To what extent was the 1867 Reform Act a turning point in parliamentary democracy in Britain?

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To what extent was the 1867 Reform Act a turning point in parliamentary democracy in Britain?

Democracy by etymology, requires that the people exercise power. The term is derived from the ancient Greek model of democracy, where Athenians met regularly to decide upon the issues of the day collectively. It is often cited as the definitive definition of a democracy, or at least the beginnings of a democratic structure, although there were clear shortcomings to this model. Plato criticised the system for its qualifications; women and slaves could not vote, nor could children vote. Clearly a functioning democracy has to have some sort of qualifications if it is to function effectively in expressing the wishes of the people at large. Yet from our vantage point of our current times, we would no doubt find the exclusions to women indefensible, (we no longer have slaves, and we believe that children lack the capacity to make reasoned judgements about government). However, we would not question that ancient Athens did possess the attributes at least, of the early stages in the evolution of what we call democracy.

     

     By this measure, we can therefore see the second Reform Act of 1867 as one step in the direction towards democracy. It was a long way off from ‘one man one vote’, as by this point only 1 men in 3 could vote, and women were completely excluded. But nevertheless, it followed on, correcting some of the shortcomings of the 1832 act with regards to enfranchising members of the working class (or at least some of them), and importantly, it set a precedent for further reforms. The secret ballot followed in 1872, and within the next decade the shift towards a full democracy moved even further with the Third Reform Act and all of its measures relating to voting rights and election practices. It is the cumulative effect of the reforms that brought us to where we are today, and it would be absurd to propose that in 1832 we might have adopted ‘universal suffrage’ (although a minority of campaigners such as Hunt however, argued for women to be enfranchised in 1830). I see it as an incremental process, which needs to be carried through step by step in manageable proportions. Clearly, as a society, we were not ready for full democracy in 1832 and we had to wait nearly a century for attitudes to change to make democracy possible.

   

      So, in 1867, we have a reform bill put to the House of Commons by Lord Russell’s ministry soon after the death of Lord Palmerston who fervently believed that the way things were was satisfactory and infinitely preferable to democracy. The bill was rejected by rebel Liberal MP’s (the so-called ‘Adullamites’) and Conservatives, largely because of the firmly held belief among the propertied classes that the uneducated masses would destroy effective government (what Bagehot in 1867 called ‘government by conversation’). However, soon afterwards, in the belief that reform was inevitable, the Conservatives under the leadership of Disraeli in the Commons, passed their own bill so that they could limit its effects. The bill has been described by historian Sean Lang as ‘pure Disraeli’ because of the apparent irony that those who opposed reform would pass their own measure, and that it was in fact, a more far-reaching bill than the bill that they had rejected. An amendment was accepted (the ‘Hodgkinson amendment’, after the backbencher that put it forward), allowing compound ratepayers the vote in addition to all urban ratepaying householders and lodgers paying over £10 a year in the boroughs. In the counties there was a £12 property qualification and all voters had to satisfy a 1-year residential qualification. Again, by today’s standards the Reform Act was not radical, but at the time it was.

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     Many problems remained. Plural voting was still possible, and there had been instances of voters careering round the country placing votes in as many constituencies as possible for their favoured party (a level of enthusiasm for politics that we seem to have left in the past). The property qualifications, with many working class people on the move, meant that they did not meet the requirement of 1 year residence as laid down by the act. Rotten boroughs had been largely eliminated by now, but corruption and patronage were common until 1883. Indeed Gladstone and Disraeli himself, found ...

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