Modern Britain, 1750 to the Present

Introduction

After the Peterloo Massacre in 1819, few would have imagined that Britain, let alone some of its settler colonies, would have the system of representative politics they did in 1885. Although in Britain it would take until 1918 for all men to be able to vote, in Australia and New Zealand they had been doing so since late 1854 and 1879 respectively. Despite lagging behind its precocious colonies, representative politics in Britain were beginning to resemble what we would today call a democratic system. There were regular elections, votes were cast by secret ballot, the treating of voters by candidates and much else had been outlawed as corrupt; the geographical distribution and number of MPs had been made to better correspond to centres of population; political parties had developed national organizations to compete for votes and newspapers provided national coverage of politics. Much also remained radically different from what we consider the democratic forms of politics today. As at Peterloo, a good deal of political activity continued to happen outdoors, on the streets or in mass meetings. Speeches at those meetings were not amplified and could go on for hours. Meetings and campaigns were often unruly and violent affairs. Many continued to believe that those with the vote should use it to represent a broader community (like the family, or a trade) that included non-voters, rather than just their own individual opinions. Nonetheless, if any veterans of Peterloo had still been alive in 1885 they would have had cause to reflect upon the remarkable transformation of British politics.

Politicians in Britain, especially those who belong to the parties that sought to prevent most Britons getting to vote, still like to boast about the nation's history of democracy. When they do so, the expansion of the electorate by the Reform Acts of 1832, 1867and1884 occupy almost as mythical a place as the Magna Carta of 1215 or the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Britons, we are told, not only invented democracy but introduced it in such measured terms that they were able to avoid the revolutions that swept the continents of Europe and Latin America in the middle of the nineteenth century. Their parliamentary system was so perfected that Westminster became the mother of – and model for – all colonial Parliaments.