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Their disappointment was further deepened by the failure of the radical MPs in the reformed Parliament to support legislation designed to reduce the working hours of women and children in factories. In England, the introduction of the hated New Poor Law in 1834 with the workhouse as its focus also alienated the working class. In response to these developments, the first working-class movement was launched in Birmingham in 1837 to campaign through mass petitions and meetings for universal manhood suffrage. It became known as Chartism due to the fact that it had six major demands or points, including:
Universal manhood suffrage for males over the age of 21
Equal electoral districts to put voting in line with population
Payment of MPs so that working-class men could stand for parliament and not just those who could afford it
Secret ballots to stop intimidation by employers and landlords
These and a few other points seem the basis of any modern political democracy, but at the time the landowning class and the newly enfranchised middle class were alarmed by the radicalism of the Chartist demands. So, the monster petitions gathered by the Chartists in favour of reform in 1838 and 1842 were ignored by Parliament. In 1848, things got a bit nastier – hungry crowds in Glasgow called for ‘Bread or Revolution’, but they were never dangerous enough to overthrow the government.
The Chartist movement was a British movement, and as such it tells us something regarding how the Scots viewed themselves in the 19th century in terms of national identity. The Scots clearly had come to accept a dual identity: Scottish but at the same time British. The aim was to reform the Westminster Parliament rather than establish a separate one for Scotland. However, there were significant differences between Scottish and English Chartism.
One of the most distinctive products of Chartist activity north of the border was the setting up of Chartist churches, which were designed to combat the negativity of ‘false pastors’ in the Church of Scotland toward the movement. These churches performed baptisms, marriages, funerals and communion and held their own Easter, Christmas and New Year celebrations with tea drinking, concerts and dancing. There was no equivalent in England or Wales. They gave Chartism in Scotland a moral dimension missing in the latter countries.
The moralism of the movement also made it possible to adopt a more conciliatory attitude toward the middle classes than could be found in England. Chartists in Scotland were quite prepared to sign petitions in favour of the repeal of the Corn Laws. The Corn Laws were a levy on foreign imports of grain introduced in 1815 by an unreformed Parliament, which kept the price of bread artificially high; their abolition was a
cause celebre
for the middle-class supporters of free trade. When they were repealed in 1846, handloom weavers in Paisley staged a series of celebrations. The class hatred that was so apparent south of the border only really surfaced in Scotland in 1848 when young, unskilled workers and Irish in the ‘Bread or Revolution’ riots overwhelmed the respectable radical artisans.
The year 1848 proved a watershed for Chartism. After this, the movement collapsed, but the demand for the inclusion of the working class in the constitution did not die. It merely entered a new phase.
The Second Reform Act
The crises of the 1840s forced a number of members of the ruling class to admit that something had to be done to address the democratic deficit and to bring the respectable working class into the pale of the constitution. Lord John Russell, who in 1837 had said that electoral reform had come to an end, altered his views; by 1852, he introduced a private members’ bill to widen the franchise. This sparked two decades of constitutional wrangling in Parliament, which culminated in the Second Reform Act of 1867 to 1868, an event that added around 1 million new voters (mainly urban skilled workers in the UK) and increased the size of the electorate in Scotland to 230,606.
Trade unions had argued that the denial of the vote was wrong because it ‘disregarded the growing virtue and intelligence of the working class’. Their exclusion also allowed Parliament to be dominated by class interests. However, the claim this time was not for universal manhood suffrage as the Chartists demanded; instead, it was for household suffrage. This excluded slum dwellers and other undesirable elements of working-class life.
The emphasis on respectability and the moderateness of the demands of the organised working class won support within the two main parties. The surprising thing was that it was the Tories, who had opposed reform in 1832, who made the ru
The Second Reform Act had increased the size of the electorate immensely – one in three adult males could vote – but it still left a majority of men and all women without the vote. It also contained so many complicated clauses as to who did and did not have the right to vote that voter registration was placed in the hands of party agents. In certain cases, they were able to disqualify workingmen who had no party affiliations by bringing legal objections to their status as voters. Moreover, aristocratic power (read: Tory) was bolstered in rural areas by excluding agricultural labourers from the franchise.
