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The ‘Battle of Bexley Square’ 90 years ago has stark resonance today
REBECCA LONG BAILEY looks back to 1931 and a protest of the unemployed at Salford Town Hall. Today’s struggles can draw inspiration and strength from them and their legacy
The Battle of Bexley Square, where police attacked unemployed workers
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ON OCTOBER 1 1931, in an era of mass unemployment and poverty, 10,000 unemployed men and women marched to Salford Town Hall at Bexley Square and were met with awful police violence.
They were trying to highlight the desperate situations they found themselves in and to hand in a petition protesting against means-tested benefits and unemployment.
The famous Salfordian author Walter Greenwood was there, and in his novel Love on the Dole he said: “Mounted police appeared at the trot, and, on a sudden, a swarm of plain-clothes men descended from nowhere and began to snatch the placards from the hands of the demonstrators, flinging the posters to the ground and trampling them underfoot … truncheons descending on heads with sickening thuds; men going down and being dragged off, unceremoniously, to the cells.”
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