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Famous Historical Elections: The Great Reform Election of 1832
16 Plays18 days ago
In this episode, Ethan Reuter speaks with Dr. Luke Blaxill, historian and Oxford college lecturer, about the 1832 general election that followed Britain's Great Reform Act. This wasn't just an election—it was a constitutional turning point that redrew the boundaries of British democracy itself.
The conversation explores the turbulent lead-up to reform, from the July Revolution in France to widespread rioting in British streets, the burning of the Duke of Newcastle's castle, and 250 fatalities in Bristol alone. Dr. Blaxill explains how elite fears of revolutionary upheaval, combined with pressure from below, forced a reluctant aristocracy to open the franchise to middle-class men and grant representation to industrial cities like Manchester and Birmingham for the first time.
But the Reform Act was never meant to be generous. As Robert Peel warned, once the door was opened even slightly, it couldn't be closed again. The episode examines how this careful compromise sparked the development of modern party politics, unleashed working-class movements like Chartism, energised moral campaigns from slavery abolition to Irish repeal, and set Britain on an irreversible path toward universal suffrage. This is the story of the election that changed everything—even if it was meant to change as little as possible.
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Transcript
The Onset of Britain's Democratic Journey
00:00:10
Speaker
1832 was a constitutional opening for British politics. In the wake of the Great Reform Act that had abolished rotten and pocket boroughs, redistributed seats to growing industrial towns like Manchester and Birmingham.
00:00:23
Speaker
The election that followed consolidated advantages. In short, 1832 brought about Britain's democratic story.
Guest Introduction: Dr. Luke Blacksell
00:00:30
Speaker
On today's episode, I'm joined by Dr Luke Blacksell to talk us through it.
00:00:35
Speaker
He's a historian and college lecturer specialising in 19th and 20th century British history at Hertford College, Oxford. Luke, thank you for being here. My pleasure, Ethan. So I would like to start by you setting the
Influence of European Instability
00:00:49
Speaker
context. How did the international political climate look coming out of the 1830 and 31 elections before us getting into the domestics?
00:00:59
Speaker
Well, an extreme period of instability. Britain is used to looking across the channel to France and events in France, particularly because of obviously the 1789 revolution.
00:01:12
Speaker
But in 1830, we have the July revolution where we see the end of the reactionary Bourbon monarchy. Charles X is forced to flee, and indeed he flees to Britain, and we have the establishment of a constitutional monarchy under Louis-Philippe.
00:01:28
Speaker
There are also uprisings in Belgium, Poland, and Italy. But I think that the real concern for Britain here is that those revolutionary undercurrents are going to hit Britain at precisely the same time that there is all sorts of unrest and all sorts of questioning of the British political settlement, which has been going on really since
Economic Distress and Radical Movements
00:01:49
Speaker
1815. So looking from 1815 to now, how did it look domestically if there was such unrest?
00:01:58
Speaker
Well, really the ministry of Lord Liverpool, which came to an end in 1827, began in 1812, had seen a great deal of distress throughout Britain. There were certain economic reasons for this. You had the end of the Napoleonic Wars, a huge number of the population without jobs, ah agricultural depressions, and you see the question of reform, i.e. giving the vote to working class people, potentially middle class people,
00:02:27
Speaker
as being a key issue which unites the radical movement. You see a large number of run-ins between protesters with monster public meetings and indeed sometimes violent dissent and the authorities.
The Peterloo Massacre
00:02:40
Speaker
The Pantry Arch Rising, Spa Fields, and of course, the Peterloo Massacre in 1819. Now that is of course the famous and celebrated event where you have a large meeting on St. Petersfield in Manchester where the crowd had come to listen to Henry Orator Hunt, a key radical orator, and um a Manchester regiment of hussars commanded by a local magistrate got into one of those very famous situations where they weren't given a direct order to charge. but someone threw a stone, and before you knew it, the cavalry were on top of the people and there were a large number of fatalities. And that was used as a real cause celebre by the radical movement to ah explain how it was that the government, as they saw it, not that it was the government, were against the people in crushing reform. There was also sorts of no all sorts of domestic censorship, the Six Acts, gagging restraints, the suspension of habeas corpus, and ah real period
Economic Upheaval and Riots
00:03:39
Speaker
of danger. That died off a bit in the 1820s during an economic boom, but it is starting to resurface in precisely the same year as we see these international events here in France.
00:03:50
Speaker
And this second wave of radical uprising is much more dangerous than the first and sees all sorts of widespread rioting. And so the government really feels as though it is being pushed into action.