There was also a Scottish dimension in the way that the Tories manipulated the details of the reform in their own interests. Many new constituencies were created in 1867 and 1868. On the basis of population, the number of Scottish seats should have been raised from 53 to 68, but the act only increased the number to 60. Knowing that most Scottish seats were permanently in the hands of the Liberals, the Tories wanted to limit the number of Scottish MPs. The devil is in the detail!
Where is it going to end? More reforms
It became increasingly obvious to many, especially those in the radical wing of the newly formed Liberal Party, that the enfranchisement of urban householders had provided the logical necessity for extending the same rights to rural householders. Radicals argued that there could be no principled objections raised toward the enfranchisement of rural inhabitants; indeed, many of them – through the redistribution of seats – had been placed in newly created boroughs and were already enjoying the vote. Another factor in their favour was the spread of literacy in rural areas, which overcame the old aristocratic objection that the labourers were too uneducated to be trusted with the vote.
The Tories were naturally suspicious and hostile to any attempts to tamper with the constitution. They were already alarmed at the spread of trade unionism among urban workers and were afraid of a similar process occurring in agriculture. When they were in trade unions, the agricultural labourers might exploit the franchise to win economic concessions from landowners. More importantly, they might try to undermine the legal power of the landed classes by demanding reform of local government, something that might lead to increased expenditure on poor relief, housing and education. The House of Lords tried to delay the bill, and that brought onto the streets of Glasgow 60,000 protesters cheered on by another 200,000 – the biggest demonstration in 19th-century Scotland.
A compromise known as the ‘Arlington Street Compact’ was reached, which allayed Tory fears and overcame the opposition of the House of Lords. The Third Reform Act of 1884 gave votes for the first time to lodgers and householders in the shire counties who had occupied houses or rooms for 12 months prior to registration. This increased the numbers of those eligible to vote from 2.5 million to 5million in the UK. In Scotland, the size of the electorate doubled and, through the redistribution of seats, Glasgow had seven MPs, Edinburgh had four and Lanarkshire had six.
Was it now possible to talk of a political democracy? Well, no. Here’s why:
Forty per cent of adult males were not registered to vote.
Domestic servants, soldiers, ‘lunatics’, peers, those in receipt of poor relief, prisoners and
all women
were excluded completely from the franchise.
The exclusion of all women was perhaps the greatest injustice in the electoral system, but they did not take it lying down.
Women on the march
Like the Chartists before them, the women’s suffrage movement was a British movement, but there were distinctively Scottish aspects regarding tactics used to pressure the government into granting women the vote.
The women’s movement came into being following the amendment of John Stuart Mill to the Second Reform Act to include the enfranchisement of women. But the immediate question that mobilised women was not the franchise but education, particularly higher education. Women were barred from the universities, which were considered male institutions. This view was challenged by Sophia Jex Blake in the late 1860s. She and other women attempted to matriculate in the medical faculty of Edinburgh University. This led to riots, opposition and intimidation by male students and staff, but eventually Parliament passed an act opening the doors to women in 1892 (although they were still ba
The campaign for equal access to higher education radicalised women, and the focus switched from education to the suffrage question. There were women’s suffrage societies in Edinburgh and Glasgow as well as in England. In 1897, they merged to form the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) under the leadership of Millicent Fawcett, wife of the Liberal MP Henry Fawcett, and the Scottish aristocrat Lady Frances Balfour, one of the daughters of the duke of Argyll. The NUWSS believed in constitutional methods of protest, such as meetings, petitions and marches.
In 1903, another society, the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) was set up under the leadership of Emmeline Pankhurst, wife of barrister Richard Pankhurst, and her daughters. They were committed to unconstitutional methods of protest such as attacks on property and hunger strikes.
Members of the NUWSS became known as the
Suffragists,
and members of the WPSU became known as the
Suffragettes.
On the whole, Scottish societies favoured constitutional means of protest. Balfour argued that acts of terrorism only hardened the position of the government against granting women the vote and showed that law breakers could never become law makers. In this, she was joined by other leading suffragists such as the Scottish doctor Elsie Inglis. The Scottish movement did not enjoy the same level of support from working-class women that the movement in England did among female textile workers in Lancashire. It was more middle class in profile and more constitutional. They also resented the high-handed, autocratic leadership of Emmeline Pankhurst.