This was the period when democracy
reached out beyond the wealthy, the monied classes and the landed vested
interests. One of the most prominent
thinkers and campaigners for democracy in the 1860s was the philosopher and
social reformer John Stuart Mill. He
believed that as the working class were denied the vote they were not
represented in Parliament so had no one to speak for their interests. In 1861 he wrote:
“It
is evident that the only government
which can fully satisfy all the exigencies of the social state is one in which
the whole people participate; that any participation, even in the smallest
public function, is useful; that the participation should everywhere be as
great as the general degree of improvement the community will allow; and that
nothing less can be ultimately desirable than the admission of all to a share
in the sovereign power of the state.
But since all cannot, in a community exceeding a single small town,
participate personally in any but some very minor portions of the public
business, it follows that the ideal type of a perfect government must be
representative”. "Considerations on Representative Government" by J.S.Mill
Mill makes the case for representative government,
but does so in an age when the microphone had not been invented or, more
important, the Internet. His vision is
rather like that of Athens where the maximum number participating in direct
democracy was ruled by the size of the crowd that could hear, hence his
reference to a small town. His
aspiration of representative democracy was made at a time of limited
communication. But today with the
Internet the possibilities of the whole population participating are
endless. Will direct democracy make a
comeback? This is a major question on
the road to democracy.
St
James’s Hall in Piccadilly was the largest indoor meeting place in London, and
on 28 March 1863 it was full to capacity. The meeting had been called by the
newly formed London Trades Council, which brought together the trade unions in
the city. The Trade Unions were
starting to take an interest in democracy, broadening their appeal from just
the labour conditions of the poor and in the process were involving
academics. Edward Beesly, a history
professor at the University of London spoke about the emancipation of British
workers:
“Our
governing classes may refuse to enfranchise you. They may shut the door of the House of
Commons in your face and value themselves on their cleverness. But when there is a need, you know how to
make your voice heard... We are met here tonight, we say it openly, not merely
as friends of emancipation but as friends of reform" (loud cheers).
They may call themselves Whigs and
Tories, but they have borrowed the motto of your societies – “Union is
Strength”. For they have found one
cardinal principle on which they can agree.
It is the key to the whole political situation…Shall I tell you what
this all-absorbing sentiment is? It is the
fear of you (applause). Over and over
again I have heard it as a proof of the danger of entrusting you with the
franchise. Now, fellow citizens, when
you are seriously bent on having the franchise and tell them so plainly, of
course they will have to give way… This is the first time, I believe, that the
trade unionists, of London have met together to pronounce on a political question,
but I am sure it will not be the last”. The Vote by P. Foot
The
speech was greeted with wild, prolonged cheering.
In 1864 the charismatic Italian revolutionary and
military commander Garibaldi caused a sensation when he visited London on a
European tour. Much to Queen Victoria’s
annoyance Palmerston received him. He
was greeted by a rally of 50,000 people and feted in the salons of St.
James’s. An appalled government took
fright and ordered him out of the country.
A
protest rally was called at Primrose Hill, but the Home Secretary banned
it. As tens of thousands gathered in
support, truncheon-wielding policemen dispersed them. The result was the formation of the Reform
League, a precursor of the Labour Party.
The National Reform League was established in 1865 to press for manhood
suffrage and the ballot.
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The following year in
1866 the Reform League challenged the government’s right to ban a public rally
in Hyde Park in favour of a widened franchise.
Sheer weight of numbers broke down the park gates and instigated the “Battle of the Railings”. Even the arrival of the Grenadier Guards
with drawn sabres failed to disperse them.
The following year the Reform League returned to Hyde
Park and led 200,000 people through its gates.
This time the police wisely stayed away. The rally was peaceful and dispersed with “Three cheers for the Queen”. The official record laconically remarked
that “not a plant was disturbed, nor a
leaf or a flower touched”.
These huge demonstrations are massively important, particularly
bearing in mind that there was no mass public transport other than the
burgeoning railways. There was no
telephone. All the people had were “word of mouth” and newspapers. Nevertheless they were a huge force for
change. With revolutions in France and
across Europe the political classes were very wary of these demonstrations,
fearful that they might lead to our own revolution. From Peterloo to the Chartists the people
had discovered a way of putting pressure on the politicians. The politicians had to respond. The legislation, which followed, was made in
the context of these immense demonstrations.
In a debate in parliament in 1864 the Prime Minister,
Palmerston, stated “I entirely deny that
every sane man has a moral right to a vote”. Gladstone referring to the Lancashire cotton
workers, whom he admired, retorted that it was “a shame and a scandal that bodies of men such as these should be
excluded from the parliamentary franchise”.
The anti-reform Palmerston died in 1865 but not before
he had won the General Election of that year.
He was the last Prime Minister to die in office. On his deathbed his last words were “Die, my dear doctor, that is the last thing
I shall do.” Palmerston was not
wholly anti-reform, but he was unwilling to take the initiative. He summed up his approach by saying, “Oh, we cannot go on adding to the statute
book ad infinitum”. By now the
elections had become more and more disorderly with bribery and entertaining on
the increase. The object of plying the
voters with drink was to persuade them to vote for you, or if they favoured the
opposition, to make them so drunk they were incapable of voting. This was a return to the bad old ways of the
eighteenth century. The male adult
population of England and Wales had increased to over 5 million of which just
over 1 million had the vote.
Since the 1832 Reform Act more people had moved into
the industrial areas in great numbers but constituencies had not been altered
and no new constituencies had been created.
The pressures for extending the vote were building up.
For the first time in an election postal votes were
allowed for the University seat of Oxford.
This enabled the country clergy to swamp the London barristers and
resident fellows who usually determined the result of the election. It was no surprise that his Conservative
opponent defeated Gladstone. Due to the
different way in which Oxford conducted its elections it was able to determine
its own rules for their conduct.
The total votes cast in the 1865 election, which
Palmerston won, had been 854,856 for 922 candidates, of whom 303 were
unopposed. The total electorate was
some 1.36 million out of a total population of 22 million. The vast majority of the people were still
disenfranchised. Change was on the
way.
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W.L. Guttsman in his book “A Plea for Democracy” quotes James Bryce on the eve of the second
British Reform Act of 1867 saying that “the
social progress of democracy has outrun its political progress”, which was
ominous because “there is nothing more
dangerous than a democratic society without democratic institutions”.
A democratic society was one in which the mass of the
people played an active rather than a passive role, and in which the old
traditions of deference and subordination had been replaced by a sense of
equality among the people – the feeling that one man, or even one person, is as
good as another, or at least has an equal right to be respected and listened
to. Thus there is inevitably a link
between democracy and equality. Only
when enough people possess a strong sense of their own worth and rights can the
demand for a popular franchise, or equal political rights, be made to any
effect. "Democracy" by A. Arblaster
This view of a democratic society is an idealised
view. The tradition of deference still
persists in many parts of society. It
is easier said than done to eliminate it.
Equality of opportunity is probably more attainable than just pure
equality.
There were little more than 400 Peers in the House of
Lords in 1867. Membership had gradually
doubled since the Act of Union with Scotland in 1707. It was to continue to increase, for it was a
very useful tool of patronage for a Prime Minister to have.
One casualty of the 1865 General Election was William
Gladstone. Gladstone
had always opposed parliamentary reform but when Edward Baines introduced a
Reform Bill he spoke in favour of the measure.
In his speech Gladstone pointed out that only one fiftieth of the
working classes had the vote. He argued
that this was unfair and that the law should be changed to increase this
number. However, this was very much a
minority view and Baines's proposal was defeated by 272 votes to 56.
In the general election
of July 1865, Gladstone lost his seat of Oxford University, having alienated the voters by his support
for electoral reform. Gladstone moved
to South Lancashire and became one of its three Members of Parliament. After the death of Palmerston, the Whig
Prime Minister, in 1865, Lord John Russell, the new
Prime Minister, asked Gladstone to become leader of the House of Commons as
well as Chancellor of the Exchequer. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
With the construction of the railways between 1830
and 1860 there was an accelerated redistribution of the population. Lord John Russell and Gladstone introduced a
moderate reform bill on 12th March 1866, which proposed to give the
vote in the boroughs to householders paying £7 a year rent, instead of £10, and
in the counties to tenants paying £14 a year rent, instead of £50, i.e. the
lower middle classes. This was expected
to bring in an extra 400,000 voters.
This was a disgraceful act of opportunism making
democracy dependent on wealth. These
were similar proposals to those that Russell had tried to introduce in 1854 but
failed when the Crimean War broke out.
They were described as “fancy
franchises”. With the £50 savings qualification in the counties also
proposed, Liberals claimed that 'the
middle classes, strengthened by the best of the artisans would still have the
preponderance of power. What a
cynical abuse of power. The Liberals
clearly thought that it would strengthen their position with the
electorate. The principle of extension
of the ballot was now becoming a cynical argument about the size of the
electorate. Positions were being taken
out of self-interest. This is a big
shift in opinion. The move towards
democracy is in the right direction but it is moving at a slow pace.
There was strong opposition from the Conservative
Lord Cranborne who thought the bill went too far although he supported postal
ballots, changes in registration procedure and some redistribution of seats. Opposition
was also provided by a section of the Liberals led by Robert Lowe, who claimed
that the working classes were ignorant of politics, would be incapable of
deciding who to vote for and would be open to bribery. He believed that reform would lead to mob
rule. Bright nicknamed Lowe’s followers,
“the Adullamites”, after a Biblical
tribe which hid away in the darkness of a cave because it was afraid to face
the world as it really was. The debate
followed exactly the same predictable course as all the previous debates on
reform.
Lord Derby, the Tory leader, got it just about
right when he wrote in his diary: “Bill discussed everywhere. There is great excitement in the upper
classes, not shared by the people”. A
great gulf was fixed between the House of Commons and the people, which all the
developments since 1832 had failed to close.
More than a third of MPs (225of them) were either peers or the sons or
grandsons of peers or baronets, represented almost equally in both parties (175
Tories, 150 Liberals). More than a
fifth (110) of the total came from 31 noble families. No wonder Gladstone’s audience was
apathetic. "The Vote" by P. Foot
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The
debate went on for eight nights; it was the longest debate on reform since
1831. The Government depended on the
support of the Radicals, especially those who had just been elected to
Parliament. One of these was the new MP
for Westminster, quoted at the start of the chapter, John Stuart Mill, widely
acclaimed as the outstanding intellectual of his time. His book Considerations
on Representative Government made the case for representative institutions
in preference to oligarchy or benevolent dictatorship. “In
this country, for example”, wrote Mill “what
are called the working classes may be considered as excluded from all direct
participation in the Government”.
As a direct result, “when a
subject arises in which the labourers as such have an interest, is it regarded
from any point of view but that of employers of labour?” He went on to clarify these issues in his
speech.
John
Stuart Mill argued:
There
ought to be no pariahs in a full grown and civilised nation; no persons
disqualified, except through their own default…. No arrangement of the
suffrage, therefore, can be permanently satisfactory in which any person or
class is peremptorily excluded; in which the electoral privilege is not open to
all persons of full age who desire to attain it. Significantly Mill advocated women’s
suffrage, one of the first prominent MPs to do so. He moved an amendment to the Reform Bill
substituting the word “persons” for “man”.
The amendment was lost by 194 votes to 73, but it was a milestone on the
road to women’s suffrage.