00:04:02
Speaker
And why did it appear so intolerable to towns and cities such as Manchester and Birmingham that they were so underrepresented?
Demand for Fair Representation in Industrial Cities
00:04:12
Speaker
That's absolutely a key point, Ethan. It's not just that lots of people didn't have the vote, as was the case. We have a franchise of between five to 9% of the population.
00:04:23
Speaker
It is also that key industrial metropolises that were becoming influential, growing in population, growing in economic importance due to the Industrial Revolution and the revolution in steam, the revolution indeed even in water power prior to that,
00:04:40
Speaker
weren't left with no MPs. They had MPs by dint of, say, being in counties like Manchester, for example, but they didn't have dedicated borough MPs. And yet at the same time, you had medieval towns, for example, the constituency of Donwich, which had fallen into the sea, the borough of Old Serum, which was just a field with no one living there, that returned two MPs.
00:05:03
Speaker
And so there was a real mismatch, not just between ah the people who could vote and who couldn't, but where the centres of democratic representation lay. Almost all of the MPs were coming out of places that had formerly been significant in medieval times, with a huge skew towards agricultural and market towns that were important in the 14th and
Aristocracy's Fear of Reform
00:05:27
Speaker
15th century. But those did not reflect modern Britain. And the most egregious example of that is Manchester not having any MPs, despite it being a burgeoning industrial metropolis.
00:05:37
Speaker
And so Robert Peel at the time described it as a moral storm. In relation to both the international uprising and especially the domestic pressure, what was meant when he said those words?
00:05:50
Speaker
Well, Peel, of course, was a famous opponent of reform in 1832. And so when Peel called it a moral storm, he was actually really saying it was just that. A storm is something that blows everything around, but a storm passes and then can be followed by a period of calm.
00:06:06
Speaker
But what he was specifically talking about was an enormous wave of monster meetings, demonstrations, riots, just massive events. a surge of political consciousness that we saw this you know in the days of May, immediately before the Reform Act, monster meetings happening everywhere and widespread rioting with large numbers of fatalities in places like Bristol.
00:06:29
Speaker
But of course, what increasingly happens is those who want to carry reform, those who are opposed to Robert Peel's opposition of it, say, Excuse me, Mr Peel, this isn't a moral storm, this is a real storm, and we can see the Duke of Newcastle's castle burning in Nottingham, and we need to do something before the crowd come and set fire to ours.
00:06:49
Speaker
This appears almost as elites attempting to save their aristocratic influence, save their castles from being burnt down. How much so was this them attempting to save their own skin comparatively?
00:07:04
Speaker
I think it is an overwhelmingly powerful sentiment in 1832. It is really the only of the Reform Acts in Britain where you can truly and definitively say that it is prompted primarily by pressure from below, that that contributes to the other Reform Acts in their way, but this one really very sizably. Now, there are some MPs who are in favour of reform from first principles because they just believe in the widening of the franchise to reflect the industrial and commercial changes that are happening in Britain.
00:07:33
Speaker
But in this case, when you see this degree of danger, where you see the loss of control and 250 fatalities in Bristol alone, many MPs are swayed by the argument that we need to act now to prevent forcible uprisings elsewhere, and maybe the destabilization of the aristocracy.
00:07:54
Speaker
Lord Macaulay, a famous ah historian who was also an MP at this time, described this in the debate before the first rejected reform bill as the parable of Sybil, which is the idea that you know she will come back many times and her demands will be higher each time.
00:08:11
Speaker
by which he meant that if we don't do anything, we don't reform, that there will be more riots, there will be more disturbances, and we will need to grant an even greater measure of enfranchisement to be able to placate
Aristocracy's Concessions and Tory Resistance
00:08:23
Speaker
this.
00:08:23
Speaker
The debate in 1832, even amongst most of its proponents, is essentially this. What is the minimum that we as the aristocracy, the enlightened elite who know what we should do, who have the government's...
00:08:37
Speaker
punches best interests at heart, what is the minimum we can do to assuage the pressure? There is only a very tiny and vanishing number of MPs, as I say, who are in favor of it for its own sake.
00:08:48
Speaker
And so they very much are thinking about literally um saving their own social status, but doing so in a way that gives the bare minimum of what is required to quell the uprising and to push back the storm.
00:09:03
Speaker
If it was attempted to exclusively give the bare minimum, how did those first votes on the Reform Act come to fail within the parliamentary system?
