̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - riots

Rage against the machine

ns480 — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 08:58:24 +0000

New research marking the bicentenary of Luddism – a workers’ uprising which swept through parts of England in 1812 – has thrown into question whether it really was the moment at which working class Britain found its political voice.

April 11 will mark the 200^th anniversary of what was arguably the high-point of the Luddite rebellion; an assault by some 150 armed labourers on a Huddersfield mill, in which soldiers opened fire on the mob to stop them breaking into the premises, fatally wounding two attackers.

It was, perhaps, the most dramatic in a series of protests which had begun the year before in Nottinghamshire, then spread to Yorkshire, Lancashire and other regions. ̽��ֱ��Luddites were angered by new technologies, like automated looms, which were being used in the textile industry in place of the skilled work of artisans, threatening their livelihoods as a result.

Invoking a mythical leader, “Ned Ludd”, the insurgents broke into factories and wrecked the offending equipment. At its most incendiary, the rebellion saw exchange of fire between soldiers and workers as well as the notorious murder of a Yorkshire mill-owner, William Horsfall. It also led to the use of the word “Luddite” to describe technophobes.

For historians, the revolt has traditionally been seen as a watershed moment in which the industrial working classes made their presence felt as a political force for the first time. This supposedly laid the ground for later reform movements, such as Chartism, as well as the Trade Unions.

̽��ֱ��great social historian, EP Thompson, even saw Luddism as something close to the workers’ equivalent of the peasants’ revolt. His definitive study, ̽��ֱ��Making Of ̽��ֱ��English Working Class, linked the insurrection to the birth of a left-wing working class movement in Britain.

Now a study by Richard Jones, a research student at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, suggests that Luddism may be celebrated for the wrong reasons. He argues that it was not a movement which represented the concerns of the working classes at all – rather those of privileged professionals with disparate, local concerns. In a British textile industry that employed a million people, the movement’s numbers never rose above a couple of thousand.

“For historians, the Luddites have traditionally been seen as a phenomenon of social history,” Jones said. “They are viewed as workers dispossessed by economic advances, frozen out of existing structures and doing whatever they could to make their voices heard. But these were not downtrodden working class labourers – the Luddites were elite craftspeople.”

Focusing in particular on Yorkshire, Jones has examined oral testimonies, trial documents, Parliamentary papers and Home Office reports to establish who the Luddites were, how they operated, and what their chief motivation was.

His findings, some of which will be published in History Today next week, suggest that for a movement representing the birth-pains of a politicised working class, the numbers were peculiarly low. While as many as 150 may have stormed Rawfolds Mill in Huddersfield on April 11, 1812, most of the machine-breaking acts involved groups of four to 10.

Jones believes that this smallness of scale reflects the fact that Luddism was far from a genuinely pan-working class movement. Instead, Luddites were skilled workers – a relatively “elite” group, whose role had traditionally been protected by legislation regulating the supply and conduct of labour.

This centuries-old body of laws had also laid down rules for access to certain professional roles, such as the “croppers”, or cloth dressers, who led the rebellion in Yorkshire. These skilled workers had to spend seven years in apprenticeships before they could take up their chosen profession. At the end of it, they tended to feel that they were owed a living.

New machinery in the textile sector was starting to deny them this. For the real working classes, however, that was an old story – many unskilled jobs had long-since been displaced by technological advances and there was little reason for these groups to get involved in an uprising in 1811/12.

Critically, Jones also challenges the idea that the Luddites were organised into any sort of national movement – in fact, the form of rebellion varies considerably from place to place. In Nottinghamshire, for example, there was less violence, with workers simply removing the jack-wires from new knitting frames so that they collapsed. In Lancashire, however, handloom weavers plugged into radical movements in the densely-populated industrial areas around Manchester, leading to full-blown riots.

̽��ֱ��study of Yorkshire reveals that local grievances lay at the heart of the attack on William Cartwright’s Rawfold’s Mill, and the assassination of William Horsfall, near Huddersfield, on April 28^th. Both had made themselves deeply unpopular with the local workforce already, and the assaults appear to have been linked to this reputation.

Similarly, there is little indication that Yorkshire Luddism, in spite of its explosive high-points, was part of a hierarchical or organised criminal fringe linking up on a national scale. Its leaders met in local pubs, and their grievances similarly represented community concerns.

In spite of this, Luddism succeeded in becoming a cause célèbre in the region, not least because it was picked up in 19^th-Century fiction which presented it as the precursor to later, nationalised reform movements like the Chartists.

“Luddism remains an important aspect of local identity in the regions where it was most active,” Jones added. “ ̽��ֱ��problem with this is that sometimes a fictional interpretation of events can slip into the historical analysis. We can only understand the lessons of history if we look at it properly. Two centuries after the Luddite uprising, it is surely time to ask exactly whose views they represented, and exactly what the movement was about.”

Two articles by Richard Jones based on his current research on Luddism will be published in the next few weeks: “At War With ̽��ֱ��Future” (History Today, May 2012) and “Where History Happened: Luddites” (BBC History Magazine, May 2012).

April 2012 marks the bicentenary of the high-water mark of the Luddite rebellion – but new research suggests that the movement may be celebrated for the wrong reasons.

Two centuries after the Luddite uprising, it is surely time to ask exactly whose views they represented, and exactly what the movement was about.

