THE People’s History Museum (PHM) in Manchester is one of the city’s lesser known attractions. Situated in a former pumping station and refurbished in 2010, it provides a concise and graphic history of the struggle for democracy in the UK.
But it is more than a museum. It provides a useful yardstick against which to judge the shrunken state of modern politics and mass political engagement. It also offers a counterbalance to the “great men” interpretation of history, politics and leadership. It was the Pitts, Peels, Gladstones and Disraelis who dominated my school history. There was relatively little about the daily struggle for survival of ordinary people and their fight to be heard.
The role of women in particular received scant attention. The PHM redresses the balance. Its heroes and heroines are those who demanded both the right to organise and a political voice to redress their economic and social ills. Their steadfast belief in the political process, education and self-help to ameliorate their suffering stands as an indictment of the cynical and self-serving nature of much of modern politics.
Those of us who despair of contemporary politics can only marvel at the mass movements that advanced causes such as the right to vote and trade union legalisation and organisation. In recent times, only the upsurge in political engagement during the 2014 independence referendum campaign can match the energy of those grassroots causes.
The museum also underlines the steady erosion of vision and idealism from politics over the past 60 years. The deficit is exemplified through listening to Aneurin Bevin’s description of the founding of the NHS as an act of “socialism and Christianity” achieved by what Winston Churchill described as a “bankrupt nation”.
Similarly, what has happened to the vision, commitment and energy that allowed that “bankrupt nation” to build nearly one million new homes between 1945 and 1951? The museum’s posters from the1951 General Election campaign illustrate a bidding war between Labour and Conservatives as to which would build more council homes. This is in stark contrast to the failure today of the world’s sixth largest economy to address a scandalous housing shortage.
We have been poorly served by our politicians. Expenses, cash for questions, fake sheiks and the like have contributed to popular alienation from politics and politicians. Yet we are also to blame. Through disengagement we have let them get away with it.
As the folk singer Tom Paxton put it, there may be a “rumblin’ in the land” and general dissatisfaction with the establishment and the political status quo. Some of that “rumblin’” has been negative, particularly during the EU referendum campaign and its aftermath. History tells us mass political movements can be double-edged swords, open to exploitation by demagogues. Nevertheless, renewed popular engagement with the political process is welcome, but it’s the PHM’s uplifting and positive narrative of social justice, improvement and cooperation that should prevail.
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