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Parliamentary reforms

BA (Hons.) History (University of Delhi)

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British Parliamentary Democracy

To what extent did the various economic and social developments in nineteenth century Britain impact the
parliamentary system and political parties?
The British parliamentary system was transformed through the course of the nineteenth century. To what
extent was this process a response to political pressures and popular democracy ?
Introduction
The revolutions of 1830 propelled the rebirth of democracy in the Western world. While Great Britain took
the lead in Europe, countries like France, Germany and later even Spain adopted some forms of democratic
rule. Since social and economic democratic reforms would endanger the position of the hereditary
aristocracy, most of these countries were interested in governmental or political democracy, exemplified by
parliaments, universal manhoodsuffrage, and the cabinet system. Historically rooted in Rousseau's
philosophical doctrine, political democracy in Europe in the period between 1830 to 1914 meant universal
suffrage, regular elections and popular control.
The British Cabinet System: The growth of the cabinet system in Britain enabled it to break away from
being a limited monarchy. Avital organ of the government, it decides general policy and births legislations
and has full responsibility for the management of public affairs, subject only to the will of the people and to
that of their representatives in the House of Commons. The history of the Cabinet system goes back the
Glorious Revolution of 1689. While there was a cabinet in the reign of Charles II, it was no more than a
council of advisers. In 1689, when William of Orange and Mary were invited on the throne, they knew it
was vital to maintain good relations with the Parliament. Therefore, they chose their ministers from the party
which held majority support, unwittingly beginning what is now convention. The cabinet grew powerful
during the reign of George I, who, illiterate in the English language, entrusted his work to his Prime Minister
Sir Robert Walpole and his cabinet. Walpole was the first modern Prime Minister of Britain; he was
simultancously head of cabinet and leader of the majority party in the House of Commons. As the cabinet
evolved slowiy, it faced resistance from members of Parliament, who during the reign of George lI.,
attempted to do away with the cabinet. It was only in the middle of the 19 century that the cabinet system
was integrated into the British Constitution.
Equally important to the evolution of Parliamentary democracy in Britain was the emergence of the House
of Commons as the more powerful branch of Parliament. While the 18" century, the House of Lords was
more influential, during Walpole 's time, the cabinet was deemed responsible exclusively to the Commons. In
the carly 19th century, the Lower House was given final authority over financial issues. But the lords still
held a veto on general legislation and the Tories often hindered Liberal reforms. In 1909, their rejection of
the budget prepared by David Lloyd George led to a dissolution of Parliament and asubsequent measure
called the Parliament Act of 1911gave financial say to the House of Commons along with other legislative
rights.
The evolution of democracy in Great Britain: In the carly 19h century, the system of voting and
representation in England was characteristically undemocratic. Very few boroughs granted suffrage the
majority of voters. In rural arcas, the few wealthy proprietors had voting rights. In the House of Commons,
more than two-thirds of the 650 seats were appointed
localmagnates, rich landed people and powerful
guilds. Naturally. corruption enabled bribery at clections and widespread abuses. Moreover, the
representation in Parliament was dominated by South English rural counties, disregarding the massive
migration to the Northern industrial centres that accompanied industrialisation in Britain. Therefore, while
newly populated Birmingham and Sheffield were denied representation, dwindling Southern villages still
sent up to three members to the House of Commons. While Norman Gash and Frank O'Gorman write that
this old system enjoyed the support of the people, Derek Beales and D.C. Moore argue that the House of
Commons was becoming increasingly less representative of the actual interests of the country.
Reform Actof 1832: Disenchanted with this arrangement that enabled the landed aristocracy to exercise a
monopoly of [Link] common people and middle classes began an agitation for political refom. The
success of the July Revolution of 1830 motivated the British Whigs under the leadership of Lord John
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Russell and Earl Grey with the support of the radicals led by Francis Place to demand electoral reform.
When this was rejected by the then Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington, the radicals refused to pay
taxations and withdrew their money from the Bank of England, forcing Wellington to resign. Earl Grey
formed a new ministry, which passed the famous Reform Bill of 1832. Norman Gash wrote, "The most
revolutionary aspect of the reform crisis of 1831-2 was not the Reform Bill itself, but the coercion of the
House of Lords."