Richard Jones

Ned Ludd, the mythical Luddite leader, in an 1812 depiction at the height of the rebellion.

Ned Ludd

In brief...

April 2012 marks the bicentenary of the high point of the Luddite uprising. Two hundred years ago this month, two of the most notorious incidents in the rebellion occurred - the attack on Rawfold's Mill and the assassination of William Horsfall, a local mill-owner. Both happened near Huddersfield in Yorkshire.
̽��ֱ��Luddites were machine breakers, opposed to new automated looms that could be operated by unskilled workers, which meant that many of the skilled craftspeople who had done that work lost their jobs.
̽��ֱ��rebellion started in the Midlands in 1811, but spread to other counties - Yorkshire and Lancashire in particular.
Although they have been remembered as the first in a series of industrial working-class movements, the Luddites were probably just a handful of skilled workers with very specific concerns. It seems unlikely that they had a wider political agenda.
̽��ֱ��notion that the uprising was organised on a national scale is also probably misplaced. ̽��ֱ��concerns of Luddites in specific counties seem to be highly localised and the closest they got to uniting was on a community scale, by meeting in local pubs.

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Criminal rehabilitation: a spotlight on Europe

bjb42 — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 14:57:06 +0000

̽��ֱ��Mercat Cross is an innocuous but beautiful octagonal building on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile. Although it originally functioned as a place where merchants would gather and sell their wares (its name being derived from “Market Cross”), it was re-fashioned in the Late Middle Ages for a unique and spectacular form of punishment.

Criminals caught stealing from the nearby market were nailed, by the ear, to one of the doors of the Cross and were pelted with rotten fruit until the morning, whereupon the Sheriff would remove the nail and they would go free, hopefully never to offend again. Thus, two forms of punishment were hypothesised to reduce the likelihood of recidivism in the 14th Century: shame and pain.

Fast forward to the present day, and we find that thankfully, criminology has advanced considerably in the intervening seven hundred years. ̽��ֱ��tools of science are being brought to bear on how to reduce recidivism in the most effective and humane manner possible. In fact, it has emerged that the two can be pursued in close harmony: when punishments are harsh and degrading, as in the Mercat Cross example, or when prisoners are warehoused into cells without dignity and humanity, as is the case in many developed and developing countries, the likelihood of reoffending is remarkably increased.

Contrarily, effective rehabilitation of criminals requires an appreciation of just how different people are. Anyone who has taught a group of students, no matter the material or the students in the class, has had to grapple with varying learning styles and capabilities; teaching a criminal how to desist from crime upon release from prison shares many of the same principles.

Sophisticated and responsive treatments, usually incorporating psychological techniques, work better than ‘one-size-fits-all’ measures like prison. Treatments such as restorative justice that emphasise the reintegration of criminals into the community through affective, conversationally-based conflict resolution, are also promisingly effective and are much cheaper than the roughly £40,000 it takes to lock someone up for a year.

One of the projects we work on at the Institute of Criminology seeks to explain what programmes can be developed and implemented to reduce reoffending throughout Europe. On one hand, this requires a detailed understanding of what measures different countries have put in place to deal with the prison populations under their supervision, and on the other, it requires gathering together all the studies that have taken place to gauge the effectiveness of those programmes in order to discern what works best, and for whom. We’ve managed to locate a substantial gap between what is being done throughout Europe to reduce reoffending, and what those countries could be doing to reduce crime, and save money.

When the UK Justice Minister Ken Clarke announced last week that he was resuming the Coalition’s commitment to a rehabilitative approach for dealing with offenders, he paid heed to the fact that the current penal system is unsustainable. Many – almost 75%, in fact – of the August rioters had already been to prison at some point in their lives. Coupled with the doubling of the incarceration rate during the New Labour years, the UK has suddenly found itself with too many prisoners, not enough money, and a revolving door of reoffenders. ̽��ֱ��picture is altogether similar in too many countries throughout Europe.

Fortunately, breaking the cycle that results in career criminality and distended penal systems is not as difficult as was once believed. But it takes investment in programmes that are often made to seem ‘soft on crime’ – the death knell for many a politician. Moving forward, countries throughout Europe are displaying an impressive commitment to rehabilitating offenders.

Clarke’s recent proposals are but one instance in a series of political manoeuvres across the continent that evince a desire to move away from the criminogenic strategy of incarcerating prisoners with the mis-placed hope of reducing crime. Smarter tactics are available, and path-breaking work is being conducted at the Institute of Criminology to recommend concrete steps governments across the continent can take to re-shape their criminal justice systems so that they are safer, more humane, cheaper, and ultimately result in much less crime.

Johann Koehler is a Research Assistant at the Institute of Criminology. He is currently working on a European Commission-funded project that seeks to develop and strengthen evidence-based practice in criminal justice systems throughout Europe.

With recent reports stating that almost three quarters of those charged with offences during the London riots had prior convictions, attention has turned to Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke’s description of Britain’s “broken penal system”. Johann Koehler, from the Institute of Criminology, discusses some of the latest projects to reduce reoffending, and how politicians may have to risk the ‘soft on crime’ label to move forward.

Sophisticated and responsive treatments, usually incorporating psychological techniques, work better than ‘one-size-fits-all’ measures like prison.

Johann Koehler

̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

Johann Koehler

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