He
went on to contest the principle that people’s right to vote should be
determined by their property. This
criterion “is so imperfect”. People were rich often by accident and to afford
them electoral privileges because of their wealth “is always and will continue to be, supremely odious”. On
the other hand, there was a case, he argued, for giving electoral privileges to
people of “mental superiority”, so
although Mill was clearly a democrat, he could contemplate distorting
democracy, but when democracy is distorted it is destroyed.
The
Tories realised quite quickly that because few of the people would benefit from
them there was no popular support for Gladstone’s proposals. Benjamin Disraeli made the final speech for
the Tories. In a vicious attack and a
rhetorical flourish he forecast that the House of Commons would be left with:
no charm of
tradition; no families of historic lineage, none of those great estates around
which men rally when liberty is assailed; no statesmanship, no eloquence, no
learning, no genius. Instead of these,
you will have a horde of selfish and obscure mediocrities incapable of anything
but mischief, and that mischief devised and regulated by the raging demagogue
of the hour.
One
can hardly think of anyone more raging in demagoguery than Disraeli when he
finally sat down after this undemocratic speech.
The
vote on the second reading, on 27 April, was carried by five votes (318 to
313). There were no demonstrations
outside the House of Commons, giving the impression that there would be no problems
if the Bill was dispensed with. As the
Bill went through the House there were an increasing number of contested
divisions, until finally on 18th June the Government were defeated
on an obscure amendment by 315 votes to 304.
Disraeli and Lord Stanley, son of the Earl of Derby celebrated the
defeat with champagne at the Carlton Club.
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One casualty of the June votes was Lord John
Russell. The opposition introduced an
amendment to reduce the number of new voters, and when the Commons passed the
amendment, Russell resigned. It was a
sad end to Russell’s career in politics, since he had hoped to bow out with
reform as his crowning achievement. The
Earl of Derby took over on 26th June as Prime Minister with Disraeli
as his Chancellor.
The votes in parliament were a misreading of the
public mood for throughout the summer the people took to the streets in
increasing numbers to demand the vote.
The main opposition in the country was led by the Reform League. They thought it vital to embrace the more
middle-class supporters of the Reform Union and were careful to avoid violence
or illegitimate actions. Meetings were closely controlled with one reputedly
having 10,000 stewards. They encouraged the orator, John Bright to speak at
events as he was one of the Reform movement's intellectual leaders. He coined
the famous phrase “England is the mother
of Parliaments”. Bright addressed
meetings in Birmingham of 300,000 people, in the pouring rain in Manchester on
24 September at which 250,000 people attended, Leeds on 8 October, Glasgow, 16
October, and Dublin, 2 November.
The
incoming Conservative government hoped to move slowly and introduce some mild
reform in 1868, but the pressure on them was growing.
Both
Disraeli and Derby were prepared to introduce a much more drastic bill than
Gladstone’s if it would bring the Tories a long period in power. Their problem was that Cranborne and his
supporters in the cabinet threatened to resign if the bill went too far, so in
February 1867 a measure was introduced which was so mild that it caused uproar
in the Commons when it was read out. It
was obvious that the Liberals would not vote for it, and rather than be forced
to resign Disraeli decided to risk upsetting Cranborne by introducing a more
radical measure. "Mastering Modern British History" by N. Rowe.
This
was primarily a political strategy designed to give the Conservative party
control of the reform process and the subsequent long-term benefits in the
Commons, similar to those derived by the Whigs after their 1832 Reform
Act. It was thought that if the Conservatives
were able to secure this piece of legislation, then the newly enfranchised
electorate may return their gratitude to the Tories in the form of a
Conservative vote at the next general election. As a result, this would give the
Conservatives a greater chance of forming a majority government. After so many
years in the 'stagnant backwaters' of British politics, this seemed most
appealing.---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 18 March Disraeli
brought his Bill to the House. He tried
obfuscation by warning not to confuse “popular
rights with democratic rights” but ended with an assurance to the dinosaurs
on his own side: We do not live – and I trust it will never be the fate of this country
to live – under a democracy”. The
proposals were as follows: a borough franchise for all who paid rates in
person, enfranchising another 237,000 people, and votes for graduates,
professionals and those with over £50 savings.
Conservatives saw these last “fancy franchises” which brought in 305,000
votes as a weapon against a mass electorate.
He also proposed a reduction in the county qualification from £50 to
£15, which would enfranchise 170,000 poorer men in the counties, but this was
offset by further fancy franchises for the rich which added 139,000 votes. Disraeli was now playing the same game as
Russell. He was not only reinforcing
wealth as a criterion for democracy but education as well. This could have been a real setback.
With
a total electorate of 1,056,000 Disraeli was proposing to add another 851,000
bringing the total up to 1,907,000.
This may seem like a large increase but remember the total of adult
males was about 5 million, so less than 40% would have a vote and this did not
include any women. Until now, Disraeli
was not a democrat but he was about to have his conversion.
Nearly
all the people other than the upper classes were outraged on the publication of
Disraeli’s Bill. They wanted one
person, one vote, nothing short of universal suffrage would do. The Reform League, which had kept quiet the
previous year when Gladstone had published his proposals, this time, began to
stir and to organise protests. In spite
of a ban, the Reform League organised a demonstration in Hyde Park on May 6
attended by 500,000 people. This was a
massive demonstration. By now millions
of people had demonstrated throughout the country in favour of more democracy.
On
May 10 1867, as Disraeli's Reform Bill wound its way through the Commons John
Stuart Mill moved an amendment to supplant the word “man” with the word
“person”. Mill’s amendment to
Disraeli’s Bill was crushed – by 196 votes to 73. But it blasted away an obstacle that had
until then prevented the political rights of half the British people being
raised in Parliament. In the forty
years after 1867 there were no fewer than 22 Commons debates on the question of
women’s votes, all of them on proposals to allow women to vote on the same
terms as men but now was not to be the time for women to get the vote.
The
proposal was greeted again and again with the most ferocious hostility. Answering Mill’s amendment in May 1867, Earl
Percy, whose ancestors had come across the Channel with William the Conqueror
and had enriched themselves with dubious land deals ever since, put the point
plainly: “the real fact is that man in
the beginning was ordained to rule over woman and this is an eternal decree
which we have no power to alter”.
At
the Hyde Park demonstration the troops and special constables who had been
sworn in had to be stood down because of the vast crowds. Confrontation would have been
disastrous. This was a humiliation for
the Home Secretary who had tried to ban the meeting. One week later on May 13 Spencer Walpole,
the Home Secretary resigned. His career
was finished.
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A week later still, on 20 May, by a
stroke of the pen, which had not even been discussed let alone agreed by the Cabinet,
Disraeli transformed his Reform Bill.
The architect of the transformation was Grosvenor Hodgkinson, an obscure
solicitor who represented 710 voters at Newark and had until that day played
very little part in the debates on the Bill, or in any others for that
matter. Hodgkinson proposed an
apparently innocuous amendment obliging all householders to be registered as
ratepayers. At a stroke, this made new
voters out of the hundreds of thousands of householders whose rates were
“compounded” in rents they paid to their landlords. They had been specifically excluded from the
register by both Gladstone’s and Disraeli’s Bills. When Hodgkinson’s amendment was posted, MPs
were amused at his gall. How could a
dull Liberal backbencher seek to change the very nature of the Bill? Everyone assumed that Ministers and even the
Liberal front bench would oppose it.
Then, suddenly, on a sultry afternoon in a poorly attended House,
Disraeli announced that he was accepting the amendment. As the news sped round the Westminster
dinner tables, it was met first by disbelief, then by horror. The amendment would quadruple the number of
enfranchised workers! It would give
votes to a million more people, most of whom had no wealth but their
wages! Lord Cranborne hurried down to
the Chamber to denounce the amendment as “entirely an abnegation of all the
principles of our Party”. Robert Lowe
shot out of the Cave of Adullam to express his horror at what the amendment
would do to his ancient pocket borough at Calne. “You will give us some Wiltshire labourers
with eight shillings a week wages!” he exclaimed. “What will their politics be? With every disposition to speak favourably
of them, their politics must take one form or another of socialism…we are going
to make a revolution”. "The Vote" by Paul Foot
Disraeli having accepted the amendment then had to explain his
actions to the Cabinet. It was quite
clear that they had been affected by the Hyde Park demonstrations. The demonstrations had unnerved them. Having already lost a Home Secretary it
would have been too much to lose a Chancellor as well. In the end they caved in and gave Disraeli
their unanimous support. It was the
size and scale of the demonstrations, which unnerved the government. Nothing had been seen quite like it since
the days of the Chartists, but why did the Chartists fail, whereas these
demonstration got a result? Was it the
strength of the politicians, or was this one of those seminal moments in
British politics whose time had come.
What a contrast to 2003 when 2 million people demonstrated against going
to war in Iraq. The Blair government
ignored them and even so was re-elected two years later.
Disraeli feared that without concessions revolt in the country
would increase. Further amendments were
made to the Bill in order to appease the people:
1) The undemocratic dual
vote whereby an elector with property in both the country and the town could
vote in both places was dropped.
2) The “fancy franchises” which gave votes to
those with £50 savings was dropped.
3) The requirement for
ratepayers to show two years residence was reduced to one year.
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On the Third reading of
the Bill on July 15 the man most opposed to the Bill – Lord Cranborne said “All the precautions, guarantees and
securities in the Bill have gone….You are afraid of the pot boiling over… At
the first threat of battle you throw your standard in the mud”.
The Bill passed without a division. Where were Lord Cranborne and his standard?
Cranborne and two other cabinet members had resigned, but Disraeli
pushed ahead with his bill. This
Conservative bill became law in 1867, and is more commonly known as The Second Reform Act.
The
terms of the Act were as follow:
·
Every
male adult householder (owner occupiers and tenants) living in a borough
constituency was given the vote. Male lodgers paying £10 for unfurnished
rooms were also granted the vote.
·
Constituencies
and boroughs with less than 10,000 inhabitants lost one of their MPs. The forty-five
seats left available were distributed by
giving fifteen to towns which had never had an MP. Giving one extra seat to some larger towns -
Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds.
Creating a seat for the University of London. Giving twenty-five seats to counties whose
population had increased since 1832.
·
The
franchise in Scotland was brought into line with the English franchise, and
seven seats were transferred from England to Scotland.
·
In
Irish boroughs the vote was given to £4 ratepayers.
By treating the Irish differently from the rest of the United Kingdom
meant that there was still no consistency in the franchise. This was bound to lead to trouble. Why should the electorate for an institution
be treated differently? This strikes at the heart of democracy, where
each person should have a vote of equal value without qualification..------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the counties, the Reform Act of 1867 reduced the property
qualification of the leaseholder and copyholder to £5 and introduced as an additional
qualification the occupation of a tenement of a minimum rateable value of
£12. This increased the county
electorate by 50%, but as this did not include the agricultural labourer and
voting was not yet secret, it still left the counties under the control of the
aristocracy. In the boroughs, however,
the working man was enfranchised, for the Act amended the voting qualification
to include every male householder occupying for one year a separate dwelling
house and paying the poor rate, and lodgers who occupied for a qualifying
period of one year lodgings to the annual unfurnished value of £10. The Act also carried out a further
redistribution of seats. The Reform Act, 1867, by adding
about a million voters to the electoral register, almost doubled the electorate
from 1.36 million to 2.46 million. The
most important effect was to enfranchise the majority of the working class in
the towns. . In the 1868 election, once
the Reform Act was in force, 2,333,251 people voted for 1,039 candidates of whom
only 212 were unopposed. There was a
significant drop in unopposed candidates – a sign that the political battle was
hotting up. Gladstone denounced
Disraeli’s “diabolical cleverness”. The Duke of Buccleuch said that nothing
remained of the original Bill except its first word, “Whereas”. Lord Derby
described the Bill as a “leap in the dark”
and in many ways it was, but we were still a long way from full democracy. Other effects of the Act were as follow:
·
In
the counties the voting qualification was high enough to keep agricultural
labourers (the majority of the rural population) and people such as miners
living in rural pit villages without the vote.
