Did the 1832 Reform Act Make Any Major Changes In the Structure of British Politics?

DID THE 1832 REFORM ACT MAKE ANY MAJOR CHANGES IN THE STRUCTURE OF BRITISH POLITICS?

... with a little instinctive sense of self-preservation, have the Whigs manufactured a ‘great measure’. They know that the old system could not last and desiring to establish another as like it as possible, and also to keep their places, they framed a Bill, in the hope of drawing to the feudal aristocracy and yeomanry of the counties a large reinforcement of the middle class. The Bill was, in effect, an invitation to the shopocrats of the enfranchised towns to join the Whigocrats of the country, and make common cause with them in keeping down the people, and thereby quell the rising spirit of democracy in England. Henry Hetherington (editor Poor Man’s Guardian. October 1832)

The 1832 Reform Act, often referred to as the 'Great' Reform Act, is traditionally perceived in one of two main ways. Firstly, the act can be viewed as an important, progressive step towards the establishment of Britain as a modern, democratic and representative state. This idea supports the idea of a key victory for the disenfranchised majority of British citizens and the first sign that the grip of the aristocracy on the state being weakened. Alternatively, it can be viewed as something of a non-entity, an act designed to appease the increasingly discontented masses. This line of argument suggests that the act in many ways strengthened the existing system, splitting and dividing the reformers while re-legitimising the status quo. Although the extract above, from an article written at the time of the Reform Act, highlights the dissatisfaction that many of the supporters of reform felt, it is perhaps more accurate to see the Act as the compromise between reform (and the threat of revolution) and satisfying the aristocracy. As Eric Evans notes, its major purpose was not to be a “piece of timeless constitution-making” but a compromise born out of the threat of revolution, the Reform act of 1832 removed the immediate threat of revolution. This Act would never be “ the final solution of a great constitutional question” as Lord John Russell put it, as further reforms would soon be made. The Reform Act would become important not for what it was, but what it set in motion.

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The Act may have had its limitations but it is important that we understand what the terms of the Act were in order to assess the impact that the act had on the structure of British politics. Prior to 1832, Britain had changed little politically since the 18th Century. Power was firmly in the hands of the aristocracy and the landed interest, and the electorate was estimated to be around 500 000 from a population of 24 million. Constituency borders for Commons seats were largely obsolete due the demographic changes and population shifts brought about by the ongoing process of industrialisation. Within these constituencies, the qualification for enfranchisement varied massively; there was no national standard for enfranchisement. The electoral system was beset by bribery and corruption, with voter intimidation and violence commonplace. The Industrial Revolution had created a new economy and caused the emergence of new cities such as Manchester and Birmingham where the new factories were centred. The process of industrialisation had also created a number of newly wealthy industrialists and manufacturers, a number of whom sat as MPs. However despite this, because the electoral system was still that formulated in 1682, these new towns had little to no political representation, while towns that had been important but now had as few as ten inhabitants still had two MPs in the House of Commons. Parliament was still too dominated by the landed interest, which used its power to defend its own interests, as it was perceived it was doing with the Corn Laws of 1815. They believed the taxation burden was being unfairly imposed on the manufacturing sector. This group by no means supported the idea of universal male suffrage; they simply wanted their own interests to be represented fairly in Parliament.

The first reform act sought to reapportion representation in Parliament in a way fairer to the cities of the industrial north, which had experienced tremendous growth, and did away with "rotten" and "pocket" boroughs like Old Sarum, which with only seven voters (all controlled by the local squire) was still sending two members to Parliament. This act not only re-apportioned representation in Parliament, thus making that body more accurately represent the citizens of the country, but also gave the power of voting to those lower in the social and economic scale, for the act extended the right to vote to any man owning a household worth £10, adding 217,000 voters to an electorate of 435,000. Approximately one man in five now had the right to vote.