Passage of the Reform Act
00:09:15
Speaker
Well, I think simply because for a large number of MPs, and we must remember that the first um ah votes on this ah were taken when there was still a Conservative or a Tory majority in the House of Commons, were opposed to reform on principle.
00:09:31
Speaker
that it didn't really matter whether the measures were minor or whether they were major. The principle was that you were trimming the tree. This is the Whig argument, you see. um You change the Constitution, you adapt it you evolve it, just like they did, you know, in 1688.
00:09:47
Speaker
by putting ah William and Mary on the throne. that The question then, if you are a Whig, is how much trimming do you do? But if you are a Tory, the point is that the Constitution is something organic that has grown with time.
00:10:00
Speaker
It's not something that men of a present moment should tinker with, because the moment one tinkers with it, another will tinker with it a few years later. You will open the door towards... essentially universal suffrage, which is what Robert Peel actually predicted would happen. He said that the Whigs had opened the door that wouldn't be closed when they passed the reform bill. and No matter how minor that was, no matter how small, slightly ajar the door was, Peel thought that the whole door would just crash open and in less than a century would have universal suffrage.
00:10:29
Speaker
And he was right. And during the successful passage of the Reform Act under the Whig government, how does this come about?
00:10:42
Speaker
Well, I think that the crucial event that we have to think about here is actually the election of 1831. Now, this occurs because the Wellington government falls.
00:10:53
Speaker
ah There is a general election and the Whigs do about as well as it is possible to do under the unreformed system. Now, elections prior to 1832 as being barometers of public opinion is not really an established precedent. Most of the seats are controlled by bribery. Most of them are controlled by patrons.
00:11:13
Speaker
The Duke of Newcastle, on his own, controls 50 constituencies, where he basically puts the MPs in. Or very often, MPs are just appointed by the local corporation, i.e. the council, as it were.
00:11:25
Speaker
But in this system, in this election of 1831, all of the constituencies which are vaguely open, and there are a few of them that are very open because the franchise is so inconsistent, the Whigs do spectacularly in all of these. They don't win the election by a landslide because a lot of seats are still in the pockets of their opponents, literally, but they do about as well as they could do. And so it is interpreted like a landslide, even though it isn't one on paper.
00:11:51
Speaker
Anyway, then obviously Earl Grey, then prime minister, tries to pilot a reform act. He gets it through the Commons, but it is blocked in the Lords. um And various Lords, you' like Lord Ashley or the future Lord Shaftesbury, a famous reformer later on, leave the Lords in opposing this because it's dangerous radicalism. It's upending the organic basis of the constitution. It's also empowering the House of Commons.
00:12:17
Speaker
and probably means the end of the personal influence of many of the Lords themselves. Because of course the Lords being an entirely hereditary chamber and of course not being elected, find themselves very much in disconnection to the Commons here. The Commons has been reforged by this storm in 1831, the Lords has not been. And the Lords does not see it as its responsibility to simply mirror the view of the House of Commons because it doesn't have, you know, the Salisbury Convention, it doesn't have democratic principles.
00:12:46
Speaker
So the Lords are quite happy to block it. And so how does Gray respond to the Lords blocking the bill?
King William IV's Role
00:12:54
Speaker
He performs a very clever deal with the king. It is very similar, in fact identical, to a deal that was done to conceive the Parliament Act many, many years later in 1911 with George the fifth He convinces William IV, who is an opponent of reform,
00:13:11
Speaker
that the situation is now so dangerous because you have the days of May, the widespread rioting, because of the international situation that we mentioned, that the Lords are incapable of consenting to their own disempowerment. And so therefore a patriotic monarch should side with the Commons.
00:13:30
Speaker
And Gray, through conversations that are unrecorded, but would undoubtedly have been very interesting, persuades William to create Whig peers artificially, using his royal prerogative, to create a Whig majority in the Lords.
00:13:45
Speaker
That is exactly the same as what as the gun that was placed to the Lord's head with the Parliament Act as well, although in that case, the creation of liberal peers. And so therefore, faced with that, the Lord's has no alternative essentially but to back down. And in that also creates an important constitutional precedent that the Commons with the monarch on side can overpower the Lord's.
00:14:06
Speaker
And why would the king pick... a bill that would be for royal assent that would be so anti-lords and especially monarchical power in favour of what what is ostensibly common sovereignty.
Impact of the Reform Act on Franchise
00:14:20
Speaker
So the King's starting position was that the Reform Act should not pass and did not need to pass. The King is aware of the popular discontent, but his initial ah opinion is to side with the Duke of Wellington, is to side with Peel, that there does not need to be reform and that these problems are primarily economic or prompted by the international situation.