This was totally illogical discrimination, but was designed to preserve
the power of wealthy farmers and landowners.
If democracy had to be conceded in the boroughs, the wealthy were
determined to salvage at least something for themselves in the countryside.
·
Voting
was still held in public; the lack of secrecy meant that working class borough
voters were bound to be swayed by their employers and landlords.
·
The
distribution of seats still left a lot to be desired. Many small towns with only just over 10,000
inhabitants – such as Tiverton for example – still had two MPs like Glasgow
which had over half a million. The
South and East were still over-represented compared with the industrial
Midlands and North; Wiltshire and Dorset between them were represented by 25
MPs for a population of 450,000. Yet the West Riding of Yorkshire with over two
million had only 22 MPs.
As time went on other
results became apparent which had not been foreseen in 1867:
·
The
increased borough electorates meant that there were too many voters to bribe;
politicians began to realise that they must explain and justify their policies,
and gradually the whole nature of politics changed as the election campaign in
the constituencies became the accepted procedure. The Liberals were the first to appreciate
this, with Gladstone leading the way in the 1868 general election.
·
The
creation of the large three-member constituencies like Birmingham and Leeds led
to another development: the rule was that each elector could only vote for two
candidates; this meant that, for example, one of the three Birmingham Liberal
candidates might not poll enough votes to be elected, while the other two
received far more than was necessary.
It was in fact, the Birmingham Liberals who first realised that this
wastage of votes could be avoided by having a local organisation to direct the
distribution of Liberal votes to make sure that all three candidates were
elected. The Conservatives soon
followed suit and before long party organisations developed both at national
and constituency level to whip up support at election time and to nurse the
voters between elections. "Mastering British History" by N. Lowe
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The results of the 1867
Reform Act had a profound impact on our political culture. The aim of the three member constituencies
was to protect minorities – a simple form of proportional representation.
Equivalent reform in
Scotland was passed in 1868 in a separate Act.
The Reform Act of 1867 gave an impetus to the
formation of political parties. The
local organisation secured the election of the candidate, so the argument went,
it would therefore select the candidate.
No one could foresee at this time how political parties would come to
dominate politics. Organisation was the
key. Joseph Chamberlain organised for
the Birmingham municipal elections in 1864.
The Liberals organised for the General Election of 1868 and they were
followed by the Conservatives in 1874 and onwards.
The registration societies (societies formed to
ensure that each elector was registered on the electoral roll) thus developed
into local party associations, carefully organised and associated with the
central organisation for fighting elections.
By working together they realised they could be more effective. Thus the National Union of Conservative and
Constitutional Associations was formed in 1867 and the National Liberal
Federation in 1877.
The effect on the relationship between the two Houses
was considerable. The House of Commons
was still further removed from the influence of the landed aristocracy and,
through the links which were being forged by the new organisation of the
parties, became much more closely identified with the middle and working
classes. As political power was now
centred in the Commons, the Government found it desirable to have more of its
leading ministers there, while it could afford to pay less regard to the
possibility of opposition from the Lords.
One of the reasons for more power being centred in the Commons was that
it could claim to have more democratic legitimacy – an argument which could not
be refuted by the Lords.
The
objects of subsequent reform were the elimination of coercion and bribery at
elections, improvement in the registering of voters, and the simplification and
extension of the franchise – measures that further undermined the influence of
the old landed interests.
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Under the Representation
of the People Act, 1867 the duration of Parliament was made independent of the
death of the Sovereign.
There was a small triumph for women in 1867 when Lily
Maxwell, a ratepayer found herself on the electoral register so voted in a
local by-election, the first time ever.
The Parliamentary Elections Act was passed on 31st
July 1868. This first step forward
transferred decisions on disputed elections from parliamentary committees,
which were highly partisan in character, to the Court of Common Pleas (now the
Queen’s Bench Division of the High Court), where the judges could decide the
question with complete objectivity.
“At
least”, Salisbury was told on joining the House of Lords, “it’s a place from
which one can get to bed”. Sittings
began at 5 p.m. and were often concluded by 7 p.m., whereas in the Commons late
nights were common. Attendance in the
Lords plummeted after the Glorious Twelfth, and Salisbury soon found the place
lived up to all his Saturday Review
criticisms of it as “the Paradise of Bores”.
Salisbury’s answer to the threat of the Lords “dying of inanition” was
to insist on its rights and ceaselessly to talk it up as the constitutional
equal to the Commons, arguing as he did in June 1868 over the Bill to disendow
the Church of Ireland, that for the Lords to become “a mere echo and supple
tool of the House of Commons was slavery”.
In order to justify this defence, Salisbury supported the creation of
life peers – “we belong too much to one class.
We want more representatives of diverse views and more antagonism”, he
wrote, and he put down an amendment to make all Appeal Court judges ex officio peers, like the senior
bishops. Salisbury Victorian Titan by A. Roberts.
Salisbury’s promotion of Life Peers foresaw their
creation almost a hundred years later after Tony Benn campaigned for them.
The people showed no gratitude to the Tories for
passing the Reform Act of 1867. In the
General Election of 1868 the electorate returned the Liberals to power. In total, 2,333,251 people voted for 1,039
candidates of whom only 212 were unopposed.
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Having won the General Election of 1868 Gladstone
turned to the issue which was to dominate his career – Ireland. He had a clear understanding of Ireland and
also a clear conviction that people had certain rights, the most important of
which was freedom. He felt, quite
rightly, that in religious matters freedom was denied to the Irish. In 1868:
There was strong opposition in Parliament to any
attempt to allow religious freedom to the Irish by relieving them of the tithe
burden. They had to pay tithes (a tax
amounting to ten per cent of their annual income) to the Protestant church,
even though they never attended its services, and at the same time, they also had to support their own churches
and priests. This was clearly
unfair. The vested interests of the
Anglican bishops and the Anglo-Irish landlords always opposed Catholic
Emancipation, even though 88% of the Irish were Roman Catholic. According to the 1861 census this meant
there were 5.3 million Catholics out of a total population of 6 million.
The Irish
Church Disestablishment Act 1869 disestablished the Church of
Ireland. It repealed the law that
required tithes to be paid to the Anglican Church of Ireland. So, although the Church still existed in
Ireland, Anglicanism was no longer the official state religion and Roman
Catholics no longer had to pay tithes to it.
The passage of the Bill through Parliament caused
acrimony between the House of Commons and the House of Lords and only passed
when Queen Victoria personally intervened to mediate. Much of the Anglican Church’s property was
taken and used to improve hospitals, workhouses and schools. To everyone’s surprise Lord Salisbury voted
in favour of the Act.
Church
disestablishment received the thanks of the Irish Catholics but it also whetted
their appetite for more freedom in the political sphere. It was an important step forward to
democracy for Ireland by taking religion out of the equation.
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Under the Municipal Franchise Act of 1869 unmarried
and widowed women were given the right to elect members of municipal councils
in certain towns. This was a welcome
development but a blatant discrimination against married women who were not to
get the vote until later.
In 1869, Lord John Russell brought a comprehensive life
peerages bill forward. He proposed that
at any one time, 28 life peerages could be in existence; no more than four were
to be created in any one year. Life
peers were to be chosen from senior judges, civil servants, senior officers of
the British Army or Royal Navy, members of the House of Commons who had served
for at least ten years, scientists, writers, artists, peers of Scotland and
peers of Ireland. The House of Lords at
its third reading rejected the bill.
Russell was the third son of the sixth Duke of Bedford. He was ennobled in 1861.
We see at this time a burst of legislation regarding
electoral matters. Parliament was
responding to the demands of campaign groups and demonstrations, not with a big
bang approach, but by chipping away at discriminatory practices, trying to pick
off the arguments one by one whilst not conceding the major issue of one person
one vote. Jacob Bright presented a Bill
in Parliament on women’s suffrage. It
passed second reading by 124 votes to 91, but Gladstone stopped it in
Committee. It took another fifty years
before it was to finally be achieved.
In 1870 no less than four constituencies were
abolished and disenfranchised for corruption.
The areas were re-allocated to adjoining constituencies. It was beginning to look as though this was
an escalating trend. Two
constituencies, Lancaster and Reigate had been abolished in 1867 for
corruption, but these four – Beverly, Bridgwater, Cashel and Sligo proved to be
the last.
The power of Royal patronage was diminished in 1871
when the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces was made subordinate to the
Secretary of State for War. The power
of Royalty was by now mainly dependent on patronage. There were attempts to move towards a
Republic but they never posed a serious threat. Questions were asked about the Civil List
and in 1871 there were no less than fifty Republican clubs scattered around the
United Kingdom, but the movement didn’t gain mass support.
It was commonly assumed throughout the
earlier nineteenth century that the survival of the monarchy, and with it
aristocratic privilege as expressed in the House of Lords, would prove
incompatible with the march of democracy and the achievement of universal
suffrage. For that reason radicals and
more extreme democrats were normally little opposed to the monarchy, because
they thought it would perish in due course; and for that same reason the upper
classes and especially the House of Lords itself resisted the progress of
democracy as being likely to lead to republicanism. England in the 19th Century by D. Thomson
A
small step forward for democracy was made in 1871 with the repeal of the
University Test Acts. Effectively this
had meant that Anglicans were in a privileged position by being the only ones
able to vote in elections to Parliament.
These Acts restricted admittance to Oxford and Cambridge Universities to
Anglicans. At this time and right up
until 1950 the Universities each sent two members elected by the graduates to
the House of Commons.
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One
of the great issues of democracy, which was still unresolved, was that of the
secret ballot. Voting was by show of
hands. The argument in favour of open
voting was that if people did not have the courage to vote openly then they should
not have the vote at all, that they should have the courage of their
convictions and not be cowards. This
ignored the fact that by having open voting, bribery, corruption and
intimidation were encouraged.
Voting still remained public, not
secret, and although Ballot Committees and Ballot Societies had been active
since 1832 the Liberal party was committed to secret ballot only after 1870 and
passed it only at the third attempt in 1872.
So obvious a protection for the working class or even middle class voter
against unjust pressure and victimization seems to us a natural corollary to
the extension of the vote. No more illuminating insight into the
political mind of the mid-Victorians is offered than a study of the arguments
produced against secret ballot. Even so
lucid and progressive mind as Sydney Smith’s had failed to see that there was
nothing sinister or undemocratic in privacy of voting. He argued that open voting was more
dignified than the secretive protection of men who, if they were had not courage
enough to proclaim their vote publicly were not fit to vote at all; and that
men with the courage of their convictions should not be forced to vote secretly
to save the face of cowards. "England in the Nineteenth Century" by D Thomson.
