ON the face of it there may not seem to be much to link the protest for the vote that became the Peterloo Massacre on Monday August 16 1819 and the Extinction Rebellion (XR) protests in central London during the first half of October 2019.

Yet both were seeking to change the world, peacefully, to exercise what might be called people power to promote reform.

The Metropolitan Police, while no doubt engaging in over-robust and possibly illegal policing tactics, didn’t kill anyone, unlike the yeomanry in Manchester two hundred years ago.

But the attempts to ban both the Peterloo and the XR protests, neither of which was successful, suggest that the authorities feared in their minds what would happen.

In 1819 as EP Thompson noted, while Manchester authorities had seen crowds gather for sporting occasions and traditional festivals, they had no experience of a mass protest meeting. In their heads was not the reality that an opening up of parliamentary democracy would start with the Reform Act in 1832, just 13 years later.

What they knew was that it was just 30 years since the 1789 French Revolution. Could Peterloo, in their minds, have been the start of the English Revolution?

When it comes to the Metropolitan Police it’s clear that the scale and duration of the XR protests was not something they had seen before.

What may have been in their minds, for example, was not that this was a peaceful protest about the climate emergency but that it was, perhaps, like the gilets jaunes in France, whose militant campaign continues — or perhaps like the recent protests in Hong Kong.

None of that excuses either the yeomanry in 1819 or the Met Police in 2019.

What came next after Peterloo underlines however how the official mind reacts to something it cannot understand. It attempts to restrict and ban every possible opportunity there may be for democratic protest.

In 1819 that meant the “Six Acts,” literally six parliamentary Acts passed in short order to restrict liberty.

Not all of them are relevant to what might happen 200 years on. In 1819 there was an armed tradition on the left, as the 180th anniversary of the Newport Rising, which happened 20 years after Peterloo in 1839, reminds us. In 2019 there isn’t.

However three of the Six Acts might well end up being copied in some way by the Home Secretary if the Tories manage to cling on to office.

The first was the Misdemeanours Act which attempted to increase the speed of the administration of justice by reducing opportunities for bail and allowing for speedier court processing. With so many arrests in the XR “Autumn Uprising” no doubt summary justice appeals to some.

The second was the Seditious Meetings Act which required the permission of a magistrate in order to convene any public meeting of more than 50 people if the subject of that meeting was concerned with “church or state” matters. Additional people could not attend such meetings unless they were inhabitants of the local area.

Finally there was the Blasphemous and Seditious Libels Act (or Criminal Libel Act) which toughened the existing laws to provide for more punitive sentences for the authors of such writings. In 2019 matters posted online would probably be more likely to attract such action.

As ever the left will need to defend the right to protest, as, eventually, was successfully done after Peterloo. But it’s important that the reason for the protest is not obscured in the process. If that happens the state also wins.

Keith Flett is a socialist historian.