Peterloo 1819 – 2019 v Tommy Robinson

Early this year I wrote this about the Peterloo Massacre.

This week I happened to have some business in the Manchester area. I didn’t arrive until some days after the EU elections when Tommy Robinson, while not being elected as one of the Members of the European Parliament of the North West Area, still received a record-breaking (for an independent candidate) 39,000 votes despite having no social media presence, no reporting other than the negative (with this one exceptional and much criticised brief and merely factual report) but receiving assault and violence which the police are still “investigating”.

Readers will recall the milk-shake attacks, which the left-wingers considered so hilarious that this meme circulated amongst them, originating from Salford Trades Union Council.

There was the Islamic attack from males of the Muslim Defence League who, having travelled from as far away as Bradford and Huddersfield in Yorkshire, were escorted by the police to the Limeside estate in Oldham where Tommy was speaking to local residents. There they attacked and intimidated those English residents, Tommy and his team and the police, damaging two police vehicles. Despite clear photographs of quite a few of the perpetrators the Greater Manchester Police are still “investigating”; however the video of what happened has been increasingly restricted.

The final rally of Tommy’s campaign was at the Mocha Parade shopping centre in Salford. These were the posters pasted up all along the main road.

That night the potential violence came not from Muslims but from their enablers the UAF/Antifa/Trade Unions.  I am told that as the local residents (like Limeside in Oldham this is a predominantly English estate) wanted to hear Tommy the shock(ing) troops of Antifa were chased away.

As I said above Tommy did not receive the votes he needed to be elected, and oh, how the elite crowed and scoffed at what they perceived as his “humiliation”. This is Nick Lowles of Hope not Hate in the Guardian

Tommy Robinson was humiliated in the EU elections. Here’s how we helped do it..

…we decided from the outset to try to keep his name out of the local media so as not to give him undue publicity. . . direct our campaign at turning out the voters who were most likely to oppose his anti-immigrant, divisive policies. . . targeted our campaign to the streets where those opposed to Yaxley-Lennon were most likely to live. . . We delivered over 360,000 leaflets to these houses and backed this up with a highly targeted social media campaign. We had different messages going to different voters,

They boast how they used Twitter and Facebook to great effect – media tools denied Tommy, some UKIP and other candidates.  

Tommy’s leaflets, which the Post Office were paid to deliver, were in some cases dumped, or languished in the sorting office until too late.

And the Manchester Evening News

Tommy Robinson’s European election result was met with laughter

When Manchester council’s returning officer Joanne Roney read out his result, it was met with uproarious laughter and shouts of ‘fascist’ and ‘out with the racist’. Labour’s re-elected MEP Theresa Griffin welcomed the result, thanking Labour activists for beating him.

Manchester is gearing up for August and the celebrations of the bicentenary of the Peterloo massacre. In August 1819 60,000 working class Lancastrians, led by middle class reformers gathered in St Peter’s Fields to hear speeches about democracy and reform. The authorities panicked in fear and sent in the militia. At least 15 men and women were killed and hundreds more injured. Thankfully no one was killed by the Muslim mob at Tommy’s rally in Oldham.  But they could have been. 22 women and children were killed by a Muslim with a bomb at a music concert at the Manchester Arena two years ago last week. Murder has become commonplace.

There is a big Peterloo exhibition at the famous John Rylands Library, just round the corner from the site of St Peters Field (an open space in 1819, developed later in that century, redeveloped several times since)

And because the left and the intelligentsia, the chattering classes, the “woke” and the worthy control, or think they do, the narrative of working class history much is made of the historic efforts to achieve universal franchise.  You may have noticed that I am continuing the same argument I made in my post of January; I have not changed my opinion, merely found some more examples which I submit to back it up.

Photography of the documents was forbidden due to their physical fragility, but I can quote from the curator’s information notes.

“In the longer term reaction to the tyrannical response to Peterloo confirmed the right of free speech, assembly and peaceful protest in British politics” says the notice at the entrance.

Of course this has to be qualified, and one of the first exhibits as you step inside are some documents pertaining to a meeting called to oppose Catholic Emancipation in 1813.

“Freedom of speech is often used to argue for denial of democratic privileges to others”. This is looking at things through a prism of modern bourgeois shibboleths (as they do slavery later on) and doesn’t sit well with the leftist chant of “no platform for… insert idea disagreed with here”.   

In January I mentioned Telescopic  Philanthropy, the phenomena described as such by Dickens  of “the preference of the English liberal classes to be more concerned with the plight of black and minority ethnic people especially abroad, than with the poverty and suffering of the white working class at home.”

Later documents at the Rylands deal with the effect of the US fight for the abolition of their slavery. The Free Trade Hall where this speech was given was built on the ground that had been St Peter’s Field; Bob Dylan played there in the mid-20^th century shortly before it was pulled down.  

Cotton workers and their families left the area in their thousands looking for work elsewhere; Yorkshire, New York, New Zealand.  I can’t yet find any figures of the deaths from starvation and disease amongst the working class of Lancashire for those years, but this description of starving labourers by Lord SYDNEY GODOLPHIN OSBORNE in a letter to the Times reproduced in the New York Times of 1862 is quite harrowing.  A description of an Englishman, in England, starving to death only a few miles from the birthplace of my husband’s grandmother, and only a few years before her birth.

at this stage of depression in mind and of gradual waste body, the sufferer complains but little, if at all; there is tendency to sleep, rest, anyhow, anywhere, yet little evidence of pain. There is, however, to the skilled eye a cast of countenance unmistakable; the children look aged beyond their [???] adults move and speak with a gait and utterance which seem to shun all effort.
…patient, sullen, hopeless despondency masters the whole man. You have atrophy now showing itself in many ways; the hair quits the head in patches, the ankles swell, the skin is bloodless, the eye sunken; at this stage food fails, medicine fails, care cannot rescue. It is a mere matter of time; few, if any, recover

This despite the relief efforts about which the archive of the New York Times goes on to give details. Slavery is undoubtedly wrong, and it’s abolition right, no other option was possible, but I must remember this the next time my people are berated for the history of the slave trade, and compensation demanded of us.  Remember the deaths and suffering through the cotton famine which white English wage slaves endured so that black American cotton slaves could be freed.  Telescopic  Philanthropy again. But I digress.

I wait in hope that the Greater Manchester Police will make arrests and bring charges against the mob who attacked the rally in Oldham.

I hope that Tommy’s campaign team get at the very least a refund of the money they paid to have the campaign leaflets delivered across the region. Hope not Hate are funded from the bottomless pockets of George Soros.

Meanwhile Tommy will be on trial again at the Central Criminal Court the Old Bailey next month for the allegations of contempt of court for which he has already served a term of imprisonment, albeit wrongfully.  We keep calm and carry on.

Photographs E Weatherwax Greater Manchester May 2019