It
took three attempts to get the legislation on secret ballots through Parliament,
but Gladstone was determined to succeed in getting the secret ballot onto the
statute book:
This was, after universal suffrage, the most cherished demand
of the Chartists, who poured their most vitriolic scorn on the bribery,
violence and farce of “open” elections. Unless people voted by secret ballot, they
argued, their votes could be bought or scared out of them by employers and
landlords. On 3 April 1871, the Commons
gave a formal second reading to a Bill to provide for voting by secret
ballot. The formal reason for
postponing a debate on the issue was to avoid “sitting through Passion
Week”. The real reason was more
probably the tempestuous events in Paris where, two weeks earlier, the people
had risen against their Government and installed a democracy far richer and
deeper than anything previously experienced anywhere in the world. The Paris Commune lasted from 16 March to 29
May, when it was crushed with the most brutal force. Some 20,000 Communards were slaughtered,
their Leaders arrested, publicly humiliated, stoned, tortured and executed. "The Vote" by Paul Foot
Was the fear of revolution one of the main reasons
the secret ballot was introduced? The
secret ballot was passed by the Commons, postponed and then flung out by the
Lords on the grounds that politics should not be conducted in secret. Eventually the secret ballot Bill was passed
and it became law in the Ballot Act 1872.
It was a just measure leading to more efficient electoral processes, but
it was highly unpopular with landlords and employers who could no longer
control the way their tenants and workers voted. The tenants at will, who
became qualified in 1832, had still been compelled, on account of the
insecurity of their tenure, to vote according to the wishes of their landlords. The secret ballot put an end to this
intimidation. The Act also introduced
the modern system of nomination; previously candidates were adopted at a public
meeting and if no opponent came forward, the one person was automatically declared
elected.
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There was nothing in the Ballot Act
1872 to stop bribery, but one could no longer check that the recipient of the
bribe carried out his part of the bargain!
In 1872 an attempt was
made to assassinate Queen Victoria. This
created a huge wave of sympathy in the country which effectively killed off the
Republican movement. Disraeli got on
well with Queen Victoria, and their relationship became increasingly warm, even
flirtatious, but she had little respect for public opinion and was firm that “she would never be Queen of a democracy”;
and, without Albert at her side she had no interest at all in public
appearances.
She
was right. Democracy still had some way
to go.
In his famous book The English Constitution Walter Bagehot spoke for the establishment
when he said in its second edition published in 1872:
“In plain English, what I fear is that both
our political parties will bid for the support of the working man; that both of
them will promise to do as he likes if he will only tell them what it is…. I
can conceive of nothing more corrupting or worse for a set of poor ignorant
people than that two combinations of well-taught and rich men should constantly
offer to defer to their decision, and compete for the office of executing it. Vox populi will be Vox diaboli if it is
worked in that manner”.
A small but important Act was also passed in
1872. It was the Parks and Regulation
Act which allowed the right of assembly in London parks and recognised Hyde
Park’s Speaker’s Corner as the first place in Britain where anyone may protest
without first obtaining permission, provided they were not obscene, blasphemous
or inciting a breach of the peace.
The law Lords, the original life Peers, were created
by the Appellate Jurisdiction Act 1876.
There are now 12 serving law Lords, plus the Lord Chief Justice and the
Master of the Rolls. They are called Lords of Appeal in Ordinary.
Although the 1832 Act had provided for the
registration of voters, it established no machinery for the purpose, and
registration was left to the political parties with the overseers of the poor
supervising. From 1878 onwards a series
of Acts created registration authorities.
The registration officers also decided on disputed qualifications,
although there was a right of appeal to the County Court.
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Having
won the 1874 General Election Benjamin Disraeli was elevated to the House of
Lords in 1876 when Queen Victoria (who liked Disraeli both personally and
politically) made him Earl of Beaconsfield.
Lord Salisbury was Foreign Secretary.
With
a light white feather quill, which can today be viewed in the Long Gallery at
Hatfield, Salisbury signed the sixty-four-clause Treaty of Berlin in the
Radziwill Palace at 2.30pm on Saturday, 13th July 1878, in time for
Bismarck to go on his annual visit to the Kissingen baths. When Beaconsfield signed, the title “Prime Minister”, which had originated, as so
many political sobriquets, as a term of abuse, was used officially for the
first time. "Salisbury Victorian Titan" by A. Roberts
Democracy
had not been achieved in spite of the many efforts made to bring it about. In the 1874 United Kingdom General Election,
the Liberals, led by William Gladstone, won a majority of the votes cast, but
Disraeli’s Conservatives won the majority of seats in the House of Commons,
largely because they won a number of uncontested seats.
The
election also saw Irish Nationalists in the Home Rule League become the first
significant third Party in Parliament.
The emergence of a third Party in our elections had the effect of
distorting the results, particularly when First Past the Post for single member
seats became the norm.
The
Appellate Jurisdiction Act, which created Lords of Appeal in Ordinary (Law
Lords) to carry out the judicial work of the House as the final Court of
Appeal, was passed in 1876.
In 1878, the blue-blooded Liberal
frontbencher George Trevelyan, seconded by the up and coming young Liberal
barrister Sir Charles Dilke, moved in the Commons that the urban franchise
should be extended to the countryside.
They were defeated, but only just: 275 votes to 222. The debate and even the vote underlined the
weakness of the Tory case. Though
Robert Lowe was still there, fulminating about doom to come for the landed
gentry, his arguments sounded thin and shrill even to his supporters. Dilke did some calculations from the
division lists. The 275 had been
elected by 1,083,758 electors, the 222 by 1,126,151. The discrepancy arose from the enduring
unevenness of parliamentary elections – from the plural voting, pocket
boroughs, universities and other anachronistic constituencies which still
existed and whose MPs voted unanimously against reform. "The Vote" by P. Foot
We
began to see some distortion in the value of a vote in the General Election of
1880. This distortion continues
today. In the 1880 Election the Tories
got 1,426,351 votes (42.46% of the electorate) compared to the Liberals
1,836,423 ( 54.66% of the electorate) but the Liberal vote gave them a majority
over the Tories of 115 seats because the Liberals got 54% of the seats (352)
against the Conservatives 36.3% of the seats (237). Perhaps this was due recompense for their
defeat in 1874 when the Tories under Disraeli with a similar small majority
ended up with an 82-seat advantage over the Liberals. The aristocracy was well represented in the
Liberal government with six earls, a marquis, a baron, two baronets and only
four commoners in a total Cabinet of 14.
170 Members of the House of Commons were the sons of peers or
baronets. The aristocracy retained
their strength under the Premiership of Lord Salisbury.
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William Gladstone became the first Prime Minister to sit in the
Commons. As Prime Minister, Disraeli
had sat in the Lords as Earl of Beaconsfield.
The problems of Irish independence dominated much of
the latter part of the nineteenth century and once again in 1882 it raised its
ugly head when law and order broke down.
Gladstone took strong measures to silence the Irish in Parliament as
well as in the country, which eventually impressed the Conservatives. Habeas Corpus was suspended and the
Government resorted to the use of the guillotine in the House of Commons. This stopped any filibustering by putting
strict time limits on the speeches. It
is a device to curb free speech which governments should only use sparingly.
This
silencing of the minority by the majority was denounced as illiberal and
un-British by the Conservatives, but after the Irish continued to employ
parliamentary rules to obstruct various important Bills of the Irish Secretary,
W.E. Forster, cloture was introduced on 3rd February 1881. Forster’s Coercion Bill, which gave the
Government emergency powers and suspended habeas
corpus, was introduced on 24th January, and after the maximum
possible obstruction by Irish MPs it was passed using the cloture guillotine
procedure on 2nd March. "Salisbury, Victorian Titan" by A. Roberts
In
1880 the property qualification for town councillors was removed enabling any
householder to stand for election. Two
years later the Municipal Corporations Act was passed sweeping away the
restrictions on what municipal bodies could do.
Still
to be resolved was the issue of corruption.
The Liberals were determined to tackle it. Gladstone introduced a Bill in 1882, which
eventually was passed into law in 1883.
Gladstone’s Corrupt Practices Act 1883 required that
election expenses should be proportionate to the size of the constituency, and
specified the objects on which money might be spent. It laid down maximum election expenses to be
incurred by candidates in parliamentary elections, the sum being based on the
number of voters. In addition, corrupt
practices were more closely defined, election agents were given the statutory
duty of submitting accounts, and heavy penalties were imposed for a breach of
the Act. It also introduced rules about
the type and number of carriages that could be used to take voters to the
polls. It banned such practises as the
buying of food and drink for the voters.
Henceforth a man of moderate means could afford to fight an
election. This Act laid open the
opportunity for working class candidates such as Keir Hardie from the
Independent Labour party to fight elections.
It pinned down personal responsibility, thus making it more unlikely
that a whole constituency be abolished as had happened in 1870. It effectively stamped the worst kind of
corruption which had previously distorted elections.
With the successful passing of the Corrupt Practices
Act the Liberal Party began to organise a countrywide campaign in favour of
electoral reform. Once again we were
set for a clash between Lords and Commons.
With the death of Disraeli in 1881 the relationship between the two
Houses had deteriorated further. There
was no doubt that reform caused bad blood between the two. The classes were at war with each
other. The Reform Act, 1867, had produced
an unstable situation. One speech, in
particular, delivered in 1883 by Joseph Chamberlain shook the Cabinet and
horrified the Queen. Lord Salisbury,
the Conservative Leader, had attacked Chamberlain. “Lord
Salisbury”, said Chamberlain in reply, “constitutes
himself as the spokesman of a class – of the class to which he himself belongs,
who toil not neither do they spin, whose fortunes, as in this case, have
originated by grants made in times gone by for the services which courtiers
rendered Kings”. 1884 was to see
the third major Reform Act of the century.
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The distribution of seats
was still unfair, with many small towns having the same representation, two MPs,
as large industrial cities. Joseph Chamberlain
led the demand for further reform. He had
the majority of the cabinet with him. In
the counties the voting qualification was so high that agricultural labourers
and other workers were prevented from voting.
Thus, the scene was set for Gladstone to bring forward another Reform
Bill. He introduced the Third Reform
Bill to the House of Commons on 28th February 1884. The sole purpose of the Bill was to extend
the franchise to the countryside on the same basis as that enjoyed in the
towns. Gladstone said the purpose of
the Bill was to “strengthen the state”
and that “the strength of the modern
state lies in its representative system” arguing that the legitimacy of
government depended on the degree to which it represented the people. Universal suffrage though, was still some
way away.
On
publication of the Reform Bill two issues raised their heads which were to have
an impact on the decades ahead – Ireland and women. As far as Ireland was concerned home rule
was always more important than struggles for universal suffrage for the
Westminster parliament, but if they could take advantage of those struggles
then so be it:
However much Chamberlain might “feel sure that
England and Scotland would like a non-Irish session if we can keep the Irish
quiet by fair words for the future”, two reforms in Great Britain were already
beginning to cast their shadows as far as Ireland: the extension of the
franchise and democratic local government.
Since a similar extension could scarcely be withheld from Ireland, a
large reinforcement of the Nationalist contingent was to be expected in a
future parliament: and both Chamberlain and the Prime Minister were disposed to
see in “something more than county councils” – as previously in agrarian reform
– the key to that problem which the extended franchise would aggravate. However, these matters remained in abeyance
– though Gladstone privately ruminated on “some fundamental change in the
legislative relations of the two countries” – until in the session of 1884 the
motion to exclude Ireland from the Third Reform Bill was defeated and the
concordat of the autumn ensured that the Bill would pass and the number of
Nationalist votes in an over represented Ireland would be trebled. "Joseph Chamberlain" by J.E. Powell
There
was a dramatic fall in the population of Ireland during the potato famine of
the 1840s, which left Ireland grossly over-represented in Parliament. This had to be rectified. In the 1880 General Election, 63 Home Rule
MPs were elected with a total of 95,535 votes, i.e. 1,516 votes each. Contrast this with the Liberal vote, which
required 5,218 votes for each Liberal MP.
