Capitalism's Conscience

200 Years of the Guardian

Des Freedman

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780745343365
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Media & Communications Industry
• Index: Business

'A lively and well-researched history and critique' - Jonathan Steele, former Chief Foreign Correspondent for the Guardian

Since its inception in Manchester in 1821 as a response to the 1819 Peterloo Massacre, the Guardian has been a key institution in the definition and development of liberalism. The stereotype of the 'Guardianista', an environmentally-conscious, Labour-voting, progressively-minded public sector worker endures in the popular mythology of British press history.

Yet the title has a complex lineage and occupies an equivocal position between capital and its opponents. It has both fiercely defended the need for fearless, independent journalism and handed over documents to the authorities; it has carved out a niche for itself in the UK media as a progressive voice but has also consistently diminished more radical projects on the left.

Published to coincide with its 200th anniversary, Capitalism's Conscience brings together historians, journalists and activists in an appraisal of the Guardian 's contribution to British politics, society and culture - and its distinctive brand of centrism. Contextualising some of the main controversies in which the title has been implicated, the book offers timely insights into the publication's history, loyalties and political values.

1
In the Wake of Peterloo? A Radical Account of the Founding of the Guardian

Des Freedman

INTRODUCTION

The Guardian regularly, and proudly, declares that it was born in the aftermath of the Peterloo massacre of August 1819, one of the turning-points in British working-class history. Some 50,000 people attended a mass rally in St Peter’s Fields in Manchester to press for electoral reform and trade union rights and were met with a brutal assault by local yeomanry that led to the deaths of 18 people and widespread outrage against the authorities. Peterloo, argues one historian, ‘was no accident; it was a political earthquake in the northern powerhouse of the industrial revolution’¹ that ultimately weakened the grip of the old aristocratic forces and emboldened the movement for reform.

In the crowd that day was John Edward Taylor, a cotton merchant and part-time journalist who wrote up his account of the massacre for The Times, helping to make what might have been contained as a local event into a national sensation. According to the current editor of the Guardian, Katharine Viner, ‘Taylor exposed the facts, without hysteria. By reporting what he had witnessed, he told the stories of the powerless, and held the powerful to account.’² Peterloo radicalised Taylor and prompted him, in the words of a Guardian feature in 2018, ‘to start his own paper, two years later, to campaign for reform’³ and to pursue a democratic agenda based on truth-telling and a commitment to progressive, liberal values. This paper was the Manchester Guardian, and its supporters argue that it has continued ever since to devote itself to the pursuit of ‘enlightenment values, liberty, reform and justice’.⁴

This chapter argues that this account of the Guardian’s birth conceals far more than it reveals and glosses over a central fact: that the liberal values espoused by Taylor served to contain, rather than to promote, demands for more fundamental democratic change. Taylor had a far more ambivalent reaction to the events at Peterloo than is widely credited, and launched the Guardian in order to foster a constitutional alternative to radical social forces and to cater to the needs of an increasingly politically confident business community in Manchester. The chapter challenges some of the myths surrounding the founding of the newspaper (not least that it was designed to serve as a fearless advocate of progressive social change and working-class representation), explores the objectives of the group of businessmen who sponsored it and examines its coverage of key reform issues in its first few years.

PETERLOO IN CONTEXT

There is little doubt that the second decade of the nineteenth century was an insurrectionary period in English history. With the French Revolution a recent memory and with basic democratic rights to vote and to organise denied to the vast majority of the population, there was a rebellious mood amongst a growing working-class movement characterised by the smashing up of machinery, huge radical meetings, hunger marches and food riots.⁵ As Viner notes: ‘The combination of economic depression, political repression and the politicisation of workers with economic need was combustible.’⁶

This presented a threat not simply to the landed gentry still in power but also to an emerging professional class who were terrified about the prospects of a powerful labour movement. According to John Saville, the middle class at this time ‘never forgot the history of revolutionary France and they were constantly reminded of the problems and the dangers of too rapid change when they listened to the ultra-radical doctrines of their own working people’.⁷ The choice for the old order in this context was either continued repression or else accommodation to the demands for change. However, in 1819 the latter approach, as E.P. Thompson argues, ‘would have meant concession to a largely working class reform movement; the middle-class reformers were not yet strong enough . . . to offer a moderate line of advance.’⁸