While the Bill gave voting rights to all smaller landholders and tenant farmers and most middle class adult
males, it left out the agricultural labourers and industrial workers in cities. The proportion of voters was
increased from about l out of every 100 of the inhabitants to 1 out of 32. Representation was transformed as
villages with a population of less than 2000 were not allowed to elect representatives to the House of
Commons, while towns of slightly larger size had their representation cut in half. The seats in the Commons
thus set free were distributed anmong the great industrial cities of the north. D.C. Moore argues that both the
redistribution of seats and the franchise qualifications were designed for the new middle classes, in a sort of
tactical regrouping by the governing class to retain its own position.
The following elections were won by the Whigs, now called Liberals, while the Tories, now called
Conservatives, found themselves relying on capitalist support. With a comfortable majority in the House of
Commons, the Liberals enacted a series of parliamentary reforms in line with bourgeois interests. Liberal
franchise in local clections facilitated middle class control of borough governments; and grants of money to
private societies for maintaining schools meant that their sons would be educated. The Poor Law of 1834
ensured that the poor were housed in workhouses, clothed and fed. However, it was the repeal of the Corn
Laws in 1846 that became the milestone victory of this period of bourgeois legislation. The Con Laws
placed a heavy tariff on the import of wheat into England, thus protecting the British landlords by keeping
the price of brcad exceedingly high. The repeal of these laws put Britain on the path towards free-market
policies.
In this sense, the bill sought to preserve the country from violent revolution. The Whigs were aware of the
support among working people for the bill, indeed they benefited from it in the elections of 1830 and 1831.
However, they were also quite determined not to allow the working classes to hold any sort of dominant
position in the new electoral system. Passing the bill therefore saved the country from risings and rebellion;
the content of the bill saved the country from the 'evils' of democracy. Needless to say, disappointment
among the working classes was likely to be intense once they realised how little they had gaincd from the
bill, but by then they would have lost their middle-class allies, won over to the system by the bill, and would
be powerless to do anything about it.
Chartist Movements of 1838-48: None of these reforms benefitted the proletariat class, which continued to
subjected to long hours in factories and no franchise rights. When the Liberal Statesman John Russell
declared that reforms of 1832 were final and binding, urban workers united under a Chartist movement in
1838 under the leadership of Feargus O'Connor and William Lovett. Chartism took root from its celebrated
People's Charter, aprogram of six points: universal manhood suffrage; equal electoral districts; secret ballot;
annual Parliaments; abolition of property qualifications for members of the House of Commons; and
payment of members. After many mass demonstrations and petitions, in 1848, influenced by the February
Revolution in France, 500,000 workers were march to Parliament. Derailment by rain meant only a tenth of
them marched, and their petition, on examination, proved to contain many obviously forged signatures,
including names like Victoria Rex' and the Duke of Wellington. While scholars like Karl Marx and Lord
John Russel were convinced of the Chartist movement's radical revolutionary character, Mark Hovell saw it
as a moderate movement and Asa Briggs called it a network of local, separate protest movements. The
legacy of the movement stillcontinues as the six points are visible in the British Constitution.
Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884: In the years following the Chartist Movement, there was steady growth of
democratic reforms. 1858 saw the abolition of property qualifications for members of the House of
Commons. The Refom Act of 1867, led by the Conservative Disracli bestowed franchise upon all men in
towns and cities who inhabited separate dwellings and those who paid an annual rent of ten pounds. And in
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1884, the Liberals, led by Gladstone, in the 'Franchise Bill' extended the right to vote to the counties,
enfranchising nearly all of the agricultural labourers. It essentially established the modern one-member
constituency as the normal pattern for parliamentary representation. It birthed a conflict between the Liberal
majority in the House of Commons and the Conservative majority in the Lords which was resolved by the
radical Liberal, Sir Charles Dilke, and queen by introducing a Redistribution Bill into the Commons.
However, England still remained a system based on household suffrage, alienating many of the working
classes. A new wave of trade unions representing the much larger, unskilled sector of the workforce began
protesting and industrial conflict started turning violent, as in the Bloody Sunday' confrontation between
unemployed workers and the police in 1887. The middle class was sympathetic, but not willing to grant vote
yet. It was finally in 1918 that The Representation of the People Act abolished all the old property
requirements for voting, virtually granting all of Britain franchise as citizens, not property owners. There
was one exception: a second vote was given to university graduates and people who occupied business areas
separate from their residence. Most importantly, the Act of 1918 enfranchised all women of and above thirty
years of age, who were occupants of property or wives of occupants.
Suffragettes: The fight for female emancipation had centred around Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst's Women's
Social and Political Union (WSPU), dubbed 'Suffragettes' by the Daily Mail, and especially on the
campaign of violent protest on which it embarked between 1905 and the outbreak of war. A Conciliation Bill
for female suffrage was rejected by the Speaker of Parliament in 1913. Scholars agree that suffragette
violence before 1914 had not brought women the vote, but the work carried out by women on the home front
during the First World War won the respect of Parliament, which in gratitude in 1918 granted the vote to
women over 30, putting their franchise on the same basis as that of men ten years later.
However, most standard interpretations disregard the fact that Labour Party leaders like Keir Hardie and
George Lansbury supported the Suffragettes, and so did a substantial section of the Liberal Party, including
Churchill, Lloyd George, and Sir Edward Grey. John Stuart Mill had included their cause in the 1867
Reform Act. Lydia Becker's Women's Suffrage Journal and in the almost annual parliamentary debates on
the private members' bills on the issue from the 1870s onwards, had generated interest on this issue. The
Parliament tried to extend political rights to women. In 1869 single women ratepayers got the vote in
municipal elections and in 1870 in elections to the new School Boards; women could also vote under the
1888 Local Goverment Act and in 1894 they were allowed to sit on local councils. By 1900 there were
something like a thousand female elected Poor Law Guardians, including Mrs Pankhurst. Women had begun
to establish themselves in the universities, learned professions like medicine and the law. The question of
which women should get the vote, and on what basis, had an even more divisive effect on the movement as
separate suffrage groups formed: most notably, Millicent Fawcett's National Union of Woman Suffrage
Societies was founded in 1889.

