Download The Reform Act of 1918 – the advent of democracy and more Study notes History in PDF only on Docsity!
The Reform Act of 1918 – the advent
of democracy
Stuart Ball
University of Leicester
The Representation of the People Act of 1918 (often referred to as the ‘1918 Reform Act’ or, less frequently, the ‘Fourth Reform Act’^1 ) was a landmark in modern British history and the most substantial and significant change in the composition of the political nation ever to take place.^2 The increase in the electorate was far larger than that of any previous measure, both numerically and proportionately, and the 1918 Reform Act marked a fundamental change in the principles upon which the franchise was based, one element of which was the admission of women to the parliamentary suffrage for the first time.^3 In essence, the vote became a matter of adult citizenship, although at first this was restricted for women by an age limit of 30 and a basic property qualification, until a further measure in 1928 equalised the terms for both genders as simple residence and legal adulthood (which in this period was 21 years of age). The extent of the change can be measured by the proportion of the adult population registered as electors: this was 29.4% in 1910, 79.5% in 1919, 90.9% in 1929, and 98.6% in 1939 (the latter increase being due to more thorough registration, not to any further change in the electoral system).^4 The greater scale of the 1918 Reform Act than any previous measure is shown in the following table:
Table 1: Increases in the United Kingdom Electorate 1831-1929^5 The university franchise is not included. The figures up to 1918 include the whole of Ireland, but those for 1924 and 1929 only include Northern Ireland. In December 1910 the electorate in Ireland was 683,767 and in 1918 it was 1,926,274; for comparison, the electorate of Northern Ireland in 1924 was 610,064. The increase in 1885 is affected by the large addition in Ireland, where the number of voters more than trebled from 224,018 in 1883 to 737,965 in 1885, a rise of 329.4%. The 1885 increase in England, Scotland and Wales was 2,008,602 (68.6%).
Reform Electorate before Electorate after Increase Act ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ year number year number number % 1832 1831 515,930 1832 806,050 290,120 56. 1867 1866 1,366,818 1868 2,462,529 1,095,711 80. 1884 1883 3,152,912 1885 5,675,461 2,522,549 80. 1918 1910 7,663,415 1918 21,324,231 13,660,816 178. (^1928) ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 1924 21,648,609 1929 28,735,491 7,086,882 32.
The 1918 Reform Act swept away the accumulated variety of property-based qualifications which had previously made electoral registration a complex legal area, and in the process repealed fifty statutes and amended fifty-seven others.^6 The act introduced an almost-universal male franchise from the legal age of adulthood on a simple residential basis.^7 There was no required minimum value of the residence occupied, no necessity to be a ratepayer (the local government tax), and no longer was there an exclusion of those who had been in receipt of poor relief.^8 The qualifying period was reduced from twelve months to six, and qualifying was made easier as it was no longer to be affected by changes of residence that were within the same borough or county, or from an adjoining borough or county. The effect of introducing adult male suffrage was far from uniform across the nation, as the proportion of men enfranchised under the previous system varied greatly between different types of constituency. Although their economic nature was the fundamental factor, the differing degrees of enfranchisement were not a direct extrapolation from their class composition, as it was the type of abode even more than its value that determined the ease or difficulty of obtaining the vote. It did not require much property to qualify under the pre-1918 system, but it did require particular kinds and it also required some permanence of abode. It was comparatively easy for the householder – however humble – to get on the register, and generally difficult for the lodger, about whom there were complicated rules and past judgements in case law concerning exclusive access (the possession of a latch-key, etc.), the relative value of furnished and unfurnished rooms, and so on.^9 A crucial factor was the way in which the registration system operated and the effect of the lengthy qualifying period
aged 19 or over,^14 whilst those who had registered as conscientious objectors were disfranchised for the duration of the war and the following five years, unless they had undertaken war service (such as in the army medical corps or on minesweepers) or other ‘work of national importance’ and had obtained a certificate confirming this from the central tribunal established under the Military Service Act of 1916.^15 The ban on conscientious objectors had not been part of the proposals for reform of the Speaker’s Conference in January 1917, and resulted from an amendment moved by the Conservative party chairman, Sir George Younger, in November 1917, but it reflected parliamentary and public attitudes at the time. The 1918 Reform Act broke new ground in introducing votes for women. This was on a substantial scale, but with limitations: women had to be over the age of 30, and – a fact which is often forgotten – there was also a property requirement. As a contemporary guide to the act by a legal expert noted, ‘there is a material difference, besides that of age, between the qualifications which confer the parliamentary franchise ... on a woman and those which confer it on a man.’