The other issue, which had not been resolved – women still did not have
the vote in National elections, and Gladstone’s Reform Bill made no attempt to
rectify that position. Although the
Bill would allow an extra two million men to have the vote, there was nothing for
women.
Furious protests to ministers were greeted
with an odd metaphor. The Bill, it was
argued, was like an overloaded ship.
There were far too many extra votes crowded into it. To throw any more in would be to make the
ship top-heavy. The cargo, ran the
argument, was so heavy that the women had to be thrown overboard. "The Vote" by P. Foot
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In
her book “Women’s Suffrage” published
in 1912, Millicent Fawcett contrasted the difference between the chivalry on
board a sinking ship – “Women and
children first!” – and the new political chivalry: “Throw the women overboard”.
The
one area on which Gladstone and Queen Victoria agreed was that women should not
have the vote.
The
Tories under the leadership of Sir Stafford Northcote in the House of Commons were
split on the issue of reform. Most of
them were instinctively opposed to any extension of the franchise. How could they oppose granting the franchise
to people in the country just because they did not live in towns or
cities? The second reading was eventually
carried by 340 to 210. This was unlike
previous reform Bills where the vote was much closer. It demonstrates how the weight of opinion
had shifted. On 26th June
1884 the third reading was carried without a vote against
In
the House of Lords there was strong opposition. Salisbury and Northcote accepted the
principle of reform but refused to countenance it unless it was accompanied by
a redistribution of seats, done at the same time. They hoped that the local difficulties
caused at a local level by the redistribution would scupper or delay both
bills. Earl Cairns, the former Lord
Chancellor, put forward a wrecking amendment on the second reading of the Bill
in the House of Lords. The amendment
was carried on 8th July by 205 votes to 146, effectively killing the
Bill. Parliament was prorogued for ten
weeks.
Joseph
Chamberlain made a series of strong speeches attacking the House of Lords and
threatening their existence. His
rallying cry was “Peers v. The People. Parliament was prorogued and attention now
turned to the platforms, press and political meetings, which were supposed to
give an indication of the people’s wishes.
To date there had been no large agitation for further reform. There had been some big meetings in 1883,
but little had happened during the passage of the Bill through the
Commons. Suddenly there was an outburst
of popular outrage, sparked by the effrontery of the Lords overturning the
Commons vote.
The London Trades Council speedily organised a
mass demonstration in Hyde Park. On 21
July an estimated 30,000 people marched through the city to merge with at least
as many already assembled in the park.
It was the spring of 1867 all over again, with seven separate mass
meetings being held in different sections of the park. “Down with the Lords – Give us the Bill” was
the universal slogan. The Radical MP
for Southwark, Professor Thorold Rogers, likened the House of Lords to “Sodom
and Gomorrah and the abominations of the Egyptian temple”. Joseph Chamberlain told the biggest of the
seven crowds: “We will never, never, never be the only race in the civilised
world subservient to the insolent pretensions of a hereditary caste”. His speech produced a furious response from
Her Majesty the Queen. Queen Victoria
was opposed to the extension of the franchise – no one after all, had elected
her – but she was much more concerned that the rising temperature of popular
fury would sweep away her beloved House of Lords. In August, Chamberlain held a series of
enormous meetings in Birmingham at which he denounced the Lords with renewed
fervour. The Queen protested again –
and again: on 6, 8 and 10 August. In
the pathetic belief that as many people supported the Lords as opposed them,
she encouraged the Tory leaders to whip up counter-demonstrations in favour of
the Lords and against the extension of the suffrage. Lord Randolph Churchill obliged at once and
urged Midlands Tories to organise a huge ticket-only Queen, Country and Lords
meeting at Aston Park for 13 October.
Birmingham Radicals organised a mass purchase of tickets. When the meeting opened it was immediately
clear that the Tories were in a minority.
A near-riot ensued. Seats were ripped up and hurled at the
platform. “At last – a proper
distribution of seats” was the triumphant shout of the demonstrators. "The Vote" by P Foot
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Salisbury responded in “The Times” to the 21st July
meeting: “The employment of mobs as an
instrument of public policy is likely to prove a sinister precedent”.
On 23rd July Salisbury addressed a crowd
of 8,000 in Sheffield. According to The Times he said that the government: “imagine that thirty thousand Radicals going
to amuse themselves in London on a given day expresses the public opinion of
the day… they appeal to the streets, they attempt legislation by picnic”.
Salisbury’s
main argument was that it was now the duty of the House of Lords to protect the
constitution. There could be no
extension of the franchise without a simultaneous redistribution of seats. Two
days later at a pro-reform meeting attended by 40,000 people in Leicester an
effigy of Salisbury was burnt illustrating their contempt for the man. Both sides of the argument were busy
organising meetings, often on a huge scale.
At Manchester on the 9th August Salisbury and Lord Randolph
Churchill (Winston’s father) spoke to a crowd of over 100,000.
"in mid- September the Duke of Argyll offered a
compromise whereby the Lords would pass the Franchise Bill after a Seats Bill
had been laid on the Commons table, Salisbury rejected it in favour of waiting
for the Seats Bill to pass the Commons, as “we should look unutterably foolish”
if the Government then lets the Seats Bill fall or get hopelessly amended in
the Lower House after the Franchise Bill had passed all its stages in the
Upper. “I think the Government are in a
hole”, Salisbury wrote to Drummond Wolfe on 20th September. “It is not our business to pull them out”. "SalisburyVictorian Titan" by A. Roberts
Not
all was sweetness and light in the Tory camp.
Some Tories actively attacked Salisbury for his approach including those
that he might have expected to give him support.
On 10th October, Sir
William Harcourt delivered a blistering attack on Salisbury, placing all the
blame for the Reform impasse on him.
Despite being a Cecil, Harcourt intoned, “Lord Salisbury has nothing of
the masculine confidence in the fibre of the English people that distinguished
the councils of Elizabeth: his statesmanship belongs to a later period and is
founded upon the model of the Stuart type.
His statecraft is that of Laud
and his temper that of Strafford…. He never sees a voter, especially a Liberal
voter, added to a constituency without thinking that he is going to have his
pocket picked or that he is going to be robbed of some darling privilege.”
Sir William Harcourt was
Home Secretary in Gladstone’s government and being a Cecil his attack had more
poignancy. Parliament reconvened on the
6th of November, by which time there had been no less than seven
hundred meetings on the issue of reform, attended by over two million people in
the period since it had last met.
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Once again Gladstone
brought a new, but similar franchise Bill to the Commons. Once again, the Tories moved the same
amendment. The speeches bore witness to
the mood of the country. The Liberal MP
for Liverpool, Samuel Smith, warned, “In
the country, the agitation has reached a point which might be described as
alarming. I have no desire to see the
agitation assume a revolutionary character which it would certainly assume if
it continued much longer.”
Gladstone was now in a
mood to compromise and a potentially explosive confrontation was avoided. He tried to persuade the Tories to support
the Bill. He met with the Tory Leaders
in secret and promised to bring in a redistribution of seats Bill. On 11th November 1884, the
Franchise Bill had its third reading in the House of Commons. The Bill was passed by 372 to 232 votes and
now it faced the Lords. Would it be a
repeat of 1832? We shall see. The Queen was so concerned about the
constitutional crisis now facing the nation that she suggested that Gladstone
and Salisbury meet and talk over a cup of tea in her presence.
Just under a week after the Bill had passed its third
reading in the Commons, on 17th November 1884:
The
morning papers had hinted that, if the Conservative leaders gave “adequate
assurance” that the Franchise Bill would pass the Lords by Christmas, the
Government would promise to carry a simultaneous Seats Bill which could receive
its second reading in the Commons as the Franchise Bill went into committee in
the House of Lords. The dual passages
through Parliament would thus be closely choreographed. Salisbury immediately expressed his
willingness to discuss such an arrangement, but only if the Franchise Bill did
not come first. "Salisbury Victorian Titan" by A Roberts
Over the next ten days Salisbury and Gladstone, in a
spirit of co-operation secretly worked out how the Parliamentary seats should
be redistributed. Every little detail
was examined. Boundary changes, size of
electorate, number of seats, number of members for each seat, composition of
the members of the Boundaries Commission – all were discussed until eventually
on 28th November Sir Charles Dilke, MP for Chelsea, drew up an
agreement known as the “Arlington Street
Compact” after the London address of Salisbury at 20 Arlington Street. Nothing was left to chance. But for his connection with a divorce case
and his defeat in 1886 Dilke might have been Gladstone’s successor.
During
the consultative process every political idea was considered, even proportional
representation. Salisbury,
surprisingly, did “not despair” of the idea “establishing itself at a later period”,
as he told a correspondent on 3rd December. “But it cannot be at a time when one party
is in a strong predominance, and only dreams of perpetuating its rule. If ever parties are so balanced that each is
nervous about its future, they will be in a mood to listen.
The
Tories called off their opposition in the House of Lords and the Bill proceeded
to a grudging Royal Assent. The
franchise was increased by over two million, and this franchise lasted until
1918. The same franchise was extended
to Ireland.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Representation of the
People Act, 1884 (Third Reform Act):
(1) extended to the counties the
household and lodger franchise which had been conferred on the boroughs in
1867;
(2) re-modelled the occupation
qualification so that in both the counties and boroughs a person occupying any
land or tenement of a clear annual value of £10 obtained the vote;
(3) instituted a new domestic service
qualification giving the vote to any servant, such as a gardener, living
separate from his employer, but not to one living in, such as a butler.
The main effect of the
Act was to enfranchise the working man in the county, particularly the
agricultural labourer.
The percentage of men allowed to vote varied
hugely from place to place. In some
urban constituencies, Wimbledon or Pudsey for instance, one in four men could
vote. In rural areas, such as Basingstoke
or Carmarthen, the ratio of voters to the male population was one in
eight. On average, about one in six,
about 17 per cent of the population were entitled to vote. Given that half the population, women, could
not vote at all, about 58 per cent of men had won the vote. "The Vote" by P.Foot
There were still a few voters entitled to vote by “ancient rights”, about 35,000. The “ancient
rights” included some freemen and liverymen. This is clearly still undemocratic but by
now consisted of less than one per cent of the electorate. The passing of the 1884 Reform Act was a
significant step forward towards democracy, but all was not sweetness and
light:
Even
after the Third Reform Act the electoral
system continued to discriminate against the poor while many of the rich and middle-class benefited from the survival of plural voting. Certain categories of working class people
were excluded entirely, among them paupers, domestic servants and soldiers
living in barracks. A lodger vote did
exist, but few were able to meet its complex requirements, as a result of which
many unmarried men, living in the parental home, where the father alone had the
vote, were not allowed to vote in parliamentary or municipal elections. The adult males who did not have the franchise
included those who shared their overcrowded houses with other families – which
meant they were not householders
Actual voting increased from 3,359,416 in 1880 to
4,638,235 in 1885 out of an electorate of 5,708,030. 40% of adult males still did not have the
vote. Having passed the Reform Act,
Parliament now turned its attention to dealing with redistribution.
