My local hustings was cancelled last night. Electioneering was put on hold after the Manchester bombing and will not resume until tomorrow. Outside of Manchester itself, one day’s pause would have been enough.
There has been plenty written by Mancunians celebrating their city, their football and music and creativity. That is their Manchester, and they cherish it and celebrate more now it is wounded.
I’ve only visited the city once and was taken with its buzz and friendly citizens and its mighty Victorian industrial past preserved. I had heard the music of course but my Manchester, the one I saw, was the civic pride of the Victorian industrialists with its splendid town hall and art collection.
Manchester had come to me from other angles – from Mrs Gaskell’s North and South with its outspoken women factory workers who astonish the lady from the agricultural south. It is Peterloo and the Chartists and the Anti-Corn Law League, the Manchester Guardian, the liberals and the radicals who sought to extend the franchise. Emmeline Pankhurst was a Mancunian. I remember the suffragettes every time I cast a vote. That Manchester shaped British politics.
To honour its spirit we should get back to the door-knocking and leafletting, the hustings and the interviews, the debates and the polls and the betting, the manifestos, the wriggling out of questions and the bad-tempered exchanges and all the noise – some of it fairly cacophonous – around an election.
The democratic process should not be derailed by a failed piece of humanity with a foul ideology who tried bigging himself up by murdering a bunch of gig-goers.
Work by Ford Madox Brown, Manchester Art Gallery