^16 A woman had to qualify personally for the local government franchise or be married to a man who did so, either as the occupant of a ‘dwelling-house’ (for which there was no minimum value or rent), or as the occupier of land or premises with an annual rental value of at least five pounds.^17 The local government qualification in the 1918 Reform Act remained very similar to the previous parliamentary franchise, and so was more restricted than the simple ‘residing’ which was now all that was necessary for the male parliamentary vote. For both men and women, the local government requirement was to be ‘occupying as owner or tenant’, and whilst this covered many forms of accommodation, lodgers in furnished rooms were specifically excluded.^18 The restrictions to the female parliamentary franchise in the 1918 Reform Act – particularly the age restriction – had been put in place to meet concerns that women, who were slightly more than half of the population, would predominate in the new electorate, which together with adult male suffrage was too much of a leap in the dark. The members of the Speaker’s Conference had had no precise data upon which to base their eventual compromise proposals, which was partly why their
report left it for parliament to decide between the ages of 30 and 35.^19 The former was adopted, and it was estimated after the act was passed that it would enfranchise around six million women.^20 This proved to be a significant under-estimate, and the new registers for the 1918 general election included nearly 8.5 million women, which was more than the total male electorate of 7.7 million at the previous general election in December 1910. However, the form of the franchise excluded around one-third of adult women, of whom approximately one-third were aged over 30 but did not meet the property qualification – particularly domestic servants living in their employer’s property,^21 lodgers in furnished rooms and hostels, and those living with relatives other than a husband (usually parents or grandparents), where their relative was the owner or tenant and thus the local government elector.
Table 2: The Male and Female Electorate 1910-29^22
Election Male electorate Female electorate Total ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________^ Number^ %^ Number^ % 1910 Dec. 7,709,981 100.0 - - 7,709, 1918 12,913,166 60.4 8,479,156 39.6 21,392, (^1929) ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 13,657,434 47.3 15,193,925 52.7 28,851,
Plural voting was abolished for residential properties – a person owning or renting several abodes might be registered in several constituencies, but could now only cast a residential vote in one of them^23 – but it remained in two other forms. The first of these was the business franchise, under which the owner or occupier of business premises which had an annual rental value of at least ten pounds, in another constituency from the one where they were a residential voter, was entitled to cast a vote in that constituency. Furthermore, each of the partners in the business qualified for a vote if the value of the premises when divided gave each of them a share worth ten pounds or more; however, the business franchise did not apply to either the directors or the shareholders of limited companies. One significant change introduced when the bill was passing through parliament was that constituencies which were divisions of the same city or town would be treated as entirely separate for the purposes of
Commons together with the other constituencies in the area that became the Irish Free State. The 1918 Reform Act also expanded the qualification for the university franchise. Before 1918, voting in the Cambridge, Oxford and Trinity College Dublin constituencies required the possession of an MA degree – which could be obtained simply by paying around £25 to upgrade the bachelor’s degree, but many did not choose or afford to do this.^27 It now became the case in all of the university seats that all graduates were entitled to vote; in addition, in the case of Cambridge and Oxford, which allowed women to attend as students but did not confer degrees upon them, women were qualified to vote if they had fulfilled the university’s condition of residence and passed the final examinations.^28 However, the Act’s age restrictions still applied, and so women had to be over the age of thirty to exercise the university franchise. The voters in the university constituencies were scattered throughout the British isles and empire.^29 The elections were therefore conducted by postal ballot, and the university seats with more than one MP were the only constituencies in which the 1918 Reform Act introduced proportional representation, using the single transferable vote system.^30 However, the unit size of these three double-member and one triple-member constituencies was too small for the system to be effective, especially as in most cases the Conservative majority amongst the voters was so large that it swamped any Liberal or Labour minority. What did occur was the election of a few non-party independents, but that was due more to the cultural characteristics of the university electorate than the voting system. Retaining the university representation had been a recommendation of the Speaker’s Conference, and both the principle and its logical expansion were uncontroversial during the passage of the bill. However, both university representation and the business franchise were abolished by the post- Labour government in the Representation of the People Act of 1948.