00:14:46
Speaker
um But it is, I think, really some of the crucial key moments, the loss of control of Bristol being one such, and the torturing of the Duke of Newcastle's castle, which is another, which really convinces the king that now is a time where he's going to have to act. I mean, we have to remember that the role of the king constitutionally is very undefined at this point.
00:15:10
Speaker
um You've had... It's vacillated um in terms of the power of the monarch. You had initially, um after the Hanoverian succession, where we had the Georges placed on the throne, a quite a series of quite weak monarchs.
00:15:24
Speaker
You then have George III, who is actually a very powerful monarch, gets a lot of power back for the monarchy. um George IV, very unpopular during the Regency period, the monarchy actually worrying about existentially its own role.
00:15:36
Speaker
And then you have William IV in this situation, the new king, in the context of that international situation where you have a conservative anti-reform monarchy being destabilized. And so the king is probably practicing some of his own wiggery by trying to actually side with the reformers ah because he's afraid that potentially his own role could be compromised. He could end up in the same way as um Charles France.
00:16:04
Speaker
And so finally, it's granted royal assent. What actually are the provisions of the Great Reform Act that are so contested? Once the principle of reform is established, and that is very controversial, there is then a huge argument about the details.
00:16:23
Speaker
Detail number one is where do you put the franchise? In other words, who's in and who's out? So there's a very obvious way you can determine that, and that is through property valuations.
00:16:35
Speaker
And that is a principle that is used throughout the 19th century. Now, prior to this, there were all sorts of different franchises that existed. um Mostly it was property values, but there were some very arbitrary ones in there as well, such as window diameter in some places, whether you got some salt out of a pit and showed it to the returning officer, all sorts of nonsense, the so-called pot walloper burrows, that was the cooking pot diameter term.
00:16:59
Speaker
And so this is all swept away with a unified um property qualification. It is placed at 10 pounds rateable value in boroughs, 50 pounds in counties. The borough franchise is lower than the county franchise. That is the case throughout the whole 19th century until 1884.
00:17:15
Speaker
Now, that effectively, although of course it does vary because the price of property varies throughout the country, brings upper middle class people in and generally keeps lower middle class people out. It depends a little bit, as I say, on property values.
00:17:30
Speaker
but Who is going to come in to the franchise and is going to be part of the Constitution and who isn't is something politicians argue about, because what kind of a person are you bringing in? Well, are you going to bring in a respectable shopkeeper, for example? Is that the kind of man that you want to have the vote ah or not, as the case may be? And so there's a bit of argument there.
00:17:49
Speaker
But where there is perhaps a still bigger argument is where they draw the constituency boundaries, in particular, how many MPs are you going to still have in so-called rotten boroughs, or at least if not rotten boroughs, a decomposing boroughs?
00:18:03
Speaker
In other words, places where there are only a few hundred voters and where bribery is probably going to be the operative determinant of an election. Because of course, if you have conceits seats that are controlled by patronage or controlled by plutocracy, it enables people to buy their way into parliament without having to face electorates.
00:18:23
Speaker
And that is a system of representation, not of people, but of certain other things, influence and plutocracy, that the aristocracy very much wish to continue in the constitution. And so there's very much an argument about how many MPs various places should get and how many rotten boroughs that there actually actually are.
00:18:42
Speaker
But just like with all of the Reform Acts, once all those things are placed in the mix, no one really knows exactly how they're going to land. And so with the £10 property qualification, £50 elsewhere, how did this and later consequential issues such as the Poor Law Amendment inspire greater reform movements further down the line?
00:19:07
Speaker
I think in a variety of ways. I think one of the first things is that by enfranchising the new industrial constituencies, having MPs for Manchester and Birmingham, as dedicated things and of themselves, not only do you have a new class of voters who are being represented, you also have a new class of MPs who start appearing as well.
00:19:27
Speaker
In other words, those who do well before quite large popular electorates. It's not really a surprise that Birmingham develops its own political colours, although much later in the 19th century as being a place of municipal socialism.
00:19:40
Speaker
Manchester, that great city of free trade, um you get politics and politicians who start appearing because those places have been given representation. And many of them are the foremost reformers who represent these kind of new boroughs.
00:19:56
Speaker
And they are the ones who propose a lot of bills. Because governments are not elected with manifestos in this era and party leadership is very weak, it is often a private member who places a bill on the statute book.
