Newport Chartist Commemorations: Strengthening Democracy

Laurence Turner Excerpts

Monday 4th November 2024 Commons Chamber

[Jessica Morden]

I will not be drawn on that particular question, but I reflect on the fact that we have a partly proportional system in Wales.

Chartism was a movement based not on ideologies or theories, but on the sense of disconnect between the lives and unaddressed struggles of working people, and the lives of those purporting to represent them. The Chartists’ demands were simple: that all men—men—over 21 had the vote; that voting should take place by secret ballot; that constituencies should be of equal size; that Members of Parliament should be paid; that the property qualification for becoming a Member of Parliament should be abolished; and that parliamentary elections be held every year—gulp! The Chartists put together a petition to Parliament with those demands in June 1839. The petition travelled to organised branches and meetings across the country, gathering 1,280,000 signatures. It ended up measuring almost 3 miles.

[Laurence Turner (Birmingham Northfield) (Lab)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for securing this debate. With her permission, I would also like to commemorate for the record the events in Birmingham in 1839, when reaction and the gathering radicalism that first found expression in the Birmingham Political Union—which did so much to shape the “People’s Charter”—combined and ignited into the Bull Ring riots, which led to soldiers patrolling the streets as far south as my constituency, such was the fear that the contagion would spread. One hundred and eight-five years later, when people are still protesting and dying for their political rights from Ukraine to Iran, does she agree that the spirit that motivated Chartism remains living, immediate and essential?

[Jessica Morden]

I am so glad that my hon. Friend managed to mention the Birmingham Political Union; it was in my original draft, but I knew that with interventions I would not have time to mention it. I agree wholeheartedly with his points.

Despite all the Chartists’ efforts, the first petition was rejected by 235 votes to 46, leading to fury and unrest across the country, including in Newport. In November of that year, John Frost, a draper, town councillor, magistrate and briefly the mayor of Newport, led thousands of Chartist sympathisers from across the south Wales valleys on a march down to Newport. The Chartists marched in three columns from three directions—one from Blackwood, one from Nantyglo and another from Pontypool—with a plan to take the town at dawn. Scuppered by heavy rain, a planned meeting in Rogerstone was delayed, and Jones and his men from Pontypool never arrived. As a result, the final march into Newport happened in daylight hours, with the men arriving at around 9.30 am.

As actor Julian Lewis Jones told Newport marchers on Saturday night:

“Uncertain of what awaited them. They faced muskets and bayonets, the cold sting of the night, and the looming threat of death. Even in the face of all this, they marched. They marched because they believed in something greater than themselves: the right of every person to be heard, the right to shape their own destiny...the right to vote. Stories of their journey are few and far between, but we know it was wet and cold. Their boots squelched on the waterlogged ground, their rain-soaked coats clinging to weary shoulders. Each of these men were ordinary people: miners, farmers, artisans, labourers—driven by their cause.”