The Labour Parliament of 1854 was one of the last
significant Chartist gatherings. A page on the Labour Parliament which also
lists the 40 delegates who attended has now been added to Chartist Ancestors.
There is no clear date at which Chartism came to an end. For
many, the disappointments and state backlash of 1848 were enough; others
struggled on to 1858 when the National Charter Association held its final
convention. A few still continued to describe themselves as Chartists for
decades more.
But there is some sense in which 1854 marked the demise of
the Chartist movement. It was both the year in which Chartism’s first
historian, Robert Gammage, ended his account, and the year in which a Chartist
Labour Parliament met and signally failed even to discuss Chartism’s political
demands.
By
the winter of 1853-54, the fight was clearly industrial
and economic. Strikes and the first systematic use of lock-outs by
employers were
rife, and it would surely have been remiss of any socialist organisation
(as
the NCA had been since 1851) to ignore this battleground. Most notably,
the Preston lock-out of 1853-54 was seen as crucially important. The
photograph here shows George Cowell, a leading figure in the events of
that winter, addressing a crowd in the Lancashire town.
The Labour Parliament was Ernest Jones’s attempt to tie
together industrial struggle and Chartism. Unfortunately, this was neither a
totally popular move among the remaining Chartist activists, nor an especially
successful one.
A furious Gammage watched in horror as Jones put forward a
scheme for agricultural and factory co-operatives in place of Chartism’s
political demands, recalling that Jones “had always previously pronounced such
schemes as worthless”.
He went on: “The plan did not take. The contributions –
which according to Jones, were to amount to five million pounds a-year – were
not sufficient to pay the salaries of the Executive, who were involved in a
debt of £18, which rested upon the shoulders of a single individual.”
Realising the plan was doomed, Jones now “advised the people
to send no monies but what were sufficient to pay off the debt”, and, according
to Gammage, declared the failure of the scheme to be evidence that the people
were becoming more convinced of the need to gain political power.
“Matchless impudence! Was ever trickery more transparent?”
asked Gammage.
No comments:
Post a Comment