00:20:09
Speaker
And so having just a small number of very reform-minded MPs in the Commons can make the difference between you getting a piece of reform and you not getting a piece of reform. And so I think that's the really crucial point, that by opening the system, a bunch of people who are reformers really with a capital R,
00:20:26
Speaker
get seats in the Commons and start pushing through bills, for example, the change to the Poor Law. And this much of this bill is debated about its lasting significance and its genuine greatness. It's known as the Great Reform Act, and yet still only about 18% of adult males are enfranchised, and women formally are excluded.
00:20:53
Speaker
What is the lasting significance of the Great Reform Act?
Subsequent Electoral Reforms
00:20:58
Speaker
Well, I think it probably should be called a great reform act, despite those extremely meager qualifications.
00:21:04
Speaker
Certainly when looking at the history of democracy, it sometimes seems a bit counterintuitive when we compare this to say 1918, which enfranchised, you know, 15 million people. Why a measure like this that just increases the franchise to about 18% of men should be so critical?
00:21:21
Speaker
I think the thing is, is it looks critical, I think, in posterity. First of all, you have the beginning of reformist politics and the beginning of new party structures, although that, i.e. Whigs and Tories giving way to liberals and conservatives.
00:21:36
Speaker
But I think the particular thing that it does is probably what Robert Peel said that it would do, which is that once you have the franchise as a man-made mark, a place ah that has been defined at 10 pounds,
00:21:50
Speaker
then it can change again. Not only is it the case that more people might get 10 pound houses and so increase the franchise organically, but it is also the case that even in the 1840s, you have reformers like Russell saying, what happens if we put it down to seven?
00:22:05
Speaker
What about six? And then by the 1860s, that's what the argument is, that there's been a spread of education, there's been the spread of the press, ah the middle class have become more conscious.
00:22:16
Speaker
Maybe you do want to widen the franchise, given the fact that the economy, culture and society are changing. So the fact that you've already lowered it to 10 and it's you know it's not destroyed the constitution means that you can then chip away at it and lower it even more.
00:22:30
Speaker
And of course, if you keep doing that, and there is always a reformist movement who wants to ah change the franchise, and of course political advantage at any given moment to changing the franchise, as there always is, then it's not surprise that there are then more reform acts.
00:22:44
Speaker
And so that's why it really detonates all of the others, even though the actual effect isn't that great. It massively changes political culture. It means that in an election, a government can be replaced, which is not something that could really happen before, which is a pretty important principle.
00:23:00
Speaker
It promulgates further reform itself, and it establishes two-party politics in a new way. For all of those reasons, I think it is well worthy of the name Great.
Political Excitement and Elite Fear
00:23:14
Speaker
1832 comes across as a period of time that was incredibly charged. It's an incredibly electric time period in British politics, akin to the the recent decades that we've had.
00:23:28
Speaker
How has that felt? I think it would have been felt literally throughout the entire country, whether you were someone who had no prospect of being enfranchised. For example, you were an agricultural labourer, you know you were a woman.
00:23:43
Speaker
um You would have known that a crisis was in the offing. that this would have been something not only that would have been published in all newspapers, news sheets, that there would be meetings that would be happening literally on every street corner, that you might have noticed ah that actually it wasn't possible for you to withdraw gold from the bank because there'd been a sort of a bank raid.
00:24:04
Speaker
All sorts of things would have manifested um themselves in political consciousness. There was undoubtedly a real electricity running running through the country. a feeling that everything was to play for. And as far as the government was concerned, a real sense of not understanding what the people would do, a fear of the herd, a fear of what public opinion, if it was mobilized by the demagogues and the reformers, to what extent they would actually go.
00:24:31
Speaker
And that focusing of attention on a particular political event, which would have meant news traveled from one end of the country somehow, not by electricity, but by something else, very, very quickly, was, I think, a really, really intense feature um of this election and this period of time that I don't really think has got any equal ah throughout the 19th or the 20th centuries. And that is one of the reasons why it is so...
00:24:59
Speaker
The Reform Act is called a great one, not because of the measures, not necessarily even because of the results, but because of the great focus and the great zeitgeist and the great electricity that was generated. And it was something that was never forgotten and was recalled ah for for decades since.
00:25:18
Speaker
Touching on those that were newly enfranchised in this great Reform Act and the slippery slope of reform, going into the actual 1832 election, how did those that were newly enfranchised affect the voting and the outcomes?
Impact of Newly Enfranchised Voters
00:25:37
Speaker
Well, in two important ways. One is by casting their ballots, but the other is, of course, by comprising new constituencies. Almost all of the constituencies are changed. Their boundaries, for many of them, are remapped.
