Do you agree with the view that the 1832 reform act was a conservative measure with limited effects?

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b) Do you agree with the view that the 1832 reform act was a conservative measure with limited effects?

In this essay i plan to look at the statement that the 1832 Reform act was a conservative measure with limited effect. To do this i plan to not only use my knowledge of it but to analyse some primary sources from the time and secondary sources published afterwards. However before i start i think it would be important to define the term conservative. Wikipedia defines it as “Conservatism (conservare, "to preserve") is a political and social philosophy that promotes the maintenance of traditional institutions and supports, at the most, minimal and gradual change in society. “

Firstly i plan to look at the reasoning behind agreement with the statement. Firstly in agreement with the statement was the fact that it only secured voting rights for a very select bunch of people. This is very much inkeeping with the definition of conservative i have given. This inkeeps with the political system when it was set up as only a very select amount of people had a say. This made the political parties alot less accountable. With only an electorate of 800,000 out of a population of 24,000,000 the parties were only accountable to the aristocracy and a select few of the middle class. Also it becomes clear to me from Source 4 and 5 that it was again a conservative measure with limited effect. Source 4 is from a Whig MP in a speech made to the house of commons a year prior to the reform act becoming law and it states that “I support this plan because it is our best security against a revolution”. First of all from the location of the speech in the House of Commons i can deduce that Thomas Babington Macaulay was trying to convince others to vote for the bill. Clearly Macauley thinks it best to keep the measure a conservative one just enough to appease the masses but not enough to give them ay real power. Source 4 says that “Every argument which would lead me to oppose universal Suffrage leads me to support the reform now before us”. I take this to mean that as a very strong opponent of universal suffrage even he’s see’s that this act is best to prevent just that becoming reality in way of a revolution. This fits in perfectly with the title of conservative measure with limited effects. Source 5 states that “Neither  Surrender cost the Lords as a HOuse or the aristocracy as a class one particle of their real power . I believe that when the Whigs proposed the reform act they had no intention of the working class man having the vote. Although it would seem that many men where under this impression i think that something on the scale would have been way too radical at the time. I also believe that the Reform act was again a conservative measure in that it did nothing to rid the system of the secret ballot, in my opinion very much one of the most corrupt features of the electoral system of the time. In many boroughs the Landlord could still control the election by threatening the electorate with the chance of having no residence.

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 I also think that Earl Grey and the Whigs had some very suspect motives for wanted to bring the reform act into play. Perhaps not as some saw it at the time as a democratic measure that would change the face of Britian for ever but a much more conservative reason indeed. Earl Grey quite simply bought in the measure to safeguard Britain against revolution. E. A. Smith has claimed that “Grey presented reform as a means to restore the old constitution, not to create a new democratic one”. I think this is very much true and although Grey never ...

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** This answer has some good features - the sources, when they are used, are used well, but in a source-based answer, they need to be interrogated and the balance needs to be extracted. The message, purpose and reliability of the sources also need to be challenged in the light of the enquiry. This answer also needs to be better structured and organised - avoid writing in the first person. In addition, the answer is fairly narrow in its choice of arguments - this is a big topic which essentially in this answer tends to swirl around a conservative measure with limited effects to avoid revolution. It does little to rigorously challenge the proposition and offer more detailed evidence.