The corn laws and Peterloo

In 1813, a House of Commons Committee recommended excluding foreign-grown corn until domestically grown corn reached £4 per quarter. What this was was protectionism, a way to force the British public to buy British corn, and it was passed as law in 1815.

The date is no coincidence. The war with France had ended in 1814, Waterloo was in June 1815, and the concern was that imported corn would drive down the cost of British corn, producing less money for farmers (and, of course, for the land-owning gentry who taxed the farmers).

Peterloo massacre, Manchester, 1819

This was very much in the zeitgeist. In 1812, wheat had risen to 126s, mirroring the widespread economic distress of that year, the Luddites had just started machine-wrecking (made a capital offence in 1812), and PM Spencer Perceval was assassinated (replaced by Lord Liverpool, who made history by being the first fatal casualty of a train crash). No wonder the government were periodically obsessed that the Great British Public were going out of their heads in a mob mentality. The public were suffering because financial interests were doing everything they could to get more money out of them, and these financial interests were the politicians! Back then, gentry became MPs because, well, they were the only ones who could afford it – the system didn't pay a wage to become an MP, so you needed your own private income (as well as paying for your election campaign). And it was thought (by the gentry) that landowners had a higher stake in their constituency than your common man, they would work harder for its interests. It's this same mentality that required you to be a landowner of wealth to be an officer (which is why the sale of ranks was so profitable in the Victorian era that financial organisations existed to transact the sale of military ranks to anyone who wanted to impress the ladies with a military rank, and was minted. It wasn't like he would be putting his life in much danger - the Victorian era was a period with relatively few wars. Plenty of conflicts, rebellions, mutinies, sieges, though, but statistically speaking he was probably going to be alright).

Anyway, the public were paying higher prices for bread, so it was hated by the majority. In a lot of cases, bread had become unaffordable. This all came to a head in 1819 when, after protests in Birmingham, Leeds, and London, there was another one in Manchester. 60,000 people attended a lawful protest - general members of the public. The speaker, Orator Hunt, was arrested, and the yeomanry charged at the crowd to get them to disperse (instigated by a panicked Tory magistracy). About a dozen people were killed, and it was then sardonically labelled 'Peterloo' by the radical writers of the time. There's quite a good website about it here.

The protests had been about a lot of things – parliamentary reform, the corn laws, being the two most popular – but by calling it 'Peterloo' the implication was that this was a war against the poor by a corrupt, repressive authority. That Peterloo still exists as a word in contemporary culture shows that those early 19^th century radical writers were probably onto something. Also that politics never really changes, it just does and says slightly different things, sometimes it's like politicians just get reincarnated into newer generations of politicians.