00:25:49
Speaker
And so it's not clear how these constituencies are initially going to vote. I should say there's probably a little less uncertainty with this election because still a bribery is very important. It's a bit more possible to work out who's going to vote what what what which way ah before polling day.
00:26:06
Speaker
But it is generally perceived that the new voters, the propertied middle classes who were amongst the vanguard of the reform movement, alongside the working classes, who of course don't get the franchise, primarily vote Whig and are pro-reform.
00:26:22
Speaker
At the same time, though, even though the Tories are smashed in this election as they expected to be, they do detect that there are certain shall we say, more anti-reform strains of opinion, even amongst those who have got the vote. And so it's certainly not the case that Toryism is bankrupt. I think, if anything, they probably see some aspects of hope that they did not think that they would see in the ruins of 1832.
00:26:47
Speaker
And so while it's true that those middle class electors are initially Whig, with some reform, it is actually possible, the Tories think, when they are conservatives after 1834, to get that back again.
00:27:00
Speaker
if If they were initially woken, eventually the Conservatives still haven't lost their hope during this campaign, what were the actual issues of the campaign now that reform had supposedly been achieved and what was on the agenda?
00:27:17
Speaker
Good question. So the first thing is really what does politics look like after reform? After the Reform Act, it if you read the speeches of the election, a lot of it is about still the Reform Act, just saying, well, I supported reform, it's happened, vote for me.
00:27:36
Speaker
And then obviously being quite difficult for opponents of reform to say, well, I opposed it, but now it's happened, so, et cetera. So that's still important. But there are also, I think, some understanding that...
00:27:48
Speaker
with a reformist majority in Parliament, that it may be possible to do certain other reforms. Now, of course, elections in this period don't have manifestos. There are moments where there are national issues.
00:28:00
Speaker
And so it's not exactly that Whig candidates are saying, well, we're going to carry the Municipal Corporations Act or the change to the Poor Law or abolish slavery throughout the British Empire. But there is certainly a principle of reform with a capital R in the abstract.
00:28:15
Speaker
But some Whigs will call themselves reform. reformist or reform party, um ah not to be confused with Reform UK. um rather than Whig.
00:28:25
Speaker
And so there is the general principle that if you elect a Whig government, that there will be further reforms and that reform is a general guiding principle. you know The trimming of certain parts of the constitution, including in local government, which is also a very sacrosanct area, is something you can expect a Whig government to do. And so there's that general reform versus we've had the Reform Act, let's just stop kind of argument that consumes the Whigs and the Tories.
Whigs' Legislative Success
00:28:53
Speaker
And so coming out of this campaign with reform as a capital R, what were the actual results of the election? So you have a massive Whig landslide. The Whigs winning, although it's not entirely possible to calculate the precise number, 479 seats, the Tories winning about 175. So, you know, taking into account some other kind of independent MPs in there as well, the Whigs have got a majority of about 250.
00:29:23
Speaker
And that is important because... In politics in this period, because a lot of MPs are very independently minded and are calling themselves lots of different things, it's very hard to apply the party whip.
00:29:35
Speaker
And so you know if you have a majority of 250, you are probably going to be able to pass bills whenever you want to, even given a large number of absentee or flaky supporters. And so I do think the size of the Whig victory does help them push through some of the more kind of controversial legislation. as opposed to a small majority where they would actually have been very vulnerable to defeat.
00:29:58
Speaker
And if there was more of an independence of MPs, how does this election and the Reform Act shape the development of parties and a more national structure?
Establishment of National Party Politics
00:30:12
Speaker
Well, because and MPs traditionally did not run under party labels, they would just run under their name. And they might even say, well, you know I'm a Whig, but at the same time, I'm i'm not really very reform-minded. Or someone might say, I'm a liberal Tory, ah to use a term that has often been referred to throughout history.
00:30:34
Speaker
That What starts dropping away, I think, in the context of a nationalized election where there is this Reform Act and then there are some national issues that appear, um is that kind of independent status. That what a Whig means starts to mean throughout the whole country someone who is pro-reform.
00:30:53
Speaker
That what a Tory means is probably someone who... wants to constrain the amount of reform, probably who opposed the 1832 settlement. And that creates a nationalized discourse around quite more partisan political parties.
00:31:10
Speaker
Now, of course, one thing that's critical in elections in this period is actually running candidates. Running candidates is very, very expensive, especially in a political culture where there is loads of bribery. It is very hard for someone who's not a multimillionaire to even run, equivalent of a multimillionaire, to run for office.