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By removing MPs from the boroughs with less than
15,000 voters and reducing to one member those boroughs with less than 50,000
voters 142 seats were then redistributed among more densely populated
areas. In all 647 single member seats
out of the total of 670 were created.
The Scottish universities together with Oxford and Cambridge still
retained two members elected by a system of proportional representation with
some large cities, which had well in excess of 50,000 voters.
The
Redistribution Act fixed new boundaries according to population. There were still gross anomalies – even
after the redistribution. For instance,
the boroughs in the South West had one member for a population of 28,000 while
in the industrial North West the ratio was one to 58,000. Tenants had to be resident for a full year
before they could register to vote. The
university seats and some plural voting persisted, and the single-Member
constituency system, a favourite of Lord Salisbury, protected Tory voters in
the towns and cities.
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Whilst all the attention was being
devoted to the major Acts of Reform, behind the scenes was an episode
illustrating that religious discrimination was alive and well. For five years the case of Charles Bradlaugh
was a constant embarrassment to the Government:
Charles
Bradlaugh was elected Liberal MP for Northampton in 1880. A Radical of somewhat unorthodox views (for
the time) he was an outspoken atheist and an advocate of contraceptives. The trouble started when he refused to take
the normal oath of allegiance because it included the words “So help me
God”. After a Commons select committee
decided that he must take the oath Bradlaugh agreed, but a group of young
Conservative MPs led by Lord Randolph Churchill stirred up the Commons to vote
for Bradlaugh’s expulsion. He was
obliged to stand for re-election, but having again won Northampton, the same
procedure was repeated when he tried to take his seat. Churchill and his friends (nicknamed the
Fourth Party) exploited the situation to divide the Liberals. Gladstone and many Radicals supported
Bradlaugh, but the Nonconformist Liberals were outraged at the presence of such
an avowed atheist, and Bradlaugh was again expelled. He was re-elected and expelled a further
three times, but was prevented from taking his seat until the next parliament
in 1885. "Mastering Modern British History" by N. Lowe
One
other step forward in breaking down religious discrimination which occurred in
1885 was the peerage given to Sir Nathaniel Rothschild who became the first
Jewish peer.
The Reform and the
Redistribution Acts did not take us to full democracy, but were a large step on
the way. Women still did not have the
vote and plural voting continued.
Plural voting gave a man a vote in every constituency where he held
property. This was clearly
discriminatory and undemocratic. It
gave a premium to landholding.
There
were two other effects of the Acts: most of the two-member constituencies were
abolished putting a stop to the Liberal practise of running one Whig and one
Radical candidate in each constituency.
The Radicals were a faction within the Liberal Party, originating in
Manchester. Because fewer Whigs could
gain acceptance as candidates, the aristocratic Whig section of the Party began
to shrink and the Radicals became the dominant wing of the Liberals. In Ireland the changes meant that Parnell’s
Nationalists dominated and could always be sure of winning at least 80
seats. The two main Parties began to
jockey for position over the Irish question.
Meetings were held between the Conservative whip, Rowland Winn and the
Parnellite whip, Richard Power.
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If Gladstone could be
persuaded to think that the Conservatives were not fundamentally opposed to
some kind of Irish separatism, he might be encouraged to come out in public
with some actual proposals. Thus when
Power spoke to Winn in late February 1885, he was told that Salisbury would not
diminish the Irish representation of 103 seats at Westminster, even though the
post-Famine population could not proportionally justify the retention of so
many. The Parnellites’ votes were being
actively bought by Salisbury, although as Winn insisted after a second meeting,
“no arrangement, compact or agreement was come to between us, nor was anything
of such a nature either asked for or alluded to by either of us”. This is because it did not have to be; nods
and winks were all it took. "Salisbury, Victorian Titan" by A. Roberts
On 9 June 1885 a
combination of Tories and Irish, assisted by Liberal absentees, defeated the
government on a budget amendment.
Gladstone resigned and Lord Salisbury, the Tory leader, formed a
caretaker government with the support of the Irish Parliamentary Party. Normally, a General Election would have
followed the collapse of Gladstone’s government. This, however, could not take place because
the work of drawing up the new constituency boundaries, demanded by the
Redistribution Act of 1885, was not finished.
Queen Victoria was
becoming more reconciled to Gladstone.
On 2 October she said to him “Liberalism
is not Socialism and progress does not mean revolution.”
Lord
Salisbury made a keynote speech at Newport on 7 October 1885 which was read by
some Liberals as not entirely ‘closing
the door’ on an Irish settlement.
Finally, on 21 November 1885, Parnell issued a ‘Manifesto to the Irish in Great Britain’ calling on them to vote
for the Tories. It seemed that the
Tories were prepared to deal.
At last a General
Election was held. It took place
between 24 November and 18 December 1885.
319 Liberals, 247 Tories and 86 Home Rulers were elected. In addition to the official Party figures
there were two independent Conservatives and 16 Independent Liberals
elected. In a touch of irony when added
together the Conservatives with the Nationalists equalled the Liberals. Parnell had hoped that Home Rulers would
hold the ‘balance of power’ after the
election, i.e. that the Liberals and Tories would each have roughly the same
number of seats in parliament and that therefore the Home Rulers would be able
to put into power whomsoever would grant Home Rule. It was not to be. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
One other striking thing
about the result of this first General Election to be held after the Reform
acts was the distortion in the result.
2.2 million votes went to the Liberals (6,894 votes per seat) 2.0
million votes went to the Conservatives (8,182 votes per seat) and 310,000
votes went to the Irish Nationalists (3,611 votes per seat). This was the first General Election in which
primarily single member seats were in effect and the voting system was based on
first past the post. Like many more
election results to come it demonstrated clearly the distorting effect of this
system of representation. Parliament
was not representative of the people.
The major distortion in this case was in the number of Irish Nationalist
MPs. Ireland was massively
over-represented. The Irish vote may
also have effected the results in mainland Britain for as a result of the
Reform Act there was a trebling of the Irish vote due to the enfranchisement of
agricultural labourers. There were a
lot of Irish labourers in Great Britain who met the residence rules.
Just
prior to the close of polling, Gladstone made his move. On 15 December Gladstone approached A. J.
Balfour, (Salisbury’s nephew), the Tory President of the Local Government Board
urging a cabinet response to the issue of Irish government. He believed it was of crucial importance in
light of the recent victories of Parnell and the risk of violence in Ireland if
the demand for Home Rule was resisted.
On 17 December 1885
Gladstone’s son, Herbert, speaking at Hawarden, announced that his father had
been so impressed by the success of the Parnellites in taking 86 of the 101
seats in Ireland, that he was now convinced that Home Rule by orderly secession
was possible. He further declared that
if Gladstone was elected Prime Minister he would introduce Home Rule
legislation. This was one of the most
momentous changes in policy in British politics during the nineteenth century—‘the mighty heave in the body politic’. By flying this ‘kite’, Herbert Gladstone hoped to break the Home Rule/Tory alliance
and win the support of the Home Rulers for his father in his campaign to become
Prime Minister.
Herbert Gladstone gave
his speech to the press. He said that
his father “with safeguards for the unity
of the Empire, the authority of the Crown and the supremacy of the Imperial
Parliament was prepared to take office with a view to the creation of an Irish
Parliament to be entrusted with the management of all legislative and
administrative affairs, securities being taken for the representation of
minorities and for an equitable partition of all imperial charges”.
This was something that
Gladstone had been approaching for quite some time, but he did not formally adopt
it as policy since he felt that his party was not yet ready to embrace Irish
Home Rule as a cause. He was presiding
over a divided party, and the ensuing tension was also his raison d’être as
leader—the Irish question was a sufficient ‘Supreme
Moment’ to suspend his plans for retirement.
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On 20th
December Gladstone sent another letter to Arthur Balfour promising that, if the
Tories were willing to settle the “whole
question of the future Government of Ireland”, his party would give their
full support. Hartington, (Duke of
Devonshire) on 21 December publicly came out against Home Rule.
In a private letter to the Radical, Henry Labouchere,
Chamberlain set out the proposition that Home Rule, except in a federal frame,
was separation:
There is only one way of giving bona fide Home Rule, which is
the adoption of the American Constitution.
1)
Separate legislature for England,
Scotland, Wales and possibly Ulster.
The three other Irish provinces might combine.
2)
Imperial legislature at Westminster
for Foreign and Colonial affairs, Army, Navy, Post Office and Customs.
3)
A Supreme Court to arbitrate on
respective limits of authority.
...There is a scheme for you. It is the only one, which is compatible with
any sort of Imperial unity, and once established it might work without friction.
In spite of losing the
election Lord Salisbury continued as Prime Minister of a minority government
and when the new Parliament met on 21st January 1886 delivered a
slap in the face to Parnell during his address on the Queen’s speech by
promising a new Coercion Bill. The
Liberals craftily moved an amendment to the Address, not on Ireland but on
allotments and smallholdings. The
Nationalists joined them in the division lobbies. The Tory Government lost the vote and was
turned out of office on the 26th January. Gladstone once again became Prime Minister
and set about drawing up the legislation for Irish Home Rule and perhaps
surprisingly included Joseph Chamberlain in his Cabinet.
It would
be surprising if Gladstone, faced with the prospect – not for the last time –
of governing with Irish votes, had not noted the consequences of a form of Home
Rule so drastic as to eliminate Irish representatives from Westminster. In Great Britain alone the Liberal Party
still had a heavy majority. This may
have been among the motives which led Gladstone to frame the legislation
initially upon the basis – logically indefensible, if the Union was to continue
at all – that there would be no Irish MPs in the House of Commons. "Joseph Chamberlain" by Enoch Powell
On the other hand Chamberlain took a totally different
line. He was quite prepared to
contemplate actual separation. In a
letter to John Morley, the editor of the Fortnightly
Review he wrote:
"If we are to
give way it must be by getting rid of Ireland altogether and by some such
scheme as this: call Ireland a protected state; England’s authority to be
confined exclusively to the measures necessary to secure that Ireland shall not
be a “point d’appui” for a foreign country… The worst of all plans would be
one, which kept the Irishmen at Westminster while they had their own Parliament
in Dublin.
The clash between two
titans of nineteenth century politics was warming up:
On
his part Gladstone foreshadowed an intention to “examine whether it is
practicable to comply with the desire widely prevalent in Ireland for the
establishment by statute of a legislative body to sit in Dublin and to deal
with Irish as distinct from Imperial affairs in such a manner as to be just to each three Kingdoms.” On his side Chamberlain promised to give
“unprejudiced consideration to any proposals that may be made” while being
assured of “unlimited liberty of judgement and rejection on any scheme that may
ultimately be proposed”. "Joseph Chamberlain" by Enoch Powell
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Chamberlain had been
given the Local Government Board to look after by Gladstone and during January
and February busied himself by drawing up legislation to create county,
district and parish councils. He was
also looking at land acquisition. In
mid February Gladstone asked Chamberlain to circulate to the Cabinet a scheme
for the purchase of land in Ireland to be administered by an elected central
board. The sums involved were
considerable with an anticipated expenditure of £120 million on land
purchase. The Bill was placed before
the Cabinet on Saturday 13th March 1886.
Chamberlain
immediately asked what form of authority was envisaged as guaranteeing the
repayment, and when Gladstone referred to “a separate Parliament with full
powers to deal with all Irish affairs,” Chamberlain sent in his resignation but
was persuaded to withhold it in anticipation of the details of the Home Rule
Bill, enquiring through Harcourt whether it was “possible to discuss the matter
on the basis of four bodies resembling the States governments in the United
States.
