#41 The Reform Bill of 1832

By the 1830 the economic crisis had reached its height. Factories were closing, unemployment increased. In the South the movement of revolt broke out in autumn. In the North, Trade Unions sprang up like mushrooms. The revolution in France and Belgium helped to increase the tenseness of the atmosphere. All this led to a demand for Parliamentary Reform. The election system certainly needed reform. By corruption rich people were able to control the election to Parliament. The growth of population made the members of Parl. Even less representative. Great new towns had appeared which returned no members.

The Reform Bill had really 2 sides. One regularized the franchise, giving the vote to tenant farmers in the countries. The really popular part of the Bill was that which swept away the rotten boroughs and transferred their members to the industrial towns.

First, by placing political power in the hands of industrial capitalists and their middle class followers it created a mass basis for the Liberal Party which dominated throughout 19^th century. The second consequence of the passing of the Bill – the workers who had done most of the fighting realized that they had been excluded from benefits; there was a turning away of the masses from parliamentary politics to Trade Unionism and Chartist Movement, the first independent political party of the working class. The People’s Charter which gave its name to the movement contained 6 demands: equal electoral districts, abolition(отмена) of the properly qualifications for members of Parliament, annual Parliamentary elections, the payment of ,members of Parliament. Chartism was the first working-class political movement in the world. But it was bound to fail due to the weaknesses of its leadership and tactics. Besides, the working class was immature.

Many people were disappointed with the 1832 Reform Bill. Voting in the boroughs was restricted to men who occupied homes with an annual value of £10. There were also property qualifications for people living in rural areas. As a result, only one in seven adult males had the vote. Nor were the constituencies of equal size. Whereas 35 constituencies had less than 300 electors, Liverpool had a constituency of over 11,000.

The British political landscape was modernised and energised by the passage of the 1832 Reform Act. Local Conservative Associations began to educate citizens about the Party's platform and encouraged them to register to vote annually, as mandated by the Act. Press coverage of national politics in the local press was joined by in-depth reports on provincial politics in the national press. Grassroots Conservatives therefore saw themselves as part of a national political movement during the 1830s

Acts of Parliament passed in 1835 and 1836 increased the number of polling places in each constituency, and reduced polling to a single day. Parliament also passed several laws aimed at combatting corruption, including the Corrupt Practices Act 1854, though these measures proved largely ineffectual. Neither party strove for further major reform; leading statesmen on both sides regarded the Reform Act as a final settlement.

There was considerable public agitation for further expansion of the electorate, however. In particular, the Chartist movement, which demanded universal suffrage for men, equally sized electoral districts, and voting by secret ballot, gained a widespread following. But the Tories were united against further reform, and the Liberal Party (successor to the Whigs) did not seek a general revision of the electoral system until 1852. The 1850s saw Lord John Russell introduce a number of reform bills to correct defects the first act had left unaddressed. However, no proposal was successful until 1867, when Parliament adopted the Second Reform Act.