideas then the ruling class would never have introduced the vote because it would have inevitably meant that this party would have great successes and the kind of risks that they were talking about the risk to civilisation would be posed again charters had to be dead and buried before they could risk introducing the vote it also shows I said about without organisation the working class being raw material for exploitation that applies politically as well as economically that without a party the working class can simply be used and abused as a reserve for the various ruling class parties we see this in America to this day but that vote was won by the threat that charters imposed it was fear of revolution from below that caused the ruling class to introduce these reforms from above but there's another very important product maybe it's not right to call it a product but an effect of charters Engels wrote about charters he lived in Manchester he associated with charters he wrote both Marx and Engels wrote letters and articles for the Charters press Marx actually spoke at a charters meeting in English he went and gave a speech in English at a charters meeting and then insisted that they don't publish it I think maybe he was a bit worried about his English but it would have been amazing to witness this meeting they were basically a part of the charters movement and they had very close relations with Ernest Jones who was kind of the leader of the later period of charters from about 1848 onwards he was the leader of the National Charter Association and they tried to and had some success in winning him over to their ideas and likewise many of the demands of the charters you will recognise from the kind of demands that have been put forward in the Communist Manifesto 1864 the International Working Man's Association is founded where did they get the name from it sounds remarkably similar to the London Working Man's Association many of the lessons and the programmes the demands the concrete demands of Marxism were taken from charters as this first living experience of the masses of workers trying to change society of course the actual programme of Marxism is generalised from the experience of the working class this is where we get the power of our demands from and we can see this in practice which makes charters such an essential movement to study but finally the last point that I want to end on is what's left of charters today that Trotsky made a very interesting observation about the British Labour movement it effectively has two souls or two sides to which we say I would say that contrary to the slander that's carried about the British working class but it's innately conservative or gradualist or reformist which is something introduced by the reforms of the later period on the corpse of charters that's not the real face of the workers the real face of the British working class can be seen in events like the Newport Insurrection the plug plot the attempts of the charters to put power on the hands of the workers that's the real face of the British Labour movement which still exists to this day but there's another side to this movement every creature has a face and a backside and the British Labour movement also has a backside and that is the liberal leadership often that you get of the right wing in the trade union and Labour party that see their role to effectively put forward if you like a form of the moral force arguments to win round, to be respectable and will win round the bourgeoisie to give them some kind of reforms a backside of the Labour movement and as we know, well maybe the zoologist in the room can correct me but I'm not aware of any creature that can move backside first and end up where he wants to go I know that's certainly not the case for human beings this true face of the working class which has been obscured by the betrayals of the right wing of the movement many times we should make it our task as Marxists in Britain to bring that real face to the fore in many respects I think we can claim to the heritage of charters the real inheritors the people to whom belong this tradition of charters can be found in the bodies of the Marxist to this day we should reclaim this heritage of charters, this revolutionary Marxist wing in the British Labour movement which was present in the Labour party which is present in the trade unions has always been present as long as Marxist existed it is our duty to take this movement the first seeds of which were sown at St Peter's Fields in Manchester and carry it to victory and on that I'll just finish with the words of the poet Shelley writing about Peterloo I felt it would be appropriate to finish on rise like lions after slumber in unvanquishable number shake your chains to earth like dew which in sleep had fallen on you ye are many, they are few thank you