Chamberlain was now warming
to the idea of a Federal solution to the Irish question similar to that of the
United States. In an article published
in February 1886 in the Fortnightly Review under the headline “Radical view of the Irish Crisis”,
thought to be written by Chamberlain it questioned whether federation was
compatible with a hereditary House of Lords or indeed the Monarchy. It concluded:
The scheme involves the absolute destruction of the historical
constitution of the United Kingdom, the creation of a tabula rasa and the
establishment thereupon of the United States constitution in all its
details. According to this precedent
Ireland might have one or even two local legislatures, if Ulster preferred to
retain a separate independence.
Scotland and Wales would each have another, and England would also have
a Parliament and a Ministry of its own.
There would be over all an Imperial Parliament, charged entirely with
the control of foreign and colonial affairs, military and naval expenditure,
and customs and Post Office. It may be
that such a proposal would not be seriously objected to by consistent Radicals,
and it is probable that it would work without friction and preserve a real
union of the Empire for defensive and offensive purposes; but it is hardly
conceivable that the people of Great Britain as a whole are prepared for such a
violent and complete revolution.
These discussions are a foreshadow of
similar discussions which are taking place on the same subject some one hundred
and twenty years later.
The Cabinet met on 26 March 1886. The clash between Chamberlain and Gladstone
was inevitable. Gladstone wanted to
immediately put down a resolution in the House of Commons proposing a
legislature in Dublin with power over Irish affairs. Chamberlain responded in a cross-questioning
mode:
He put four questions across the table to the Prime
Minister:
1) Was
Irish representation at Westminster to cease?
2) Was
the power of taxation, including customs and excise, to be given to the Irish
legislature?
3) Was
the appointment of judges and magistrates to vest in the Irish authority?
4) Was
the Irish legislature to have authority in every matter not specifically excluded by the Act constituting it or only in matters specifically delegated
to it by statute?
Gladstone, for once, did
not refine or prevaricate. He answered
“Yes” to every one of the questions.
“Then”, said Chamberlain, “I resign”, whereupon he left the Cabinet room
at once, accompanied by Trevelyan, the Secretary of State for Scotland.
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There was now a serious split
in the Liberal party with nearly a third of them opposing Home Rule. This significant minority had found a leader
in Joseph Chamberlain.
Gladstone published the Home Rule bill on 8th
April 1886. For two months it was to be debated in Parliament. It
contained the following proposals:
(1) An Assembly to be set up consisting
of two Orders, the First Order to consist of 28 Irish representative Peers and
75 members elected through a highly restricted franchise, the Second Order to
consist of 204 elected members. . It could delay the passage of legislation for
3 years.
(2) There was to be an Irish Executive
responsible to this Parliament.
(3) The 103 Irish members to be excluded
from the British Parliament at Westminster.
(4) Ireland to contribute one fifteenth
towards the total cost of Imperial expenditure.
(5) Britain would still retain control
over a range of issues including peace war, defence treaties trade, Army and
Navy, foreign affairs, customs and excise, and coinage.
(6) Britain would retain control of the
Royal Irish Constabulary until it deemed it safe for control to pass to Dublin.
The Tories now showed their colours with Salisbury
displaying all his racist prejudices.
In the midst of the debate on Home Rule, at a Conservative Party dinner on
15th May, Salisbury commented on the Irish Nationalist view that: “we are
to have confidence in the Irish people”.
“Confidence,” Salisbury said, “depends
upon the people in whom you are to confide.
You would not confide free representative institutions to the
Hottentots, for instance. Nor, going
higher up the scale, would you confide them to the Oriental nations whom you
are governing in India – although finer specimens of human character you will
hardly find than some who belong to those nations, but are simply not suited to
the particular kind of confidence of which I am speaking…. This which is called
self- government, but which is really government by the majority, works
admirably well when it is confided to the people who are of Teutonic race, but
it does not work so well when people of other races are called upon to join in
it”.
For years afterwards, this speech was to dog
Salisbury for its inflammatory nature.
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The day before his bill was defeated
Gladstone made a final appeal “Think, I
beseech you, think well, think wisely, think not for the moment, but for the
years that are to come before you reject this Bill”. It was all in vain. In a withering comment,
which stuck to Gladstone thereafter, Lord Randolph Churchill said the Bill was
“to gratify the ambition of an old man in
a hurry.”
On 8th June 1886 Gladstone’s Home Rule
Bill was heavily defeated in the House of Commons. A General Election was inevitable and was
called for 17 July 1886 with polling between 1st and 17th
July.
The dissident Liberal MPs, lead by Joseph Chamberlain
and peers who had created a new party of their own, the Liberal Unionist Party
(so called because they were Liberals who wanted to maintain the Union with
Ireland) formed an electoral pact with the Conservatives. The result of the election was a
Conservative government with Lord Salisbury as Prime Minister. The Liberal
Unionists supported him. Together the Conservatives
and the Liberal Unionists held 393 seats in the House of Commons, the Liberals
192 and the Nationalists 85. Home Rule
for the time being was dead, but not for long.
Perhaps because of the Bradlaugh case in 1886, when
Lord Salisbury became Prime Minister, in spite of his prejudices, he took
several steps to break down religious barriers. It was easier for him to do so because he
was probably agnostic. He appointed a
Roman Catholic, Henry Mathews to the Cabinet, the first Roman Catholic to serve
there since the reign of James II. He
also appointed the first Roman Catholic Ambassador since the Glorious
Revolution and the first Jewish Lord-Lieutenant.
By the late 1880s a chaotic system existed in local
government. Separate ad hoc
authorities, each raising its own rate, looked after the poor law, health and
education and there was a prospect of further ad hoc bodies being created. It was decided therefore, to construct a
more uniform system of local authorities covering the whole country.
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The major step was taken
by the Local Government Act, 1888. This
created sixty-two elected county councils, and transferred to them many of the
powers exercised by the JPs in Quarter Sessions – highways, asylums, food
adulteration, etc. The larger boroughs
resisted being incorporated in the counties and were made “county boroughs”. The Act
gave women, if unmarried and otherwise eligible, the right to vote for county
and county borough councillors. One of
the main proponents of reform was the wealthy merchant MP, G. J. Goshen.
The
Local Government Act (1888) was the major reform, the work of C.T. Ritchie
(President of the Local Government Board) and Goschen. A change was necessary because the 1835
Municipal Corporations Act had only reformed the boroughs; in the counties
local government was carried out by about 27,000 different boards, which dealt
separately with matters such as sanitation, drainage and street lighting. Goschen called it “a chaos of authorities, a
chaos of jurisdictions, a chaos of rates, a chaos of franchises, chaos, worst
of all, of areas”. Unlike the town
corporations, these bodies were not directly elected; local Justices of the
Peace, usually landowners, appointed their members. In 1884 agricultural labourers had been
given the right to vote for their MPs, so it was only logical that they should
be able to choose the people who governed them at local level."Mastering Modern British History" by N. Lowe
The Act included the following terms:
·
62
elected county councils were created and the old boards abolished. The new County Councils became responsible
for the management of roads, bridges, drains, general county business, the
provision of police, and the functions of the JPs.
·
Over
60 towns of more than 50,000 inhabitants were made into county boroughs: they
were to have elected councils with the same powers as county councils.
·
London
became a separate county with its own form of government, the London County
Council, subdivided into 28 Metropolitan Boroughs,
·
The
franchise for these new councils and for the borough councils was that unmarried
women were given the vote, though they were not allowed to be members of
councils.
In 1889 a similar system was created in Scotland.
As a result of this Act the power and influence of
the land owning gentry was reduced.
Joseph Chamberlain tried unsuccessfully to have a similar measure
introduced for Ireland and also to create elected District and Parish
Councils. He also wanted elected County
Councils to have full control of the police.
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The first elections for
the London County Council held after the Act was passed were revolutionary in
that two women, Lady Sandhurst for Brixton and Jane Cobden for Bromley were
elected. This was a small, but
nevertheless important step for women.
Once again Salisbury showed his libertarian streak, although:
It was not until December 1888, speaking to the
Primrose League in Edinburgh, that Salisbury publicly declared himself in
favour of votes for women, saying that by knowledge, training and character
they were obviously abundantly fit to enjoy it, and they could be as trusted as
men to cast their votes “in the direction of morality and religion”. He believed that married women should have
the vote as they represented the most stable part of the community, and he anyhow
assumed that in nine cases out of ten they would vote like their husbands. "Salisbury Victorian Titan" by A. Roberts
Salisbury clearly disagreed with Bismarck who
famously remarked that “Any woman who
could not make her husband vote as she wanted wasn’t fit to vote herself”.
On 19th March
1888 the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury appointed Lord Rosebery and a committee
to look into the issue of Reform of the House of Lords. The main issues to be examined were whether
to introduce Life Peerages as an alternative to Hereditary Peerages and whether
criminals could be expelled from the House of Lords. This was an unusual move for Salisbury, who
although he often spoke in a very conservative mode his actions were liberal.
On 10th July,
Salisbury was placed in the “exceedingly humiliating position of commending a
life peerages Bill to the Lords, and then having to say at the end of the
debate that Smith had, without his knowledge, abandoned it in the Commons
because Gladstone had threatened to oppose it.
The “black sheep” Bill was also withdrawn. “Life peerages are likely to be the
creations of the imagination for some time to come” Salisbury wrote to
Akers-Douglas two days later. In April
George Curzon, heir to the Barony of Scarsdale had tried to insert his own
self-interested reform by which heirs to peerages might be allowed to renounce
them. “Poor Curzon”, Salisbury wrote of
the attempt, “I am afraid he has overworked himself for a very inadequate
object. Institutions like the House of
Lords must die, like all other organic beings, when their time comes: but they
are not to be saved by little grafts of this kind”
The following March a
Bill was introduced to discontinue the writs of peers convicted of
felonies. It failed on second
reading. To this day convicted
criminals can and do sit in the House of Lords.
At
last in 1890 all restrictions were removed on Jews standing for any position in
the British Empire. There were some
46,000 Jews living in England. This was
a step forward and Salisbury can take credit for it. Of course the Monarchy was still the
exclusive preserve of a Protestant.
This bit of religious discrimination in the Constitution exists today.
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In 1892 Salisbury called
a General Election. It was held from 4
July – 26 July 1892. It saw the
Conservatives win the greatest number of seats, but not enough for an overall
majority.
The Unionists polled 2,159,150
votes, 47 %. They actually beat the
Liberal vote of 2,088,019, 45.4% – and the Party won a majority of English
seats. 268 Conservative MPs were
returned, 45 Liberal Unionists and 272 Liberals. But with the Irish Nationalists winning 81
seats, and with three Independent Labour MPs including Keir Hardie, Gladstone
had a Commons majority both for government and, more worryingly for Salisbury,
for Home Rule.