Table 3: The Representation of the University Seats 1918-35^31 This table analyses the twelve university seats in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland; it does notinclude the three southern Irish university seats, which ceased to exist in 1921.
Party ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 1918 1922 1923 1924 1929 1931 1935 Conservative Liberal 93 84 92 83 82 82 72 Independent ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ - - 1 1 2 2 3
The 1918 Reform Act placed one further limitation on plural voting, that no matter in how many ways or places a person might be qualified to register, in an election they could cast no more than two votes.^32 Thus, a person having a residential vote in one constituency, a business premises vote in another, and – being a graduate – a vote in one of the university seats, could only exercise two of those franchises. The Speaker’s Conference unanimously proposed the introduction of proportional representation in the boroughs which were large enough to have three or more MPs; these were to be arranged in constituencies returning between three and five members, in which each elector would have a single transferable vote.^33 More contentiously, the conference passed by a majority the recommendation that in single-member seats when more than two candidates were nominated, the alternative vote system should be used.^34 However, when the conference report was eventually debated in the house of commons on 28 March 1916, the prime minister, David Lloyd George, undermined these proposals by indicating his lack of enthusiasm for proportional representation; it was not ‘in quite the same category’ as the other recommendations, and indeed ‘not an essential part of the scheme’.^35 This opened the door to the report’s recommendations being treated as a list which could be adopted or amended selectively, rather than an indivisible whole, and it overtly encouraged the discarding of proportional representation – about which the views of MPs were certainly divided. The majority of Conservative MPs were opposed to both forms of proportional representation, but there was support amongst Conservative peers for the single transferable vote as the means of
vote. There was then a final flurry, with the house of lords in turn reversing this on 4 February, and on the following day the lower house removing the single transferable vote again by 238 to 141, and restoring the alternative vote by the narrowest of margins (195 to 194), although only for borough constituencies. On 6 February, the Lords then removed the alternative vote for a third time and the Commons again rejected their amendments, after which a compromise was quickly agreed.^39 Liberal and Labour MPs feared losing the bill entirely, and did not wish to risk the attainment of their pre-war objectives of adult male suffrage and the restriction of plural voting by insisting on the alternative vote, whilst the peers did not wish to press their amendments to the point of provoking a constitutional crisis. The result was that the alternative vote was dropped from the bill entirely, as was the single transferable vote for the territorial constituencies, and the provision was inserted that a royal commission be appointed to draw up a scheme for the application of proportional representation in 100 seats.^40 The Representation of the People Act then completed its passage, and received the royal assent on 6 February 1918. Chaired by Speaker Lowther, the royal commission worked swiftly and on 13 April 1918 published its plan, under which the larger towns and cities would be formed into 24 constituencies of between three and seven members each, returning a total of 99 MPs. However, given the extension of the franchise, these multi-member seats would have very large electorates; few of the MPs sitting for one of the existing smaller divisions liked the prospect of being submerged in the larger unit. The scheme was rejected by the House of Commons on 13 May by 166 to 110, and thus apart from its application in the four university constituencies which returned two or three MPs, proportional representation was cast into limbo. By default, the 1918 Reform Act retained the first-past-the-post system for all of the territorial constituencies, which with the exception of twelve surviving double- member boroughs (see below), were all to be individual single-member seats. The fewer and more straightforward franchise qualifications in the 1918 Reform Act were paralleled by the introduction of a simpler and less partisan system of registration. Since 1832, the register had been compiled by the Poor Law overseers from the rate-books and any other claims that
