THE right to demonstrate was hard-won. It took a massacre at Peterloo in Manchester on August 16 1819, where soldiers on horseback cut down, killed and injured protesters who were demanding the right to vote, to remind that state that allowing political demonstrations was perhaps preferable to such confrontations.

It is a right that has required exercise in practice down the decades and centuries — and there have of course been times when demonstrations were banned or attacked by the police.

Since the 1960s protest marches have become a significant way of focusing on issues which official Westminster politics ignores.

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) set the benchmark in the late 1950s, often bringing hundreds of thousands onto the streets to ban nuclear weapons. They did so again on cruise missiles in the 1980s.

CND reinforced and promoted a tradition that democratic politics was about people themselves being active, as much — or sometimes more than — voting for an MP every few years.

October 27 marks the 55th anniversary of the anti-Vietnam war march that went to the US embassy in Grosvenor Square, central London. 1968 was a year of revolt and the state took precautions against revolution.

Protesters may have had this in mind in some cases, but the immediate aim was to stop a war. That demonstration of 100,000 was historically large, but much larger protests followed.

The march against the Iraq war on February 15 2003, which saw well over a million on the streets, remains the largest so far in British history.

That march ushered in an era when the message that politics was as much for the streets as it was for the House of Commons reached a much wider layer of people.

Apart from left-wing and progressive movements, the right, with the Countryside Alliance, and the centre, with pro-EU marches, also had hundreds of thousands marching through London.

These were usually one-off marches, not within a democratic structure and certainly not feeding into longer-running campaigns like CND and Stop the War.

The distinction is important: it is not just the march but the ongoing grassroots, community and workplace organisation that is key to the aims of a demonstration success.

In the most recent period, a Conservative government has sought increasingly to crack down on the right to protest.

The current Home Secretary Suella Braverman gives a strong impression of wanting to ban all protests.

Labour leader Keir Starmer, despite his background as a human rights lawyer, often seems not far behind: he has clearly read at least the opening passages of Ralph Miliband’s 1961 book Parliamentary Socialism which notes that Labour is the most dogmatic of parties — about Parliament, not socialism.

Numbers on the streets can frustrate those who want to ban protests. Current marches in support of Palestine have seen hundreds of thousands participate. Starmer has attempted to ban Labour from having anything to do with them.

However, as Aditya Chakrabortty has argued in the Guardian, the freezing out of legitimate issues from official politics simply encourages people to protest more.

There are two wider points to keep in mind. Firstly, marching is not the only way to get change — there is indeed what the US sociologist Charles Tilly called a repertoire of contention, of possible strategies, from riots to meetings, petitions and lobbies; all have their place depending on context.

Second, we must remember that the era of mass politics will continue: as politics is defined by the media and politicians as something that is done from above, the motivation to effect change from below grows.

It is surely what motivated those who made their way to Manchester on that August Monday in 1819 — and history suggests that it can work.

Follow Keith on X @kmflett.