Conclusion - The evolution of democracy in Great Britain includes primarily three different elements: the
extension of the suffrage, the development of the cabinet system of government, and the growth of the
supremacy of the House of Commons. As Sean Lang puts it, "the state of Parliament, who should sit in it,
who should vote for people to sit in it, and what they should do when they got there, were never points of
merely academic interest to the Victorians, but were of immense and immediate importance."
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Parliamentary Reforms: Britain

The popular radicalism of the 1790s in Europe led to revolutions all across Europe. The government
refused to pay heed to the popular demands as a result of which political tensions instability
occurred in many countries. While nineteenth-century Europeans resorted to Revolution with
alarming frequency, Britain avoided civil strife of equivalent proportions. Even in Britain, demands for
political reforms were gaining ground among the middle-class & peasantry. However there was no
revolution in 19th century Britain because the landed elite which dominated the Parliament,
supported by the bourgeoisie defused the social & political tensions by bowing down to the middle
classes. Aseries of parliamentary reforms were brought causing long term changes in the British
society.

Parliament and its workings were enormously important to the Victorians. Nearly all of the most
important popular campaigns of the nineteenth century, from the agitation of the Peterloo years,
through Chartism and the campaign for Irish Home Rule, to the long battle for female suffrage and
the crisis over Lloyd George's People's Budget, were connected either directly or indirectly to the
issue of reforming the workings of Parliament. And the twentieth century saw a series of major
changes to the workings of Parliament, including universal adult suffrage, the virtual crippling of the
House of Lords as a political institution, the lowering of the voting age to 18, and numerous changes
to parliamentary procedure. The Whigs regarded the reformed Parliament as the envy of the civilized
world & today the British politicians today seem, more or less satisfied within the structure they
operate. Hence parliamentary reforms can be seen a logical story of progress. Now let us analyze
some of these important reforms in detail.

Parliament abolished the Combination Acts in 1824, making strikes legal. Workers formed more
"friendly societies," which generated interest in reform, against a backdrop of hardship, industrial
disputes, demonstrations, and the wave of food riots in Britain. In 1828, despite vociferous
opposition from the Established Church, Parliament repealed the Test and Corporation Acts, which
had forced anyone holding public office to take communion in the Anglican Church. Catholic
emancipation had emerged as a major political issue around this time. Finally, in 1829, Parliament
passed the Catholic Emancipation Act, which removed the legal restrictions that had kept Catholics
from holding office or serving in Parliament.

In Britain, political liberalism continued to be closely linked to the movement led by Whigs for
electoral reform. The electoral system remained a patchwork that reflected the interests of local
elites and particular communities that had gradually developed in England since the fourteenth
century. The industrial north had almost no representation in Parliament because electoral districts
had not changed since before the Industrial Revolution. In contrast, some sparsely populated rural
districts still were represented in Parliament. With news of France's Revolution of 1830, the British
upper classes rallied together to demand major electoral reforms. A broadly based campaign for
electoral reform swept the country with more than 5000 petitions being brought to the parliament.
The new prime minister of Britain, Earl Charles Grey, a Whig, tried passing reform bills in Parliament
but it couldn't pass through the House of Lords. By this time, many Tories had also come to a sort of
conclusion that only an electoral reform bill could save Britain from a revolution. They feared an
alliance between frustrated businessmen and radicals, supported by workers, as had occurred in
France in 1830. The third reform bill was proposed in 1832, which passed through both the houses of

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the Parliament. The Reform Act of 1832 was a turning point in the history of modern Britain. The
minimum franchise requirement was lowered almost doubling the size of electorate. British
Parliament now more accurately reflected Britain's emerging industrial society. By the early 1840, 1 5
percent of the members of the House of Commons were businessmen, and 35 percent had some
other connection to commerce and industry.

