The Twentieth Century - Votes for women at last - 1900 to 1928

The Twentieth Century – Votes for women at last – 1900 to 1928

Democracy is a system in which elites compete in open elections for the right to rule and are then held under control by the threat that they may be thrown out in the next election.   Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 1942

The 20th century started off with a General Election.   The Liberals were utterly demoralised by their split over Irish Home Rule and failed to contest 163 Conservative and Liberal Unionist seats.   Only 22 of their own seats were uncontested.   Having tied their hands behind their back they did rather well in terms of the votes they obtained, but once again we can see the distortion in the results caused by the First Past the Post system of election.
The 1900 General Election had - for those days - a relatively low turnout of 74.6%.   The Conservatives and Liberal Unionists won 402 seats (60.1%) with 1,767,958 votes (50.3%).   The Liberals got 184 (27.5%) seats with 1,578.746 votes (44.9%).   The Liberals failed to win a majority of Scottish seats for the first time since 1832.
Most extraordinary was the result of the Irish Nationalists who got 82 seats (12.1%) with only 81,282 votes (2.3%) and the Labour Party for the first time got 2 seats (3.0%) with 62,698 votes (1.8%).   In other words the Conservatives got an MP for every 4,398 votes, Liberals got an MP for every 8,580 votes, the Irish Nationalists got a seat for every 991 votes and the worst off Party – the new Labour Party got a seat for every 31,349 votes.   Ireland was clearly vastly over-represented in Parliament.
With an overall majority of 134 seats the Conservatives under Salisbury were riding high, but as we shall see pride comes before a fall for the Conservatives were out of office by 1906.
The Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury demonstrated that nepotism was not dead with his Cabinet:  

Salisbury’s nephew, Arthur Balfour, was First Lord of the Treasury and Leader of the House of Commons.   Another nephew, Gerald Balfour, was President of the Board of Trade.   A third, Evelyn Cecil, became the Prime Minister’s parliamentary private secretary.   Salisbury’s nephew in law, James Lowther, was Chairman of the Commons Ways and Means Committee.   His son in law, Lord Selbourne, was First Lord of the Admiralty and his eldest son, Lord Cranborne, was Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, which Hugh Cecil, another son and an MP, called “only a stipendiary” but which was an acknowledged route to higher office. "Salisbury Victorian Titan" by A. Roberts
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“Stipendiary” is a salary so the comment included a touch of aristocratic arrogance.   The MP, G.C.T. Bartley tabled a motion censuring the Prime Minister for nepotism.   It was the first time the words “Prime Minister” appeared on a parliamentary order paper.   The phrase “Bob’s your uncle” emanates from Robert Salisbury’s relationship with his nephew Arthur Balfour.
During the first decade of the twentieth century the electorate increased by a million from 6.7 million to 7.7 million men.   The proportion of the population registered to vote increased from 15% of the population to 17.5% and in contested seats the number of votes cast went up by 25%.   In the ballot box engagement was also rising.   In 1900 3,514,592 electors voted.   By 1910 this had risen to 6,643,139, a huge increase.   In percentage terms it went from 52% to 86%.   Democracy was increasing in popularity.   By 1910 we had more electors more likely to vote than ever before, all achieved without any further legislation.   What happened was that there was an increase in the population, the population was ageing and we had a period of economic inflation.   Because the eligibility to vote was still partly based on wealth, i.e. the level of annual rentals, inflation meant that more people met this criterion.   This was all good news for democracy and added to the pressure for more of it.   By 1918 when all adult males had the vote there were 12.9 million male voters.   Available figures show that in the decade 1900 to 1910 the electorate consisted of 60% of the male population.   What we do not know is how many eligible voters failed to register, either deliberately or because they moved around a lot.
After Queen Victoria’s death in January 1901 Lord Salisbury once again showed his rare libertarian streak: On 14th February, the King had to make a declaration to Parliament in a form prescribed by William and Mary, in which he renounced some Catholic rites as “superstitious and idolatrous”.   According to Lady Balfour, Salisbury considered this oath “scurrilous” and “a stain on the Statute Book.   He unsuccessfully tried to get the Cabinet to abolish it.   The Cabinet feared a Protestant backlash, so it was allowed to stay there until 1910.
        One question was rising fast up the political agenda – votes for women.   The campaign by Millicent Fawcett and the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies formed in 1897 was beginning to have an effect.   The women campaigning for this became known as the “suffragettes” – a term first coined by the Daily Mail denoting a female vote.   The Mail had intended it as an insult but the campaigners became proud of the title and the name soon stuck.
In 1903 Emmeline Pankhurst founded the Women’s Social and Political Union, with her daughters, Christabel and Sylvia.   The organisation adopted the slogan “Deeds, not words”.   Emmeline Pankhurst was the widow of a radical Manchester barrister and she believed that only when women had the vote would sufficient pressure be brought on governments to improve social conditions.
Up to this time the suffrage had been a male domain.   The suffragettes were females campaigning for women to have the vote.   They faced strong and vehement opposition.   One of the most vociferous opponents was Henry Labouchere.   Having voted for John Stuart Mill’s amendment calling for votes for women in 1867, thereafter he made speech after speech opposing it.   In March 1904 the old Etonian millionaire said:

