Is Manchester’s radical history history?
Article published: Wednesday, September 15th 2010
“Why not have a Congress of our own?” The famous words of Samuel Caldwell Nicholson which led to the first Trades Union Congress taking place in 1868, on David Street—now Princess Street—at the Mechanics’ Institute. There were 34 delegates; two even came up from London.
As the set-piece event of UK trade unionism is held in our city again this week, there is certain to be a lot of media coverage of potentially the most lively and controversial congress in years. The deep cuts in public spending that are being announced with frightening regularity are certain to cause widespread concern to this year’s delegates, with well over half of public sector workers trade union members, compared with barely 15 per cent in the private sector.
Congress marks a good time to reflect on the city’s history as a focal point of dissent and assess its prospects in the twenty-first century.
Manchester has a strong history of social innovation. It was arguably the most important town in the development of trade unions in the UK, key as it was to the Industrial Revolution. Not only was the first Congress held here but it was the location of one of the first attempts to build a ‘general union’ in 1830 when a young John Doherty set up the National Association for the Protection of Labour (NAPL). Today, the three biggest unions are all general unions (representing a variety of different job types rather than a niche like, say, teachers) and between them have a membership of over 3.5 million. The NAPL lost its first strike, most of its members and was finished within a year or two after its secretary went AWOL with £100.
Our city has been integral to many other ‘progressive’ social movements. The peaceful demonstration that precipitated the Peterloo Massacre in 1819—in almost the exact location of this year’s Congress—was stoked by the Corn Laws of that era which caused famine by protecting the price of corn for aristocratic landowners. Manchester, and particularly Salford, was an important area of support for Chartism a couple of decades later which sought to implement a people’s charter, including universal suffrage for all men over 21. So too was the city important to suffragette movement in the UK. Emmeline Pankhurst set up the Women’s Social and Political Union in Moss Side a century or so ago.
Perhaps it is unfair to compare the struggles of the nineteenth and early twentieth century to those of today in order to extrapolate some kind of character of a city’s people. But there are more recent pointers that suggest this is a city that is, shall we say, ‘left-of-centre’. It was the first city in the UK to go ‘nuclear-free’ in 1980 and it would appear has never forgiven the Conservatives for that decade either. Of the 96 councillors elected to Manchester City Council as of this year, only one is Conservative – a defector from the Lib Dems in 2008 which showed that the Conservatives were “the true home of progressive politics”, according to David Cameron. Not one has been elected since the early 1990s.
So what of Manchester today? Has relative widespread economic prosperity blunted Mancunians’ taste for a fight? There is some evidence that the collectivist zeal and tendency towards co-operation could be on the wane.
The thumping defeat of the congestion charge in 2008 with a near 80 per cent rejecting the scheme is one such sign that the mentality is changing – toward the more individualistic. Also, much of the media coverage of the ID cards pilot scheme in Greater Manchester seemed to imply that it was being taken up with a fair amount of enthusiasm (in fact, a House of Commons question by Wythenshawe and Sale East MP Paul Goggins revealed that only 6,000 had been issued by May of this year.) One may also read a drift to right by the reception given to the prime minister last month when he addressed a ‘PM Direct’ audience in Manchester. By all accounts he was received with a reasonable amount of warmth with the Economist reporting that “no voter in Manchester made a murmur” at the suggestion of private credit rating agencies “policing welfare rolls.”
Whether or not the fundamental character of the city has shifted, amid the monumental change that Manchester has undergone over the years, will in all likelihood become clear in the coming months and years. Prospects for cordial industrial relations in the short to medium term look very bleak. I have seen many banners and placards with words like ‘national demo’ being prepared in the weeks leading up to Congress with a whole variety of different organisations’ logos attached. All that was before the doors had even opened. Once they did, one of the first acts was to pass a motion to “support and co-ordinate campaigning and joint union industrial action, nationally and locally, in opposition to attacks on jobs, pensions, pay or public services”.
This was after an impassioned opening by TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber. In a smart reversal of right-wing accusations of a Leviathan state having emerged, he warned that big cuts would make Britain a “dark, brutish and more frightening place”.
Many people in and around their forties identify the 1984-5 Miners’ Strike as the defining moment of their coming-of-age politically. Those a little older, the strikes of ‘72 and ’74. What happens after this Congress will answer whether Manchester’s future will be anything like its past.
Ben Egan
More: Blog
Comments
No comments found
The comments are closed.
