Memory & Activism: the Heritage of Chartism, from Flett to Gove

Memory & Activism: the Heritage of Chartism. From Flett to Gove

I was unfortunately not able to join the event at the time but have now caught up with Matthew Roberts Working Class Movement Library meeting on Chartism. It is well worth watching/listening to and the link is below.

Roberts makes the point that Chartism has been claimed by various political constituencies. The Fabians, who saw William Lovett as a model for moderate peaceful reform. Those to the left of Labour who looked to the physical force traditions of Chartism and more recently liberal democrats (lower case) and even Michael Gove- who is neither-to press the case for a more democratic electoral system.

Roberts references by 1980s arguments with pre-New Labour around various attempts to harness the Chartists to their project, perhaps in particular Neil Kinnock. To be fair to him he certainly did know something of South Wales Chartism but an attempt to harness the 1839 Newport Rising to 1980s Labour politics didn’t impress me (and it still doesn’t). Cue a letter to the Guardian in 1986..

I am of course firmly on the page of seeing Chartism not just as history but as a movement that still has lessons for the modern labour movement and left. As Trotsky noted in Where is Britain Going, Chartism was the first to try a range of tactics including the General Strike and Armed Revolt. We need to enter here a note of caution from E P Thompson who argued that as the working class proceeded to warren capitalism from end to end starting in the 1860s, those options as specifically tried then (that is with no clear alternative) had gone.

Indeed but even so the fundamental questions that the Chartists asked about how to get democratic representation within capitalism and whether an alternative could work and how remain ones asked in 2021.

A key point Matthew Roberts made was what the memory and heritage of Chartism might be now. There is a new generation of historical research- albeit not so much in the public eye. There is also a danger of Chartism being seen as a fight by white blokes for their rights (though tbf Nigel Farage never references it). Here as Roberts notes the continuing effort to get recognition for the black leader of London Chartism in 1848, William Cuffay, has importance. There is some good news here in the sense that a plaque on Cuffay has been agreed in his birthplace of Medway and will be erected once current restrictions lift.

A question which is at least now being asked is whether there was a wider black presence in the Chartist movement and if so what its extent was. There are a handful of known examples but as often with historical research, if you don’t look, you don’t find.

There is also a think a good deal more that could be done on female Chartism following on from the work that Dorothy Thompson and others did some time ago.

Like the work of the left itself, the issue of the heritage and memory of Chartism remains work in progress.

Heritage politics and the memory of Chartism in England and Wales

Matthew Roberts at the Working Class Movement Library