“The mission of a working man’s wife is to look after the home, to mind the baby, to cook the dinner and do the washing.   She has no time for electioneering.   The business of the husband is to take an hour off, go to public meetings and, if he is a wise man, adopt the radical principles addressed to him”. 
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 In 1905 Campbell-Bannerman became the first official Prime Minister.   The term “Prime Minister” had been employed informally, but technically depended on the sinecure of “First Lord of the Treasury”.   On December 10th 1905, a Royal warrant placed the Prime Minister, in the first use of the title, in the order of precedence immediately after the Archbishop of York.   In a narrow sense therefore, Campbell-Bannerman, not Robert Walpole, was the first British Prime Minister.
In 1906, in one of many constitutional clashes with the House of Commons, the House of Lords threw out a Bill to abolish plural voting.  Plural voting, by which one individual had more then one vote, due to being registered in more than one place, was still widespread.   This was a foretaste of the clashes to come.   Lord Rosebery recommended an elected upper House in a report published in 1907.   Meanwhile in the same year a private members Bill to give women the vote was heavily defeated in the House of Commons.  
        Faced with the government’s stubbornness the suffragettes gradually became more militant.   Since 1905 they had been disrupting meetings addressed by Liberal politicians; Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney, a Lancashire cotton worker, spent a week in gaol after being ejected from the Manchester Free Trade hall where they had heckled Sir Edward Grey.   Now the WSPU members turned to smashing windows, chaining themselves to the railings of Buckingham Palace and Downing Street, kicking and scratching policemen who tried to move them on and holding massive demonstrations and processions. "Mastering Modern British History" by N. Lowe
By 1907 the “suffragettes” had high hopes of the new Liberal government since it was well known that, Lloyd George was sympathetic to their cause.   Their hopes were further raised by the passing of the Qualification of Women Act 1907 which allowed women to be elected onto borough and county councils for the first time, and to act as Mayors.   The Act clarified the right of women ratepayers to be elected to Borough and County Councils in England and Wales.   It also gave women the right to stand anywhere in Local Government
The Womens Social and Political Union, known as the WSPU was growing in strength and beginning to attract a lot of support, so much so, that in 1906 the Pankhursts moved the headquarters from Manchester to London.   Within a year they had built up 58 branches and donations were running at over £100 per week.   It is no wonder that women, particularly the middle class, were becoming more and more frustrated with the political system.   Many senior MPs held extraordinary views when looked at from today.   A typical example was that of Sir William Brampton Gordon, the MP for Norfolk North.   In March 1907 he stated that: “The more civilised man became, the more he elevated woman until he himself did all the hard work and left her only the lighter duties and the pleasures of life”.
The suffragettes adopted a much more militant approach in their campaigning:
In the year from the spring of 1907, suffragette demonstrators were sent to prison for a total of 191 weeks.   In the following year, to the spring of 1909, suffragette imprisonments rose to 350 weeks.   In the same period, membership and funds of the WSPU doubled, and at the same time the constitutional activity of the WSPU increased at a rate that defies belief.   In the first six years of its existence, the Union held more than 100,000 meetings.   The biggest meeting halls in London, Manchester, Liverpool, Bristol, Scotland and Wales were booked to overflowing.   In the same period, the Albert Hall, the biggest in the country, was filled no less than 13 times by the WSPU, whose public meetings exceeded, sometimes by three or four times the total number of meetings sponsored by all other political organizations. "The Vote" by Paul Foot.

