Bloody Sunday (1887) - Significance

Significance

Bloody Sunday and its aftermath were significant events in the history and the mythology of the British and Irish Left but they were also crucial media events. They formed a high point for the interest of the media and middle-class commentators in the "social question", largely embodied in the condition of the East End of London. The spectres of the mob or of poverty could be conjured, according to taste, to generate interest in social conditions. The spate of murders attributed to Jack the Ripper, which began shortly afterwards, diverted this attention and allowed concern with the East End to take a very different focus, around crime and policing.

Socialist activism, on the other hand, tended to flow away from direct political confrontation into the industrial struggles of the New Unionism, like the London matchgirls strike of 1888 and the London Dock Strike of 1889. The rift between the middle-class liberals and secularists, on the one hand, and the Socialists, on the other, proved to be an important step in the evolution of an independent working class movement. The new unionism produced a new working class leadership, which was itself to mould the Labour Party in the next century.