were lodged, but now the preparation of the registers was made the responsibility of local government officials, who were required to make ‘a house to house or other sufficient inquiry’.^41 This did away with the previous system in which party agents could put the cases of some voters to be registered, and make objections to the claims of others, in the annual Revision Court before a barrister appointed to oversee this process; in the smaller electorates before 1914, adding a couple of hundred of your supporters and securing the removal of a similar number of your opponents could be decisive.^42 As part of this change, the costs of the Returning Officers were to be paid by central government; previously each candidate had paid an equal share of the costs in their constituency (which in December 1910 had averaged £280), in addition to their election expenses, but now they were relieved of this charge. The 1918 Reform Act also introduced two electoral registers in each year, instead of the previous one; the ‘spring’ register was to come into effect on 15 April for six months, and the ‘autumn’ register on 15 October for the next six months. However, in 1926, with the government under pressure to economise, this costly and time-consuming procedure was abandoned and a single annual register was reverted to, coming into force on 15 October; at the same time, the residential qualifying period was reduced to three months.^43 Another new feature in the 1918 Reform Act was a postal ballot for members of the armed forces, who were placed on a list of ‘absent voters’ in the constituency where they would otherwise have qualified as resident, with their votes to be included in the count there; it was under this provision that servicemen voted in the general election of December 1918, and again in 1945.^44 The act also allowed voting by proxy if they were serving in a location too remote for postal ballots to be returned in time, and gave discretion to registration officers to allow proxies for merchant seamen, harbour pilots and fishermen if they could show that they were likely to be at sea on polling day.^45 Following the demobilisation of 1919-20, during the inter-war period the number of absent voters was relatively small: in 1924, the first election for which there is a national total, it was 184,201, which was 0.84% of the whole electorate.^46 However, this was an innovation from which much wider civilian postal balloting was to develop after 1948.
to its normal state afterwards, and for heating, lighting and cleaning (and for any damage incurred).^54 However, these costs were very small and, as they did not include any element for the use of the room as such, they were considerably less than hiring a meeting place commercially. Of equal significance, in the rural constituencies they provided reasonably accessible venues amongst the scattered villages. This provision of the act was helpful to all candidates in keeping their expenses down, especially in the county divisions; it may have marginally been most helpful to Labour candidates in these seats, because their party was weakest in the agricultural areas and there was less trade union sponsorship. The second provision was that each duly nominated candidate was entitled to one free postal delivery to every registered elector in the constituency, ‘containing matter relating to the election only, and not exceeding two ounces in weight’.^55 This was almost always used by candidates for their election address, which was a printed leaflet containing their personal message and policy statement. However, whilst the Royal Mail delivered this without charge, it had to be prepared by the candidates and their supporters, at their own expense. This was not just a matter of printing sufficient thousands of copies of the election address, but also of putting these into envelopes addressed to each voter – the latter was not part of the postal service’s responsibility. One consequence of this was that local constituency associations would often keep in stock a sufficient supply of envelopes, ready to be addressed by the voluntary members when a general election was announced, with the aim of being the first to get their candidate’s address into the hands of the voters. Finally, a significant change in the conduct of elections was the provision that polling should take place everywhere on the same day.