As Marx notes in The Critique of the Gotha Programme, the state does not just hang in mid air, but rests upon the civil society.
“The German Workers' party — at least if it adopts the program — shows that its socialist ideas are not even skin-deep; in that, instead of treating existing society (and this holds good for any future one) as the basis of the existing state (or of the future state in the case of future society), it treats the state rather as an independent entity that possesses its own intellectual, ethical, and libertarian bases.”
And yet, the fact that the British state was a capitalist state did not at all mean that the political regime, the governmental power, was itself bourgeois. Parliament asserted its dominance in 1688, in The Glorious Revolution, by installing a Monarchy of its choosing, but the political regime remained one based on aristocratic power and privilege. Even in 1819, at the time of the Peterloo Massacre, only 2% of the population had the vote, thereby excluding the vast majority of the bourgeoisie, as well as the workers, not to mention the huge numbers of petty-bourgeois, handicraft producers in process of dissolution into the ranks of the proletariat. Even where the bourgeoisie did have the vote, where they had the required property qualifications, in the urban areas, where they were concentrated, this had little effect, because the urban areas returned few MP's, whereas the rural areas, and rotten boroughs, containing more sheep than voters, returned several MP's. It was possible for wealthy landlords to simply buy themselves a seat in parliament, and that was in addition to the domination of the House of Lords by the landlord class.
It was only after a prolonged struggle, of which Peterloo is an illustration, that the bourgeoisie, with the support of the urban proletariat, obtained the vote via the 1832 Reform Act. Yet, even then, as Marx noted in his Inaugural Address, as late as 1865, the House of Commons remained a house dominated by the landlord class not the bourgeoisie. As Engels says, 1832 represented a victory for the bourgeoisie as a whole, but the merchants and financial bourgeoisie remained tied to the landlord class. It was the symbiotic relation between them that had created the colonial empire from the 16th century onwards. Their interests remained protection of that empire, and of a system of protective trade quotas, and tariffs that kept food prices, rents and interest payments high. These interests conflicted with the interests of the industrial bourgeoisie that sought free trade, and a reduction in the price of food etc., so as to raise profits.
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