Furthermore, the Commons passed two reforms in 1833 influenced by the Reform Act. Firstly, the
Parliament abolished slavery in the British Empire in 1833. The second reform measure, also passed
in 1833, prohibited work by children under nine years of age, Iimited the workday of children from
nine to twelve years to eight hours a day, and that for "young persons" ages thirteen to eighteen to
twelve hours a day. The Poor Law followed in 1834, where able-bodied individuals would no longer
receive assistance from parishes, but would be incarcerated in "welregulated" workhouses. And the
Municipal Corporations Act of 1835 eliminated the old, often corrupt governments, creating elected
municipal corporations responsible for administration. Allthis again reflected the growing political
influence of the English middle classes particular in the industrial areas.
The Chartist movement reflected the strength of reformism in Britain. William Lovett, a
cabinetmaker, and Francis Place, a London tailor, prepared the "Great Charter" that called for the
democratization of political life, including universal male suffrage, annual elections, equal electoral
districts, the secret ballot, and salaries for members of Parliament, so that ordinary people could
serve if elected. Chartists objected to the monopoly of wealth and political influence in Britain by a
small percentage of the population. They attempted to attract women to the movement by
recognizing the contributions of women workers to the family economy. The Chartist movement
remained overwhelmingly peaceful because its members were committed to acting as a "moral
force" in British life. The Chartists tried to get the Great Charter passed in 1839 & 1842 but did not
emerged successful. Thereafter, Chartism declined as a movement.
Another significant reform enacted in Parliament was the repeal of Corn Laws. Corn Laws imposed a
sliding tariff on imported wheat. Whern the price of wheat produced in Britain fell below a certain
level, import duties would keep out cheaper foreign grain. The laws protected landowners, but were
detrimental to the interests of businessmen who sold imported grain and, above all, to ordinary
people, who were forced to pay higher prices for bread. Failed harvests in 1839-1841 brought great
deprivation in Britain. The issue of the repeal of the Corn Laws pitted proponents of laissezfaire
economic policies against wealthy property owners, Whigs against Tories. In 1839, the Anti-Corn Law
League was formed, joined by businessmen, Whig politicians, and political radicals, who believed
that the repeal of the Corn Laws would be a major step toward universal male suffrage. In 1846,
Parliament repealed the Corn Laws, reducing duties on wheat and other imported agricultural
products, under the prime-ministership of Robert Peel.

Since 1832, the majority of British subjects had regarded further political reform as a certainty. John
Bright campaigned for electoral reform. However conservatives feared that the enfranchisement of
more people would eventually lead to subsequent legislation that might weaken the political
influence of wealthy landowners. Benjamin Disraeli, a member of the conservative party who was
also against universal male suffrage initially now came to conclusion that electoral reform that
maintained some exclusion was not only inevitable but that his Conservative Party could benefit
from it. He proposed that vote be given to each head of a household and that the minimum

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countryside tax requirement be further lowered. Under Conservative auspices, the Reform Bill of
1867 passed, like that of 1832, which doubled the number of voters including workers. The major
goal of the Chartist campaign more than two decades earlier had been reached. Another act of
reform in 1884 added 2 million more voters to the rolls by enfranchising agricultural labourers.
The Reform Act of 1867 was the herald of the era of mass politics. Benjamin Disraeli realized that his
party was long closely tied to the British landed elite and the Anglican Church & would have to
expand their voters' base. He created a modern national party organization with an emphasis on
nationalism & imperialism. The Conservatives now found new support among some of the wealthiest
businessmen, who abandoned the Liberals.
In conclusion, we can say that these parliamentary reforms & subsequent political developments
played an imperative role in the development of modern state apparatus in Britain. These reforms to
a large extent were the result of popular demands &political pressure that came to strike the British
economy the wake of French revolution of 1830 & other popular revolutions in various parts of
Europe. The way in which British government dealt with these demands was a proof of her workable
system of governance, which was further advanced when accompanied with the reforms in the
nineteenth century Britain.

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