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Why People Need to Reclaim Politics
A little more than a century ago, most people could not vote. Until 1918 and the Representation of the People Act, you could only vote if you owned property and were a man over the age of twenty-one. As compensation for the horrors of World War One, this was changed in 1918 to all men over the age of twenty-one and women over the age of thirty (this was then equalised in 1928). This means that a vast majority of working people have only been voting for one century. One hundred years.
We are all aware of the sufferage movement and its fight to win women the vote. What people are not so aware of, is that if you were working class you were much less likely to have to vote even if born male. If you didn’t own property you had no say in local or national government.
A survey conducted in 1780 found that just 3% of the eight-million-strong population could vote. This hadn’t changed much by 1866 where only 1.43 million out of thirty million could vote. If you weren’t male, over twenty-one and in possession of property you simply could not vote. Also, the votes at the time were ‘open’ which led to coercion and bribery. In 1867 some working class men were given the vote (the “most skilled” in the towns). To pass this, Conservative leader Benjamin Disraeli said working…