00:31:27
Speaker
And so because there is a consistency between what the candidates are standing for from constituency to constituency, it's much easier for money to flow nationally behind particular political causes rather than just having to be raised by a certain gentleman who wishes to campaign to get himself into parliament.
00:31:44
Speaker
So you have actually a quite large mobilization of money behind politics. and not all of that is And not all of that is local. um And so once you start getting that and you start getting a national party that appears, suddenly the government starts calling itself, well, we are the Whig government and we have a Whig mandate.
00:32:03
Speaker
And so therefore we will ah perform this kind of policies rather than Parliament just being a representative chamber where there are 650 different mandates and government government emerges as a sort of a national consequence natural consequence for that. In 1832, while we can't go into the mind of electors there, I think it is undoubtedly the case that huge numbers of voters were voting for a party before they were voting for an individual.
00:32:30
Speaker
And It is understandable, therefore, that the politics that then emerges has a more party-centric focus, certainly throughout the eighteen thirty s and right really up until the death of Peel.
00:32:41
Speaker
And looking at the development of future parties coming down the line, almost a century later, Labour gets into power. And how did acts such as the Great Reform Act impact working class movements as they are still left unenfranchised?
00:33:02
Speaker
Immediately, it doesn't enfranchise them at all, and it doesn't give them any formal representation. But it does do one very important thing, which is that the lead up to reform, and obviously the Reform Act itself, where there is the sense of widespread betrayal of the working classes, that they help the middle classes up the ladder and then the middle classes kick the ladder away...
Ignition of Working-Class Movements
00:33:22
Speaker
creates and detonates a culture of political organization and excitement, and indeed even class consciousness amongst the working classes, because they are the group who are politically excluded.
00:33:34
Speaker
And from that is obviously birthed the Chartist movement, that famous ah working class, ah popular movement, dedicated to achieving the famous points of the People's Charter, universal male suffrage, secret ballot, payment of MPs, equal constituencies, and annual parliaments.
00:33:53
Speaker
Four of those things were of course enacted in the years that followed. The only one that was not of course was annual parliaments. And Chartism is an enormous movement, monster public meetings, vast support amongst the working classes, and indeed is able to run its own MPs in many places, or own candidates, and win seats in the Commons as well.
00:34:14
Speaker
um It isn't ultimately a successful movement, because one of the curious aspects of British history is that in the 1840s, while there were revolutions kicking off throughout the continent, Britain on that very same year, 1848, sees actually the end of the Chartist movement in a failed meeting um on Kennington Common.
00:34:34
Speaker
ah But it is still a movement which greatly energizes working class consciousness. And one could argue is re-energized later in the 1860s when there was a real push for working class enfranchisement. And If we want to take the real lingerie and think about working class political consciousness right up to the birth of the Labour Party, chartism and the chartist tradition of working class political mobilisation and its intersection with trades union organisation as well, which is important, is something that is a consistent motif from the beginning
00:35:07
Speaker
ah from 1832 onwards. and so while the Chartists don't succeed and the working class don't get the vote in any capacity until 1867, there is still a lasting legacy of organization there that stretches well into the 20th century.
00:35:20
Speaker
And moving beyond the Reform Act and looking instead at the capital R of reform and the slippery slope of reform that the moral storm talks about.
00:35:34
Speaker
How did figures across the Atlantic, such as Samuel Sharp and figures in the UK, such as Thomas Falwell Buxton, shape issues after the election of Earl Grey?
00:35:48
Speaker
Well, I think that one thing that happens is ah the detonation, I think, of politics also is an increasingly moral debate. Now, while there are critical ah changes to things like um ah local government, there are also arguments about who should matter and why.
00:36:09
Speaker
So, for example, the new Poor Law Amendment Act, for example, you know, what do you do with paupers? How responsible are they for the fact that they're not able to self-support them?
00:36:19
Speaker
so They're not able to support themselves. What should government do? and The other one, of course, perhaps still more celebrated is, of course, relating to slavery. Now, slavery, of course, has already been abolished, ah the the trade that is in 1807, which was almost also an enormous kind of sort of moral debate.
00:36:39
Speaker
But there is then, through persons such as Buxton, the um imperative to push this moral dimension further, that it's not just simply a question of the actual trade itself, but obviously it is still going it is still going on because there are still slaves who are working, even if they were traded traded previously.
00:37:01
Speaker
and so It's then a question of going to the next stage, um ah which is actually emancipating the slaves, emancipating 800,000 slaves throughout the British Empire, and indeed putting considerable resources into ending the trade within the very large British Empire.