^56 This was quite different from the practice which had been followed from the earliest times, in which different districts selected their own day. In the general elections from 1885 to 1910, the polling in different constituencies had been spread over a period of between 15 and 17 days, which had the effect that the results in the early seats could affect opinion in those that voted later, such as when the Conservative Party leader, Arthur Balfour, lost his seat in
1906.^57 The previous system had also made it easier to use plural votes, but as these were now being limited to just one additional vote, the change to a uniform polling day made little extra difference in
this respect. The 1918 Reform Act’s new provision standardised the length of campaigns, as all seats now had the same interval between the announcement of the election and the polling day. This marked a final stage in the evolution of elections from being a collection of local contests, with local issues and the standing of local candidates playing an important and even determining role, into a more uniform national experience in which the programmes, propaganda and leaders of the parties at the national level were the crucial factors, and candidates were mostly voted for according to their party label. As had been the case with the previous Reform Acts, the 1918 act included a redistribution of constituencies and redrawing of their boundaries. The same procedure was adopted, of appointing three boundary commissions (one for England and Wales, one for Scotland, and one for Ireland) to draw up detailed proposals in accordance with the instructions passed by parliament; the innovation in 1918 was that all three commissions were chaired by the Speaker. In 1885 the Third Reform Act had made the most radical and extensive changes in the political map by introducing large numbers of single-member constituencies, particularly through partioning the cities into many smaller seats. The Speaker’s Conference recommended ‘the principle that each vote recorded shall, as far as possible, command an equal share of representation in the House of Commons’,^58 and the reform bill based upon its proposals sought to achieve this by having constituencies based upon a standard population size. The initial instructions to the commissioners in May 1917 specified that the number of MPs for each county or parliamentary borough would be one for every 70,000 population, plus an additional member if the remaining population was above 50,000; a county or borough with a population of between 50,000 and 70,000 would retain one MP, whilst those with less than 50,000 ‘shall cease to have separate representation’. However, the strict application of these mathematical criteria was made more difficult by two of the other instructions; first, that the total number of MPs ‘shall remain substantially as at present’, and second, that the boundaries of constituencies should, ‘as far as practicable’, coincide with the local government boundaries.^59
even though a number of ancient boroughs (including five county towns^63 ) lost their status and were merged into their counties. The largest additions were in the biggest cities: Glasgow expanded from seven to 15 seats, Birmingham from seven to 12, and Manchester from six to 10. As Table 4 shows, whilst the Conservative Party was able to maintain its share of wins in the large cities after 1918, the Liberals’ share slumped to one-third of the pre-war level; the beneficiary of this was the Labour Party, whose overall proportion of wins rose to match the previous Liberal share.
Table 4: The Effects of Constituency Redistribution in the Cities 1895-1929^64 This table analyses the cities of mainland Britain which after 1918 returned five or more MPs, and compares party performances in the five general elections before and five general elections after the 1918 Reform Act. In 1895-1910, Liberal Unionists are counted as Conservatives, and in 1918 Coalition Liberals are counted as Liberals. Independents and minor parties are not included; generally these were only elected occasionally, but it should be noted that throughout the period 1895-1929 one of the seats in Liverpool returned an Irish Nationalist MP.