A contrast with today’s level of political engagement could not be more stark.
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Asquith, who became the Liberal Prime Minister in April 1908, just two weeks before Campbell-Bannerman died, opposed votes for women.   With the high level of activity in the women’s movement it was likely that there would be clashes with the authorities.   When the Prime Minister visited Bingley Hall in 1909 eight women protesters were arrested and incarcerated in Winsome Green prison in Birmingham.   They immediately went on hunger strike.   On 24th September the press reported that they had been force fed by tubes inserted through their mouths or noses.   This treatment, instead of creating horror and concern in the House of Commons was met with amusement.   The medical profession were not amused and pointed out the dangers of such behaviour.
  Henry Noel Brailsford a journalist, whose wife had been imprisoned for taking part in a demonstration of the WSPU in October 1909, decided to take action:
  “he put together what became known as the Conciliation Committee composed of 36 MPs all in favour of some sort of women’s enfranchisement.   The Committee cobbled together a Conciliation Bill that would grant the vote to some women.   Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst and the Pethick-Lawrences were suspicious of the new Bill but did not oppose it.   Reluctantly they agreed a temporary truce in which all militant activities, including by-election campaigning against Liberal candidates, would cease until the fate of the Conciliation Bill was clear” "The Vote" by Paul Foot.
 In the January 1910 General Election the Conservatives and the Liberals had almost the same number of seats – 272 and 274.   The result was a hung Parliament.
In July 1910 the Conciliation Bill was carried with a majority of 109 after a two-day debate and was sent to committee for consideration.   The Bill did not propose full enfranchisement for women.   Lodgers had no vote and married women could not vote in the same constituency as their husbands.   With a parliamentary recess and then no progress nothing happened before the second General election of the year.

 The Royal Commission on Electoral Reform reported in 1910.   It recommended that the Alternative Vote system of voting be used for the House of Commons with the Single Transferable Vote system being used at a local level.    
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The second General Election of 1910 took place from the 3rd to the 19th of December.   It was the last time a General Election was held with balloting taking place over several days.     A new Conciliation Bill was tabled.   This time there was no £10 property qualification as in the previous Bill.   Also dropped was the clause banning husbands and wives voting in the same constituency.   The second reading of the Bill was passed with a majority of 167 on 5th May 1911.   At this point party politics raised its ugly head.   The Liberal Lloyd George convinced himself that if the Bill went through the main beneficiaries would be the Tory Party for he believed they would attract the women’s vote.   On November 11th he secretly approached the Conciliation committee and told them that he would give them his support if a different Bill to increase further the votes for men should fail.   Sure enough the next day Prime Minister Asquith announced such a Bill, at the same time promising that it could be amended to include women in it.   This was disingenuous for Asquith knew perfectly well that such an amendment would never get through the House of Lords.

                Rather than be grateful for this seeming compromise the Pankhursts could hardly contain their anger at what they thought was a stitch up.   For over a year they had stopped campaigning in the belief that they would get their own Bill, yet all they had got was the possibility of an amendment to another Bill.   The truce was over.   Demonstrations took place all over London and many shop windows were smashed.   On 28 March 1912 the Conciliation Bill was defeated in the House of Commons by 14 votes.   The Irish Nationalists voted with the Liberals to defeat it.   They wanted to stay in the good books of the Liberal government in the hope that it would keep them in good stead for Home Rule.   The main argument against the Bill was a commitment by the government to introduce a full franchise reform Bill that could be amended to include women.  
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 Whilst the battle for women’s votes took place, a separate great clash between the House of Commons and the House of Lords had commenced.   The Commons were still smarting from the clash of 1906.   This conflict had been brewing for several years in the Commons.   The Liberals had been building their enthusiasm for a big push as they were getting more and more frustrated.   A. J. Balfour, the Conservative leader, in a speech at Manchester in November 1909 said:
   The object of a second chamber is not, and never has been, to prevent the people, the electorate, determining what policy they should pursue; it exists for the purpose of seeing that on great issues the policy which is pursued is not the policy of a temporary majority elected for a different purpose, but carries the conviction of the people for the few years in which it carries their mandate… The object is to see that what concerns the people should be referred to the people, and that the people shall not be betrayed by hasty legislation, having perhaps some vindictive policy to carry out”. Edwardian Britain - Society in transition by K.Benning
   In his book The Conservative Party from Peel to Thatcher Robert Blake says:
   Why did such a balanced man as Balfour see nothing objectionable in this use of the House of Lords”?   Deep in the subconscious mind of the party was a sense of prescriptive right to rule, inculcated by twenty years of domination after 1886.   This was an error that neither Disraeli nor Derby would have committed.   The most revealing remark of all was made by Balfour just after his personal defeat in Manchester in 1906.   It is the duty of everyone, he said, to ensure that “the great Unionist (Conservative) party should still control, whether in power or in opposition, the destinies of this great Empire”.   If this proposition is taken literally, it is a denial of parliamentary democracy.   Indeed many Conservatives behaved as if the verdict of 1906 was some freak mistake on the part of the electorate, and that it was the Conservative’s duty, through the House of Lords, to preserve the public from the consequences of its own folly till it came to its senses. The Conservative Party from Peel to Thatcher by R. Blake.
  The Conservatives of 1906 had not adjusted to the landscape of 1906 in the same way that the Conservatives of 2005 had not adjusted to the landscape of 2005.   They were stuck in a particular way of operating.