00:37:17
Speaker
And so I think the moral of that story is actually the introduction of moral consciousness in politics, that you have campaigns that are led by conscientious reformers who get seats in Parliament through the Reform Act,
00:37:31
Speaker
and are able to lead those kind of moral campaigns, including even campaigns like this, which were extremely expensive ah for the British government to be able to finance, requiring something like 40% of of the national the national tax take to be able to actually pay for the compensation ah that was doled out to the slave owners um but following that act.
00:37:54
Speaker
And so I think that there's a greater feeling that there is a connection between what happens in Parliament and moral debates in the country as well. And that's not just reform, there's rising consciousness ah that comes with rising non-conformist consciousness as well that also matter here, a a re-engagement with more evangelical Christianity throughout the 19th century as well.
00:38:16
Speaker
But there is now an outlet in politics for those moral questions to enter parliament much more easily than they had been, for example, with the abolitionist campaign um ah before the Great Reform Act, when parliament was much more closed.
Irish Political Consciousness
00:38:31
Speaker
This is also an incredibly important time for Ireland and in the wake of Catholic emancipation, um the Irish Repeal Party do successfully in 1832.
00:38:44
Speaker
What does it mean um looking at the election and how is Ireland impacted by the election? So it's important, I think, to remember. So 1829, you have Catholic emancipation. Catholics formally, ah because of the Tests Act, formally prevented from ah voting, taking um taking seats in Parliament, and 1829 changes that.
00:39:09
Speaker
But at the same time, it also hugely restricts the Irish franchise, just as a a little amend them, that having given um political rights to Catholics, that they are then effectively taken away by a property qualification.
00:39:22
Speaker
Now, 1832 redresses ah some of that. um And you have, as you say, the repeal party doing quite well in this election and giving ah the O'Connell party um A base to, for example, campaign against tithes, the tithe of the um ah the Church of of England in Ireland, which was you know obviously something that many Catholics ah thought was unjust.
00:39:45
Speaker
And I think perhaps primes Ireland for a huge moment of politicization in the 1840s, which is when, of course, the Great Famine begins. And so I think the legacy of 1832 is really, I think, to allow O'Connell, one of these a great men of Irish politics, who is able to create Irish political consciousness in the first stage, which is continued by Parnell in the second stage, gives them, I think, a platform to um promote Irish political consciousness, and especially Irish political consciousness,
00:40:19
Speaker
in opposition to the union and the government at Westminster. And so I think without that, and without O'Connell being able to continue that campaign, it's not as clear that you would have had that political consciousness in Ireland, and there wouldn't maybe have been such a a reserve, such a cachet for those who obviously were campaigning about the famine and then campaigning in the land war ah later to be able to draw upon. So I think it keeps Irish politics relevant and politically mobilised, which is instrumental moving forwards right up until partition.
00:40:52
Speaker
1832, it seems, is a great time of not only reform, but also moral questions within politics and of political
Further Reading Recommendations
00:41:04
Speaker
consciousness. For those that are more interested in issues surrounding that, do you have any further reading recommendations?
00:41:12
Speaker
Yes, I think so. And I think that there are several things that need to be read about. I think it is the particular circumstances of 1832 and the story ah that ah ah that it that it that entails.
00:41:24
Speaker
um I also think that there are questions about what 1832 actually does in terms of its practical ah operations. And then I think a more general um question about some of the moral aspects of it.
00:41:37
Speaker
So I have three recommendations particularly. One would be an old book, but many of the best books on elections are quite old. Michael Brock, The Great Reform Act. um For the actual operation of the Reform Act in terms of what happens in elections, by far the best is um Philip Salmon's um electoral reform at work, which really gets into the nitty gritty.
00:41:58
Speaker
And then for, I suppose, a more dramatic account, which also includes some of the much more moral questions, Perilous Question ah by Antonia Fraser also, I think, helps recreate some of the real drama and some of the zeitgeist, which is critical, I think, to understanding the 1830s, because it's not just what happened on paper.
00:42:16
Speaker
It was also, I think, a revolution in people's hearts and minds as well. And so trying to find out what it really felt like is, I think, particularly important in this ah totemic general election.
00:42:29
Speaker
Luke Blacksell, thank you for joining us on the Observations podcast hosted by Democracy Volunteers, looking at the 1832 election. Thank you very much. My pleasure.
Podcast Presentation by Democracy Volunteers
00:42:51
Speaker
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00:43:04
Speaker
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