Modern Britain, 1750 to the Present

Introduction

In 1937 a new organization called Mass Observation set out to study the responses of ‘the mass’ to the coronation of King Edward VIII. They believed that scientifically observing the behaviour of the mass would facilitate a better understanding of the political culture that had developed in Britain since the Great War. As we saw in Chapter 6, the foundations of a liberal system of political representation had been laid by 1885, but it was not until 1918 and 1928 that all men and women were able to vote. Just as politics was finally made democratic, culture was increasingly experienced in new mass forms. If rational recreation had helped create an understanding of the individual as the subject of politics in the Victorian era, so mass culture became seen as synonymous with the nature of democratic politics. Increasingly commercialized, the forms of mass culture deepened long-held fears of the demos as an unthinking, easily manipulated and indistinguishable entity. As soon as Britain became a democracy, many across the political spectrum argued that its mass political culture was degraded and set about trying to create a better-informed and more critical citizenry. Hence the formation of Mass Observation. The task of this chapter is to show how the liberal political culture that in the nineteenth century had afforded the vote to very few propertied men as individuals was transformed into a mass democracy.

The work of many hands, this transformation was nested into other historical processes. As the electorate steadily increased before the Great War, political parties assiduously sought to build mass memberships and craft distinct cultures of sociability that reflected their political programmes. Just as the Great Depression helped galvanize colonial nationalist movements in Ireland and India, so in Britain it catalysed the mobilization of a labour politics. Although women were involved in the political parties and trade unions of the labour movement, they were, as the gathering momentum of the women's suffrage campaigns made manifest, still denied the right to vote. These political movements, like colonial nationalism, exposed the ways in which the liberal political system was fatally compromised by its own contradictions. Imbricated in the institutional and social forms of the ancien regime it had sought to displace, it had failed to deliver on its promises.