It is necessary to stress the fact that the number of new industrial seats created was still small. It is estimated that while Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool comprised over 2% of the population, they were represented by less that 1% of the seats in the Commons. This was mainly due to the Whig idea concerning what representation was. In drafting the Bill, they took it to be a representation of interests, such as coal mining or spinning, rather than the representation of citizens. Hence under this system, a small town could be enfranchised if it was dominated by a certain interest, whereas a more populous one would not if it lacked this defining feature. As the population increasingly were based in urban areas, this gave a certain bias towards agriculture. There therefore remained a strong bias in Parliament in favour of the landed interest, and the urban, industrial areas of Britain were too minor a part of the political nation to comprise anything other than a small and unimportant section of Parliament. The disequilibrium of interests would remain unresolved until the next Reform Act of 1867.

Demand for reform had grown as the Industrial Revolution had grown, and in addition to the demand for the fairer distribution of voting towns there were also calls for a change in the voting process. At the time the vote was only open to landowners, meaning that almost 95 percent of the population had no say in political matters. The vote was done by counting hands in an open vote, a process that made it easy for a landlord to see which of his tenants had betrayed him and so treat them worse as a result. This led to corruption. Most radicals wanted changes that would mean the vote for all and a secret ballot, where voters could cast their vote anonymously. A key omission of the 1832 Reform Act was that it made no attempt to reform the actual electoral process. Voting was still carried out in public, and no steps were taken to eliminate the bribery and corruption.

The terms of the Reform act had been heavily compromised. Although the rotten boroughs had generally been eliminated and the new industrial centres enfranchised, the process remained the same open vote, and the ten pound property qualification still meant that the majority of the working classes, who owned nothing, could not vote. Also, it was still necessary to pay to stand for election, and so almost all people who stood for election were still aristocrats, landowners or businessmen. This led to many working class people resenting the Whigs, and their failure over the next ten years. Although the Act had been conceived as a final resolution of the reform question, pressure was exerted by groups like the Chartists, and the Great Reform Act was very far from being the last Reform Act in British politics.

The conventional historical view is to see the First Reform Act as the prelude to the Second and Third Reform Acts (1867 and 1884) and the later introduction of universal suffrage. In this “Whig” view this is part of a wise, stabilising adjustment of the political system to the rise of democracy, letting in different sections of society into politics before they move to radical opposition. Others have stressed the short-term, often chaotic nature of the reform process and the role of panic and mass action in bringing about change. There has also been a stress on the conservative elements of the 1832 measure, for example by means of increasing the number of county seats. Indeed some historians have even gone so far as to see the Act as helping destroy various kinds of popular politics. The more regulated system and the satisfaction of some middle-class interests can be seen as working against popular influence. Some historians have linked the Reform Act to other measures such as the Municipal Corporation Act of 1835, the Poor Law Amendment of 1834 and policing innovations and argued that if anything the Act was part of a process of clamping down on traditional forms of mass politics.

The importance of the 1832 Act has of course been open to a number of interpretations over the last several decades: as the means through which a responsible aristocratic party sought to prevent unprecedented agitation from turning into revolution; as a way of perpetuating landed influence within the new electoral system by cordoning it off from the new borough constituencies; as a way to 'attach numbers to property and good order', in the words of the earl of Durham, i.e. to reconcile the middle classes to the existing political system by giving them a more obvious stake in it. Recent studies have tended to stress the narrowness of the Act, with Frank O'Gorman emphasizing that it increased the national electorate from a mere fourteen to an only slightly less paltry eighteen percent. It should also be noted that The Reform Act was sexist as well as elitist, the terms of the Act explicitly excluded women as it defined the parliamentary franchise as the exclusive privilege of propertied men.

As mentioned at the beginning of this discussion, the importance of the Act lay in its ramifications rather than its actual terms. It has been said that the Act made as little change to the traditional structure as it could possibly do, whilst still implementing reform. The changes were an, initial small step that, although Lord XXXXX hoped it would be the end of reform, opened the floodgates for further reform and substantial change. So did the Reform Act make any major changes to the structure of British politics? I believe that the acceptance of the need for reform was in itself a dramatic change for British politics.