When soliciting parliamentary assistance and applying industrial pressure on their employers had proved ineffective or inappropriate, there was always open to the handloom weavers a third method of halting the decline in their well-being. This was to seek the reconstruction of the institutions of the country—if not, indeed, of the very structure of society—in order to end the evils which had seemed inseparable from the old system of government. The discontented in the early nineteenth century did not lack radical social and political doctrines which they might espouse. In concrete terms, these doctrines usually involved the complete overhaul of the electoral system of Great Britain so as to give free and direct representation in the legislature to all elements in the community, and the end of all legislation which favoured any one class in society at the expense of the rest.

Once the handloom weavers were in full decline after 1826, their connexion with radical politics of this kind became a commonplace both to contemporaries and to many subsequent historians; it was contrasted particularly with their alleged loyalism in past times of prosperity. Old men looking back from the unhappy 1830s were very prone to lament the weakening of loyalty to old institutions.