“These are trying moments,” the Queen wrote to
her daughter Vicky. “and it seems to me a defect in our much famed
Constitution, to have to part with an admirable government like Lord
Salisbury’s for no question of any importance or any particular reason, merely
on account of the number of votes"
Gladstone was back in the
saddle. With his victory Ireland was
back on the agenda. On 13th
February 1893 the first reading of the (Second) Home Rule Bill was moved:
At its heart lay the old unsolved because insoluble
dilemma – how, given self-government was Ireland to be represented in the House
of Commons? In 1886 Gladstone had given
the impossible answer “Not at all.” This time he preferred another of the
impossible answers, and proposed that Ireland should continue to be represented
in the House of Commons on the same ratio of members to population as Great
Britain, but that the Irish members should be debarred from voting on questions
which concerned Great Britain only – the clause was known derisively as the “In
and Out “ clause. "Joseph Chamberlain" by J.E.Powell
Gladstone’s second attempt at Home Rule had a
fundamental flaw: Why should Irish MPs
have the ability to legislate on mainland British matters but English MPs not
be able to legislate on Irish matters?
This is reminiscent of the current situation. The modern version of this dilemma, which
has not yet been resolved, has arisen as a result of the creation of the
Scottish Parliament. The issue has
become known as the “West Lothian”
question after the constituency of the Labour MP Tam Dalyell who raised it.
The Bill proposed to have 80 Irish MPs at
Westminster, but it was doomed from the start.
There was no way it would get through the House of Lords. This was no longer 1832. Although Gladstone said “The Lords must amend or be amended”, he was not about to take them
on. The Cabinet did not believe that
there was sufficient electoral support.
In their frustration the Liberals could fulminate against the peers for
all they wanted but unless they were prepared to move it would all come to
nothing. A great opportunity was missed
to curb the powers of this undemocratic assembly. The fact is that the Liberals were weak in
the Upper House and the task of creating more peers to get the legislation
through would have been too much for them.
This was an important precursor to the debates on the House of Lords in
1911 – it is a softening up.
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In an article published
just before the Home Rule Bill was introduced Salisbury wrote justifying total
resistance:
"even if
Gladstone should threaten “to inject five hundred sweeps into the House of
Lords to vote for the Bill. He even
hoped that the House of Lords own procedure could be used to prevent the
Liberals flooding the place. He cited
precedents in which the Lords had refused to allow newly-created peers to take
their seats, which he claimed could happen “if there was any circumstance
attaching to their creation which indicated an intention on the part of the
Crown to encroach on the independence of the House”. In 1711 Scottish peers of British creation
were prevented from sitting and voting until 1782, and in 1856, when Palmerston
attempted to create a life peer by royal prerogative, “the House decided that
Lord Wensleydale….should not be allowed to take his seat”. (It was a tenuous argument; in fact the
Committee of Privileges had decided that the Crown had lost by disuse the power
of creating life peerages, so the judge Sir James Parke took his seat as the
hereditary Baron Wensleydale six months later.)" Salisbury Victorian Titan by A. Roberts
The Home Rule Bill got through the House of Commons, but its
chances of success in the Lords was zero.
Conservatives dominated the Lords with 356 peers. Liberal Unionists had 115 whilst the
Liberals only had 84. It is difficult
to understand why Gladstone pursued his policy, unless from the beginning he
wanted to take on the House of Lords and change it, but in that his Cabinet
refused to back him. During the passage
of the Bill through the House of Lords:
Salisbury’s most
impressive point was that thirty-eight Irish Nationalist MPs had been described
by judges over the years as being associated with organisations which mutilated
cattle, withheld rents and even murdered people, yet the majority in the
Commons for Irish Home Rule Bill had only been thirty. The Lords voted against the Bill by 419 to
41, a crushing ten-to-one victory for the “Not Contents”. Over four fifths of all eligible peers voted
in the largest turnout in the history of the House of Lords. As over half of the “Contents” were actually
ministers on the Government payroll, Cranbrook considered it a “grand
independent testimony against the Bill”.
Every Bishop voted against it, as did the great majority of the
thirty-six Liberal peers whom Devonshire and Salisbury had personally canvassed
in the previous weeks.
A huge crowd, singing Rule Britannia and setting off
fireworks, applauded Lord Salisbury when he left the House of Lords. “Contents”
and “Not Contents” is parliamentary
language for “In favour” and “Against”.
With such a crushing
defeat in the Lords, Gladstone had no choice but to abandon his attempt at Home
Rule. He turned his attention to
another constitutional issue, that of local government:
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The Local Government Act
of 1894 contained the following provisions:
·
The
Act subdivided the counties into urban districts and rural districts each with
its own elected council in all areas of England and Wales, outside a municipal
borough. The new district councils were based on the
existing urban and rural sanitary districts.
Many of the latter had lain in more than one county, whereas the new
rural districts were to be in a single administrative county. Rural districts were further divided so that
each village had its own parish council.
·
The
act also re-organised civil parishes, so that none of them lay in more than one
district and hence didn't cross administrative boundaries.
·
Married
as well as single women were allowed to vote in elections for these councils and
also to stand as candidates.
The parish councils were never allowed to be important
because the House of Lords insisted that their powers should be kept to a
minimum. This structure of county and
district councils remained the basis of local government until 1974.
This
Act was an important step forward towards women’s franchise. Although women could now vote and stand as
candidates in local elections, Parliament remained impregnable, not least
because Queen Victoria was implacably opposed to the women’s movement. “The
advocates”, she said, “needed a good
whipping.”
Gladstone resigned in 1894 and retired from
politics. He died four years
later. Gladstone’s tragedy is that if
he had succeeded with his Irish Home Rule Bill the tragic events in Ireland
over the next century might have been avoided.
The new leader of the Liberals was Lord Rosebery. He did little before calling for a General
Election in 1895, which to his relief he lost.
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Salisbury won another landslide victory. The Conservatives and Liberal Unionists
together took 411 seats giving them an absolute Commons majority for the first
time in twenty-one years. They had a
combined majority of 152 over the 177 Liberals and 82 Nationalists. In a turnout of 3.866 million, far lower
than the 4.598 million who voted in 1892, the Unionists won 1.895 million votes
(49.0%) the Liberals 1.765 million (45.6%) and the nationalists 149,530
(3.9%). The Independent Labour Party,
polling over 44,000 votes (1.1%) fielded 28 candidates but failed to win any
seats. Once again in this election we
see the distortion in the results caused by the First Past the Post system of
election. The Tories and Liberal
Unionists got 61% of the seats and the Liberals 26% of the seats even though
they received only 4% less of the popular vote than the Tories, and in the
biggest discrepancy of all the Irish Nationalists with less than 4% of the
votes got 12% of the seats. They might call this democracy but it was
certainly not representative.
The total electorate in 1895 was 6.330 million and
consisted of about 60% of the adult male population.
A small but significant event took place in the 1895
General Election. For the first time a
minority ethnic MP was elected. He was
Mancherjee Bhownaggree and was elected as the Conservative MP for Bethnal Green
NorthEast.
With
Gladstone, who was implacably opposed to women’s suffrage, out of Parliament,
women’s right to the vote was rising up the nation’s agenda. In 1897 The Tory MP for Glasgow, St. Rollox,
Faithful Begg moved a motion to extend the vote to women. He said:
At present the
disqualifications for the Parliamentary vote applied to Peers - a restriction
which he fully approved - to candidates' agents, to minors, to lunatics, to
paupers, to felons, and lastly to women.
That was the category in which intelligent women were placed in this
country in relation to the Parliamentary franchise. ["Hear, hear!"] Even illiterate persons were allowed to vote,
and he found that in the last election no fewer than 73,000 illiterates
voted. It was not a credit to our
civilisation that, in such circumstances, intelligent women should be debarred
from exercising the privilege. [Cheers.] Now, as to the qualifications of women to
vote. They were regarded as capable of
holding property, and, in consequence, paid taxes upon it, and it had been
recognised for many years as a principle of the constitution that taxation and
representation should go together. ["Hear, hear!"] Further, the right had been extended to them
to vote in connection with Parish and District Councils, Poor Law Guardians,
County Councils, Town Councils, and School Board Elections, and he ventured to
say that they had exercised those functions with credit to themselves and
advantage to the country. ["Hear, hear!"]
Begg’s
motion was carried by 230 to 159, a majority of 71, but it did not proceed any
further and then in the same year, Millicent Fawcett formed the National Union
of Women’s Suffrage Societies. She
hoped to persuade male politicians to give women the same rights as men had at
that time.
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In local government there was unfinished business to
be dealt with. Great Britain had been
reformed but not Ireland, unpalatable as it might turn out to be. In February 1898, Gerald Balfour, the Chief
Secretary for Ireland, introduced the Irish Local Government Bill. This created county and district councils
throughout Ireland. Elections to them
were to be held every three years. The
Irish Nationalists saw them as another step on the road to Home Rule so gave
their support. The Unionists accepted
it with some reluctance because they could see the inevitable end to
self-determination but were in effect bribed because the Bill gave relief from
local taxation along with the reforms.
Prime Minister Lord Salisbury shared the doubts of the Unionists, but
the Liberal Unionists who supported it pushed him into acceptance, and
Salisbury wanted to keep them on board his coalition.
Sure
enough in the first elections in March 1899, the Nationalists won 551 county
seats, against the 125 Unionists (86 of whom were in Ulster). Salisbury’s view was further corroborated
later that year when Nationalist dominated councils proceeded to fly the Irish
tricolour, declare for Home Rule and pass resolutions in favour of the Boers.
As
we reach the end of the 19th century how far has the United Kingdom
progressed down the road to democracy?
Our definition of democracy was as follows:
Democracy is a system of government of the people in
which the people of the Nation exercise power directly, or indirectly through
their representatives, by a process in which the will of the majority is
determined. In determining the will of
the majority, all people, regardless of sex, race or creed, are able to
participate - each person having a vote
of equal value and the vote is exercised by way of a secret ballot without fear
of intimidation or violence. In a
democratic society the majority will take into account the views of the
minority when exercising their will and so govern for all the people.
What has been achieved in
meeting this definition and what has still to be done?
60% of adult males have the vote,
the more prosperous 60% – a huge increase on the position at the beginning of
the century. Property qualifications
were quite small, although some 500,000 have an extra vote because of large
property holdings. Adult women have the
vote in local elections, but still do not have the vote or are able to stand as
candidates for Parliamentary elections – a small advance but excluding women from Parliamentary elections
is a major fault. Effectively only 30% of adults have the vote, the majority of 70% are
excluded.
Much has been achieved in
overcoming religious and racial discrimination but we still have an established
Church of England, with all the privileges of an established church, giving
Bishops seats in the House of Lords.
The Act of Settlement prevents the monarch from being of any religion
other than Protestant.
The House of Lords – half of our
legislature – is totally unreformed, its members being either hereditary,
appointed or bishops, an untenable position for any country which wishes to
describe itself as a democracy.
The secret ballot has been
achieved and is a major step forward.
There is a growing consensus about protecting minorities. The suspensions of habeas corpus mainly took place in the early part of the century. The Chartist demand of annual parliaments
has not been met so the issue of regular accountability is not resolved.
The country has moved towards a
representative democracy but in such a democracy the key factor is does
Parliament represent the people? It was
becoming increasingly clear from the election results towards the end of the 19th
century that the First Past The Post system of elections with single member
constituencies gave huge distortion in the results. The old system of two or three member
constituencies had an element of proportional representation within them which
is absent from the single member seats which are now overwhelmingly used. This is clearly a set-back for
representative democracy.
We have still not got equal size
constituencies and Ireland is vastly over represented so we have not achieved
votes of equal value.
MPs were unpaid but demands were
growing from the Liberals for payment.
It being argued that there should be no hurdle between rich and poor who
the people’s representative should be.
All in all we are not yet in a
position to reflect the will of the majority.
In fact we are a long way from achieving this. Let us see what happens in the 20th
century.
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