| 1895-1910 | 1918- City | no. of Cons. wins Liberal wins Labour wins | no. of Cons. wins Liberal wins Labour wins ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________^ |^ seats^ no.^ %^ no.^ %^ no.^ %^ |^ seats^ no.^ %^ no.^ %^ no.^ % | | Glasgow | 7 18 51 13 37 3 9 | 15 31 41 4 5 38 51 Birmingham ||^7 35 100 0 0 0 0 || 12 52 87 0 0 7 12 | | Liverpool | 9 37 82 3 7 0 0 | 11 41 75 2 4 7 13 | | Manchester | | 6 11 37 13 43 6 20 || 10 25 50 7 14 18 36 Sheffield | 5 16 64 7 28 2 8 | 7 16 46 5 14 14 40 | | Leeds | 5 5 20 17 68 3 12 | 6 12 40 5 17 13 43 | | Bristol | | 4 7 35 13 65 0 0 || 5 9 36 9 36 7 28 Edinburgh | 4 7 35 13 65 0 0 | 5 11 44 6 24 8 32 ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________^ |^ | | | TOTAL | 47 136 58 79 34 14 6 | 71 197 55 38 11 112 32 ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________^ |^ |
1928,^70 is often regarded as simply a delayed instalment of the 1918 Act, completing its work by removing its largest anomaly. It led to the second-largest admission of new voters, and there were 7. million more electors on the registers for the May 1929 general election than there had been four and a half years previously in the election of October 1924. However, not all of this increase was previously disqualified female voters, as during these several years the general growth of population had added more men aged over 21 and women over 30 who met the existing criteria. David Butler has calculated that the increase in the number of women registered from 1928 to 1929 was 5,299,301, which was 18.4% of the electorate at the general election in May 1929 (for which a special register came into force on 1 May).^71 Of those who were newly qualified by the 1928 act, about one-third were aged over 30 but had been excluded by the property restrictions, whilst those aged between 21 and 30 were certainly not mostly the frivolous and hedonistic ‘flappers’ characterised by the opponents of the measure.^72 Many of them were working women, in factories, shops and offices (the 1921 census found that 62.2% of women aged 20-24 were working outside the home), whilst a high proportion of those over 25 were married.^73 The only change in the franchise that has occurred since 1928 was not primarily an electoral reform, but rather the necessary consequence of the change in the legal definition of adulthood when this was reduced from 21 to 18 in 1969. The consequent increase in the electorate from 1969 to 1970 was 2,630,134; at 7.1%, this was proportionately by far the smallest of any franchise extension.^74 The next substantial redistribution of constituencies after 1918 took place in 1948,^75 and in 1949 a consolidating act established a procedure of recurring periodic reviews. The first of these resulted in only minor changes in 1958 and the second, which reported in 1969 but was delayed by the Labour government and not implemented until 1970, was more extensive;^76 in more recent decades, the boundary commissioners have engaged upon a more frequent cycle of revision to match the shifting pattern of population. Other than this, there have been only minor changes in the electoral machinery established in 1918, of which the most important has been the expansion of postal voting in recent decades, including allowing British citizens living overseas to cast a vote. When more radical change
was proposed in the referendum of 2011 on the introduction of proportional representation, it was rejected by the electorate, just as the house of commons had done during the passage of the 1918 Reform Act.
2 Despite its scale and lasting legacy, the 1918 Reform Act has attracted remarkably little attention from historians. Its main provisions were described (with some simplifications) in David Butler’s account of the contemporary electoral system, first published in 1953;^77 apart from this, specific analysis of the act as a whole is limited to a single monograph published in 1978 and one more recent article.^78 There is a vast literature on women’s suffrage up to 1914 and a growing body of work on women and politics in the inter-war period, but comparatively little – and still less recently – that directly focuses upon even this most famous aspect of the 1918 enfranchisement.^79 The 1918 Reform Act was followed by a period of unparalleled turbulence in the party system, this being the only occasion when a long-standing party of government declined to minor party status and was replaced by an alternative governing party. However, at first the impact of the changes introduced by the act was almost invisible in the historiography, which focused upon political issues and conflicts during the First World War and their consequences for the Liberal and Labour parties. The early and influential analysis of the decline of the Liberal Party by Trevor Wilson published in 1966 had no listing in its index for the 1918 Representation of the People Act (or even for broader terms such as ‘electoral reform’ or ‘franchise’), and curiously neither did Ross McKibbin’s pioneering examination of the development of the Labour Party between 1910 and 1924, although his introduction declared that it was founded ‘upon a proposition argued implicitly in the book: that the 1918 Representation of the People Act ... transformed the conditions under which Labour grew.’^80 Later on the same page, he made two linked assertions: ‘Much of this new electorate voted Labour in 1918, but had it been enfranchised it would probably have done so in 1914 as well.’ From this a considerable controversy developed over the following two decades, in particular following the fuller
