Source: spiked
by Gawain Towler
“Chartism was a constitutional movement. It operated through petition, through the discipline of the mass meeting, through the moral pressure of demonstrated popular will. The General Convention of the Industrious Classes, called regularly from 1839 onwards, styled itself a parliament of the people, not to overthrow parliament but to remind it of its obligation to the people. When three petitions, each signed by millions, were presented and each contemptuously refused, the movement’s response was not insurrection but reorganisation, continued agitation, education and, eventually, decades later, the slow grinding of history through the machinery of genuine reform. Five of the six Chartist demands are now simply the unremarkable fabric of democratic life: universal suffrage, secret ballot, payment of MPs, no property qualification for membership of parliament and equal electoral districts. The sixth, annual parliaments, we decided against, and probably wisely so.” (04/19/26)