Skip to main content
Gifts from The Morning Star
The Cato Street 205th anniversary – an alternative tradition of protest
The legacy of an 1820 conspiracy in revenge for Peterloo resonates down the ages, argues KEITH FLETT
A cartoon depiction of the arrest of the Cato Street Conspirators

IT IS 205 years since the Cato Street conspiracy was “uncovered” on February 23 1820 and the leaders duly despatched at the scaffold or to Australia.

It warrants a section in EP Thompson’s classic account of the Making of the English Working Class (1963) but until recently has been largely overlooked both by mainstream and left historians.

The conspirators, who, like others before them, had been infiltrated by government spies — a reminder that spycops are nothing new — planned to attack a “Cabinet dinner” in central London, murder the prime minister, home secretary etc and display their heads on poles.

The 95th Anniversary Appeal
Support the Morning Star
You have reached the free limit.
Subscribe to continue reading.
More from this author
LONG-HATED IDEA: Demonstrators protest against identity cards at the DVLA office in Glasgow, May 2004
Features / 10 October 2025
10 October 2025

Socialist historian KEITH FLETT looks at the pronounced hostility the labour movement has had to giving the state the power to pry and identify dissidents, going back to the era of the ‘Freeborn Englishman’ and Captain Swing

Veteran Labour MP Tony Benn, leading over 500 OAPs in a march to mark the start of the three-day National Pensioners Convention in Blackpool's Winter Gardens, April 30, 2001
Features / 22 September 2025
22 September 2025

In 1981, towering figure for the British left Tony Benn came a whisker away from victory, laying the way for a wave of left-wing Labour Party members, MPs and activism — all traces of which are now almost entirely purged by Starmer, writes KEITH FLETT

A ballot box arriving during the count for the Blackpool South by-election at Blackpool Sports Centre, Blackpool, May 2, 2024
Features / 11 September 2025
11 September 2025

Who you ask and how you ask matter, as does why you are asking — the history of opinion polls shows they are as much about creating opinions as they are about recording them, writes socialist historian KEITH FLETT

Jeremy Corbyn (second left) and Zarah Sultana, MP for Coventry South (second right) on the picket line outside London Euston train station, August 18, 2022
Features / 26 August 2025
26 August 2025

KEITH FLETT revisits debates about the name and structure of proposed working-class parties in the past

Similar stories
Police officers watch as people take part in a national march for Palestine on Whitehall in central London, January 18, 2025
Features / 10 July 2025
10 July 2025

The government cracking down on something it can’t comprehend and doesn’t want to engage with is a repeating pattern of history, says KEITH FLETT

WINNING OVER THE WORKING CLASS? Margaret Thatcher (left) personally sells off a London council house in her bid to undermine the welfare state and woo Labour voters via the 1980 Housing Act and so-called ‘right to buy’ for tenants
Features / 26 May 2025
26 May 2025

Research shows Farage mainly gets rebel voters from the Tory base and Labour loses voters to the Greens and Lib Dems — but this doesn’t mean the danger from the right isn’t real, explains historian KEITH FLETT

A Marx and Engles statue covered in snow
Features / 18 December 2024
18 December 2024
Modern Christmas as we know it, with its trees, dinner menu, cards and time off from work, only dates back to the early days of modern socialism as we know it, writes KEITH FLETT, checking in on Marx, Engels and the Chartists in the 1800s
TRULY MASSIVE: The great
Chartist meeting on Kennington
Comm
Features / 4 December 2024
4 December 2024
Forget Farage and the recent daft demands for a new election against Labour: the greatest petition Britain has ever known gathered millions of names demanding the right to vote — and it didn’t work either, writes KEITH FLETT