ON Monday August 16 1819 in central Manchester, around 60,000 people gathered to protest for the right to vote, which few, if any of them, had. Most of the men or their descendants wouldn’t get the vote until 1918 and many of the women until 1928.

The yeomanry, local businessmen on horseback, rode into the protesters, on the order of Tory magistrate William Hulton, and cut them down with sabres. Tens were killed and thousands injured.

The reason for the attack remains unclear. It may be that the government had ordered it. It might be that the magistrates acted on their own — they were certainly supported by the government afterwards.

The demonstration posed a new threat to the ruling order as the start of the age of mass democracy.

The authorities were unsure how to deal with such a gathering with a shoestring, if brutal, police force, and feared violence. The violence came from the authorities.

The socialist historian EP Thompson argued that such was the reaction to Peterloo that the authorities determined not to violently attack peaceful democratic protest again.

Industrial disputes were another matter.

In fact, during the Chartist period, there were some attacks with deaths and injuries on protests, but nothing on the scale of Peterloo.

More recently, however, in Derry in 1972 at a protest for democracy now known as Bloody Sunday, the army did shoot and kill and injure protesters. Again the claim was the violence was planned.

Fifty years on with an increasingly authoritarian state, could Peterloo happen again?

Most protest in 2023 in Britain, whether over climate change or against racism or for better conditions at work relies on mass peaceful mobilisation. Civil disobedience is also a strategy used, for example, by Just Stop Oil, but again, peacefully.

Where violence does occur at protests, it is often provoked by police tactics.

However if the state perceives a protest threatens the interests of capital, the use of the army certainly can’t be ruled out. The 1984 miners’ strike gave a glimpse of that. It was an industrial dispute, but also a political one.

That said, if demonstrations are large enough, the capacity of the state to stop them in any way can be limited — see the 2003 protest against the Iraq war.

Peterloo was about the demand to have the right to vote and participate in the parliamentary process. One focus was on the price of bread, kept artificially high by the Corn Laws. They were repealed by Parliament in 1846, but successive Chartist demands for the vote through parliamentary petitions got nowhere.

It was only in May 1867 when the Reform League gathered illegally in Hyde Park but the government determined numbers were too great and too much was at stake to send the army, who were on standby, when progress on voting rights was made.

In 2023 a focus on Parliament remains. Despite many shortcomings and misgivings, most want the Tories out and Labour in. Yet Sir Keir Starmer is no keener on protest that Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman.

Some argue that numerous recent changes to the law mean that protest has effectively been criminalised; certainly, as economic and political crisis hits, governments want to dissuade protesters — and not just in Britain.

The reality remains, however, that if the numbers mobilised are large enough the state does have to pay attention, if not always give way. The lesson of Peterloo remains: the use of armed force creates as much of a crisis for the state as it does for our side.

Keith Flett is a socialist historian.