Wednesday 17 January 2018

"... because they didn't teach us about it at school." is the short answer to that.

From The Daily Telegraph, April 2015:

Why has everyone forgotten about male suffrage?

... Before 1918, the vote was restricted not simply by sex but also by property qualifications. Roughly 60pc of adult men were then entitled to vote. At the 1910 general election, 7,709,981 men were registered to vote. By the time of the 1918 general election there were 12,913,166 registered male electors in the United Kingdom.

The 1918 Act is, rightly, most famous for having brought more than eight million women into the electorate; but, for the first time, it also enfranchised more than five million men over the age of 21 without regard to property or class.


I knew that the number of men allowed to vote crept up gradually over the centuries, as the "property owning" condition became less and less onerous, but I didn't realise that universal (male) suffrage was as recent as that.

Which makes the outcomes of the 1906 election and the second 1910 election, when the Liberal Party won on a platform of Land Value Tax, all the more surprising.

11 comments:

Lola said...

Most towns have a 'Freehold Road' in them. This was a device used to enfranchise non-property owners. They were called '40 Shilling Freeholds'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forty-shilling_freeholders
https://www.ibs.co.uk/about-us/our-heritage

Mark Wadsworth said...

L, ta, yes, I am sure there were loads of scams going on, my point was that universal suffrage - even for men - was as recent as 100 years ago.

Will TPTB do anything to commemorate this I wonder?

Lola said...

MW '40 Shilling Freeholds' weren't a scam. They were a device. A classic market reaction to get round a stupid rule.

Graeme said...

Yes and you have to dig a bit to find out that votes for more than a minority of adult women took another 10 years. Hence the appeal of "1066 and all that ", or DBCRs text "it's all Thatcher's fault"

DBC Reed said...

@ G.
I do not say that all dimwit mistakes of economic policy are Thatcher's. There is a complex period starting in 1971 with the closing of the Gold Window by the US where oil price rises fucked up the remnants of the Bretton Woods agreement and a genuibe loony, Sir Keith Joseph, convinced the Conservative party that the inflation was caused by government spending. He had to retire from the leadership contest because of the infamous Edgbaston speech which suggested eugenic controls to curb spending on the lower orders.Thatcher , a patsy, took over from him.I put all of this in a Guardian letter "A conspiracy against labour is nothing new" in Aug last year.

Lola said...

DBCR Here we go again. Bretton Woods was fake gold standard doomed to fail. It was not oil prices that did for it, but US currency and credit expansion to finance their 'police action in' Vietnam. The oil price hikes had other roots and were indeed responsible for an economic shock, which the market dealt with.
Sir Keith Joseph was not a 'loony'. He was a clever man, with whom you disagree. He was also a 'social market economy' type.
Government spending in itself does not 'cause inflation', and that's not what he said. He said that the way government spending was financed would cause inflation. He was a monetarist.
The Egbaston speech certainly upset people, you can read it here:
https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/101830
but is the sentiment of the passage you quote that different from the eugenic policies proposed by Sidney Webb? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Webb,_1st_Baron_Passfield

Mark Wadsworth said...

L, true.

G, I take it you are being ironic?

DBC, see what L says.

DBC Reed said...

@MW
I tried to agree with L on the basic issue, but my posts doing so have not appeared.In many years of lefty argument on the Net, Lola is the only controversialist in my experience to point to the elephant in the room: the Nixon shock caused by American overspending on the Vietnam war.Lola appears to agree that the consequent international inflation of oil prices was the starting point of the British inflation of the 70's.
However he denies that Keith Joseph ever tried to shift the blame onto the UK government in such speeches as that in Preston (on net) during his leadership bid.This speech is preserved/ treasured by the Margaret Thatcher Foundation and has 'Inflation is caused by Governments' plastered all over it.
As to the infamous Edgbaston speech (on net) around the same time it was the Tory Party that evidently considered this loony (not just lefties) and Tory grandees terminated his run on the leadership with extreme prejudice. (I defy anybody to read this without doubts about Keith Josephs's fitness for office). Of course the stinging rebuff to Joseph led Thatcher to take up the reins and fix the sexually promiscuous lower orders for good by selling off I million council houses and allowing house prices to become unaffordable to the poor.
I admit to personal animus against Joseph and Thatcher. A close following of the evidential trail of cover ups and collusion that runs through Don Hale , Barbara Castle , Anthony Gilberthorpe ,Geoffrey Dickens, Keith Joseph suggests only the worst.

Mark Wadsworth said...

DBC, you say that your comments do not appear.

This is because I set it up so that comments on posts which are more than a few days old do not appear immediately, I have to review them for spam and then tick a box.

This is simply because most spam, being posted at random tends to turn up on old posts, and most real comments tend to be on the newer ones.

But rest assured, I tick the box for all real comments including yours as soon as the notification pops up in my email inbox.

This blog does not do censorship.

Mark Wadsworth said...

DBC, my question to you - my article was about how surprisingly recent universal male sufffrage was in this country - only ten years older than female suffrage, which we hear about all the time.

How on earth you get from that topic to slagging off Keith Joseph and Mrs M Thatcher, who weren't even born at the time, is a mystery to me.

DBC Reed said...

I was responding to Graeme's tag on the previous posting which says "Or DBCR's text 'it's all Thatcher's fault'".As I have explained at quite excessive length,a lot of the follies attributed to Thatcher emanate from Keith Joseph.