The violence meted out at Peterloo helped to transform the balance of forces amongst proponents of reform. It exposed the barbarism of the authorities to a national audience and opened the door to liberal reformers to make a case for piecemeal change and thus to pre-empt the need to cave in to radical demands for universal suffrage. Indeed, while the ‘constitutionalist’ wing of the movement gained in confidence following Peterloo, the ‘revolutionary’ wing, facing sustained repression and internal division, temporarily lost its momentum. According to Thompson, once the ‘clamour of 1819 had died down, the middle-class reform movement assumed a more determined aspect’ and the industrial militancy that had characterised that decade died down, at least for a few years.⁹

In Manchester, this paved the way for liberal-minded business leaders to agitate for parliamentary reform, religious freedom and, above all, free trade. People like Taylor, his good friend and fellow journalist Archibald Prentice, his then business partner John Shuttleworth and his future publisher Jeremiah Garnett were part of what was known as the ‘Little Circle’, a group of Manchester merchants that opposed both the rule of the ‘old order’ and the extension of the franchise to all working people. According to David Knott, the Circle believed that, ‘it was preferable to have a small bourgeois public such as themselves exercising political rights, as they alone would approach this role with objectivity and rationality.’¹⁰ Many of its members were connected to the cotton trade, an industry that was intimately linked to and dependent on the profits yielded by slave labour in the Caribbean and US, even though, as individuals, many of them were also active as abolitionists, an apparent contradiction to which we will return later in this chapter.

Peterloo played a key role in the development of the Circle, convincing its members of the need for a new, constitutionally focused political strategy. Knott argues that while Circle members were outraged by the violence they witnessed at Peterloo, ‘they also wanted to distance themselves from the event’ and to channel radical political dissent into ‘deliberative assemblies’ that took the form of ‘rational debate within legally sanctioned indoor local political forums’.¹¹ What they lacked at the time was a vehicle that could articulate their values and promote these assemblies – such as a regular newspaper – and the fallout from Peterloo provided precisely this opportunity.

TAYLOR AND THE LIBERAL RESPONSE TO PETERLOO

The two most recent editors of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger and Katharine Viner, both identify Peterloo as the main inspiration for the birth of the title. For Viner, the ‘history of the Guardian begins on 16 August 1819’.¹² Yet one of the Guardian’s official biographers, David Ayerst, suggests that, far from emerging spontaneously from the battleground of St Peter’s Fields, the idea actually emerged a few months earlier, following Taylor’s victory in a libel case in March 1819 that was brought against him by a Tory politician who accused him of inciting vandalism. ‘It is now plain you have the elements of public work in you,’ remarked a friend of his on the way home from the trial. ‘Why don’t you start a newspaper?’¹³ Taylor was aggrieved, according to another Guardian biographer, Haslam Mills, not simply that he had been wrongly accused of criminal behaviour but that his Tory opponents had claimed that he was not a ‘moderate reformer’ but a more incendiary one.¹⁴ Taylor was already contributing to the liberal Manchester Gazette, but events would propel him to seek a more reliable outlet for his worldview.

Peterloo and its aftermath however, provided Taylor with a further incentive to imprint his values on a volatile political landscape. This was necessary largely because he was uncomfortable with the orientation of the radical leaders whose voices were dominant up to and including the day of the massacre, and who were demanding universal suffrage, annual parliaments and the immediate repeal of the Corn Laws. For Ayerst, Taylor ‘was out of sympathy with the extreme radical leaders’ and penned an article two weeks before Peterloo criticising them for appealing ‘not to the reason but the passions and sufferings of their abused and credulous fellow-countrymen.’¹⁵ Taylor certainly had little time for Henry Hunt, the radical leader who was the main speaker on 16 August, even if he was horrified by the violence meted out by the yeomanry against innocent people in St Peter’s Fields.

Taylor threw himself into a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Introduction: ‘Just the Establishment’?
• 1. In the Wake of Peterloo? A Radical Account of the Founding of the Guardian
• 2. The Political Economy of the Guardian
• 3. Reflections from an Editor-at-large
• 4. Radical Moments at the Guardian
• 5. The Guardian and the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict
• 6. The Guardian and Latin America: Pink Tides and Yellow Journalism
• 7. The Origins of the Guardian Women’s Page
• 8. Trans Exclusionary Radical Centrism: The Guardian, Neoliberal Feminism and the Corbyn Years
• 9. The Guardian and Surveillance
• 10. Corruption in the Fourth Estate: How the Guardian Exposed Phone Hacking and Reneged on Reform of Press Regulation
• 11. The Guardian and Corbynism and Antisemitism
• 12. Guardian Journalists and Twitter Circles
• 13. The Guardian and the Economy
• 14. The Guardian and Brexit
• 15. ‘I’m not “racist” but’: Liberalism, Populism and Euphemisation in the Guardian
• Notes on Contributors
• Index