        The Conservative Party had suffered a heavy defeat by the Liberals in the General Election of 1906.   Nevertheless the unelected House of Lords with its large built-in Conservative majority ignored this fact and proceeded to reject many Bills proposed and passed by the huge Liberal majority in the House of Commons.   Some of the earlier reforms of the Liberals had been obstructed, including an Education Bill (1906), a Plural Voting Bill (1906), and a Licensing Bill (1908}.   Perhaps in practice constitutional change happens in fits and starts.   The pressure builds and builds before coming to a head.
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Was democracy to prevail?   This was the great-unanswered question.   A constitutional clash between the two Houses was inevitable.   The spark that set the fire alight was the rejection by the Lords of Lloyd George’s first budget in 1909.   This budget increased taxes particularly on the wealthy in order to pay for Dreadnought battleships, a pension scheme and labour exchanges.   These would cost £15 million.   It was unprecedented that an entire budget should be rejected.   What were the Lords thinking of?   In introducing the budget Lloyd George was certainly thinking of a crisis.   For once and for all, the elected House of Commons had to stamp its authority over the unelected House of Lords.
      The budget was debated in the Commons from April until November – much longer than usual.   The Conservatives assaulted it viciously both in the Commons and outside, forming a Budget Protest League.   They complained that it was a deliberate attack on the wealthy; especially on landowners and that it was the beginnings of socialism: the new land tax would require all land to be valued, and this, they feared, could be the preliminary to the nationalisation of land.   The Duke of Beaufort said that he would like to see Lloyd George and Churchill “in the middle of twenty couple of foxhounds”; Lloyd George struck back with his famous Limehouse speech, accusing the landlords of being selfish creatures whose sole function was “the stately consumption of wealth produced by others”.   In November 1909 the budget passed the Commons with a huge majority (379 – 149), but later the same month the Lords rejected it, even though Edward VII was anxious for it to pass.   Lord Lansdowne, Conservative Leader in the Lords, justified this on the grounds that such a revolutionary measure ought to be put before the public, in a general election.   Balfour said that the Lords were merely carrying out their proper function as the “watchdog of the constitution”, i.e. making sure that no irresponsible laws were passed.   Lloyd George retorted that the Lords were acting as if they were “Mr. Balfour’s poodle”. "Mastering Modern British History" by N. Lowe
       In an earlier speech on 9 October Lloyd George had a dig at the peerage.   He said “A fully equipped Duke costs as much to keep up as two Dreadnoughts, and Dukes are just as great a terror, and they last longer”.    The Dreadnought was an expensive battleship.
     The constitutional crisis caused by the rejection of the budget was not long coming.   Lloyd George spoke about “revolution”.   Should an elected body have its decision overturned by an unelected body?   The progress of democracy over several hundred years had now hit the brick wall of the House of Lords.   Prime Minister Asquith and the Liberal Party prepared for battle.   Lloyd George made a mocking speech on the 9th of October 1909 at Newcastle implying that the House of Lords were the unemployed.
      "If they begin, issues will be raised that they little dream of, questions will be asked that are now whispered in humble voices.   The question will be asked: Should 500 men, ordinary men, chosen accidentally from among the unemployed over-ride the judgement – the deliberate judgement – of millions of people who are engaged in the industry which makes the wealth of the country?…. Another question will be: Who ordained that a few should have the land of Britain as a perquisite, who made 10,000 people owners of the soil, and the rest of us trespassers in the land of our birth?… These are the questions that will be asked.   The answers are charged with peril for the order of things the Peers represent; but they are fraught with rare and refreshing fruit for the parched lips of the multitude who have been treading the dusty road along which the people have marched through the dark ages, which are now emerging into the light.”

