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by seabass-labrax 541 days ago
In addition, although the Luddite uprisings were themselves crushed, the political elite were not blind to the circumstances that led to them, and did eventually bring in the legislation that introduced modern workers rights, legalized unions and sowed the seeds of the modern secular welfare state in Britain. That is a pattern that appears throughout history and especially in Britain, where the government cannot be seen to yield to violent protest but quietly does so anyway.