Reform Act of 1832

Reform Act of 1832

1-Reform Act of 1832 was an Act of British Parliament ,that introduced wide-ranging changes to the electoral system of England and Wales. According to its preamble, the act was designed to "take effectual Measures for correcting divers Abuses that have long prevailed in the Choice of Members to serve in the Commons House of Parliament."

2-Calls for reform had been mooted long before 1832, but perennially without success. The Act which finally succeeded was proposed by the Whigs led by the Prime Minister Lord Grey. It met with significant opposition from the Pittite factions in Parliament that had governed the country for so long .

3-Nevertheless, as a result of public pressure, the bill was eventually passed. The Act granted seats in the House of Commons to large cities that had sprung up during the Industrial Revolution, and took away seats from the "rotten boroughs"—those with very small populations.

4-The Act also increased the number of individuals entitled to vote, increasing the size of the electorate from about 400,000 to 650,000, and allowing a total of one out of six adult males to vote, in a population of some 14 million.

5-The full title is An Act to amend the representation of the people in England and Wales. Its formal short title and citation is the Representation of the People Act 1832 .

6-The Act only applied in England and Wales; separate reform bills were passed in the same year for Scotland and Ireland.

7-Other reform measures were passed later during the 19th century; as a result, the Reform Act 1832 is sometimes called the First, or Great Reform Act.

Provision of the Act of 1832

1-The Reform Act's chief objective was the reduction of the number of nomination boroughs. Two hundred and three boroughs existed in England before the Act.Tthe Act disfranchised 143 borough seats in England .In their place the Act created 135 new seats for England and Wales. Twenty-six English counties were divided into two divisions with each division being represented by two members. Eight English counties and three Welsh counties each received an additional representative and Yorkshire, which was represented by four MPs before the Act was given an extra two MPs .Twenty-two large towns were given the privilege of electing two representatives, and another twenty-one towns were given the privilege of electing a single representative. Thus the Act's enfranchising clauses created 65 new county seats and 65 new borough seats in England and Wales with the total number of members representing England falling by seventeen and the number representing Wales rising by four. The boundaries of the new divisions and parliamentary boroughs were defined in a separate Act, the Parliamentary Boundaries Act 1832.

2-The Act also extended the franchise. In county constituencies in addition to forty shilling freeholders franchise rights were extended to owners of land in copyhold worth £10 and holders of long-term leases on land worth £10 and holders of medium-term leases on land worth £50 and to tenants-at-willpaying an annual rent of £50.

In borough constituencies all male householders living in properties worth at least ten pounds a year were given the right to vote - a measure which introduced to all boroughs a standardized form of franchise for the first time. Existing borough electors retained a lifetime right to vote, however they qualified, provided they were resident in the boroughs in which they were electors. In those boroughs which had freemen electors voting rights were to be enjoyed by future freemen as well provided their freeman-ship was acquired through birth or apprenticeship and they too were resident.

3-The Act also introduced a system of voter registration, to be administered by the overseers of the poor in every parish and township. It instituted a system of special courts to review disputes relating to voter qualifications. It also authorized the use of multiple polling places within the same constituency, and limited the duration of polling to two days.

EFFECT OF THE ACT

1-The British political landscape was modernized and ignited by the passage of the 1832 Reform Act. Local Conservative Associations began to educate local citizens about the political platform of the party and advocated participation in the annual voter registration mandated by the 1832 Reform Act. Press coverage of national politics in the local press was also accompanied by in depth reports of the political and social events of provincial Conservative societies in the national press. Grassroots Conservatives, ergo saw themselves as part of a national political movement during the 1830s.

2-The scale of the unreformed electorate is difficult to accurately estimate. Voter registration was lacking, and many boroughs were rarely contested in elections. It is estimated that before the passage of the 1832 Reform Act, only 400,000 were entitled to vote in 1831, and that after passage, 650,000 Englishmen were enfranchised, ergo the Reform Act enlarged the electorate by more than 60%.The vast majority of the population remained voteless which included the whole of the female population—indeed by the wording of the Act specifying that only "male persons" were to enjoy the franchise rights it introduced, the Act thereby introduced the first statutory bar to women voting.

3-Most of the pocket boroughs abolished by the Reform Act belonged to the Tory Party. These losses were somewhat offset by extending the right to vote to tenants-at-will paying an annual rent of £50. This clause, proposed by the Tory Marquess of Chandos, was adopted in the House of Commons despite opposition from the Government. The tenants-at-will enfranchised by the Chandos clause typically voted in accordance with the wishes of their landlords, who in turn normally supported the Tory party. This concession, together with the Whig Party's internal divisions and the difficulties faced by the nation's economy, allowed the Tories under Sir Robert Peel to make gains in the elections of 1835 and 1837, and to retake the House of Commons in 1841

Assessment

Several historians credit the Reform Act 1832 with launching the rise of modern democracy in Britain. G. M. Trevelyan hails 1832 as the watershed moment at which "'the sovereignty of the people' had been established in fact, if not in law”.Other historians have taken a far less laudatory view, arguing that genuine democracy began to arise only with the Second Reform Act in 1867, or perhaps even later.  Evans concludes the Reform Act marked the true beginning of the development of a recognizably modern political system.