    Asquith had no choice.   Parliament was dissolved and a General Election called in January 1910.   Astonishingly the Liberals did not get the anticipated landslide again – perhaps the British have a deep sense of deference in their make-up, or more likely the Labour Party took their votes.   The Liberals were the largest Party with 275 seats, not far behind were the Conservatives and Unionists with 273 followed by the new upcoming Labour Party with 40.   The Irish Nationalists with 82 seats held the balance of power.   Ironically the Conservatives got thirty of their seats through plural voting which the Liberals had tried to abolish but had been defeated by the House of Lords.   Their campaign for “One Man, One Vote” was given a boost in the arm by this result.
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The Irish Nationalists were sitting pretty and their Leader, John Redmond took advantage of the situation by agreeing to support Lloyd George’s budget and restriction of the power of the House of Lords in exchange for an Irish Home Rule Bill.
 Fairly early in the new Parliament the Liberals presented a Parliament Bill restricting the powers of the House of Lords and they also resurrected the budget.   Both went smoothly through the Commons.   In April 1910 the Lords passed the budget without a division, but as for the Parliament Bill that was a different case – do turkeys vote for Christmas?   Not if they are in the House of Lords.
The next step was somehow to manoeuvre the Lords into passing the Parliament Bill.  Asquith tried to persuade Edward VII to create about 250 new Liberal peers, enough to defeat the Conservatives in the Lords.   The king would only agree if the Liberals could win another election on the issue, but Asquith dare not risk another one so soon.   Edward died suddenly in May, and the new king, George V, suggested a conference, which discussed the situation for the next six months.   A compromise solution was almost reached, but the conference broke down over the problem of Ireland.   The Conservatives wanted special loopholes in any new bill, which would enable them to block Home Rule, but Asquith would not agree. "Mastering Modern British History" by N. Lowe

With the breakdown of talks Prime Minister Asquith decided to bring matters to a head by sending the Parliament Bill to the House of Lords in November 1910.   Once again it was rejected.   Asquith then had a secret meeting with King George V.   George V promised Asquith that if he called another General Election and formed the Government, he, George V would create up to 500 new peers to enable the Bill to be passed by the Lords.   With this secret promise in his pocket Asquith called another General Election in December 1910.   The result was virtually the same as the previous one.   The Liberals got 272 seats; the Conservative and Unionists 272, Labour 42 and the Irish Nationalists with 84 once again held the balance of power.   In May 1911 the House of Commons passed the Bill with a comfortable majority.
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It was quite clear by now that the government were determined to get the Parliament Bill passed come hell or high water, whatever the cost.   They had decided that the power of the House of Lords had to be reduced.   One House had to be supreme and the government were determined that the democratically elected House of Commons should have supremacy over the unelected House of Lords.   The Conservative and Unionists in the House of Lords fought back and their fight-back became increasingly bitter as they realised that they had no hope of winning.   This was to be a fight to the bitter end.   There could be only one winner and on 21st July the Shadow Cabinet made the first moves to save themselves from what was now an impossible situation.   The Conservative Leader Balfour, playing a similar role to Wellington in 1832, had the difficult job of persuading a majority of the Conservatives and Unionists to accept the Bill.   Some of them though were prepared to go down fighting to the end.
 On 24th July there was uproar in the House of Commons, with so much personal abuse hurled at Asquith that the session had to be suspended.
 Asquith announced in the Commons that the king had promised to create as many as 500 Liberal peers if necessary, to get the bill through the Lords.   The furious Conservatives led by Lord Hugh Cecil (Salisbury’s son) howled Asquith down with shouts of “Traitor!” and he was unable to complete his speech.   However the more moderate Conservative peers decided that it would be better to accept a reduction of their powers, rather than find themselves permanently swamped by the Liberals"Mastering Modern British History" by N. Lowe
 Balfour hoped he could persuade the King not to use his power to create new peers, but it became increasingly clear that the King would if necessary keep his promise to Asquith.   The heat generated by the arguments reflected the hot days of that summer as an unusual heat wave descended on Britain.   The choice was stark and simple for the Conservatives and Unionists in the House of Lords – accept a permanent dilution of their powers or face a huge permanent Liberal majority that would immediately proceed to pass all the Liberal Bills, which they had previously rejected.   Home Rule for Ireland, Disestablishment of the Church in Wales, an end to Plural Voting, all these would hit the statute book.   All this they would lose, or they could accept a delaying power for two years.   It would have been madness for them not to accept the delay.
In a thesis on the “Conservative Party” R. B. Jones commented:
Balfour announced on 25 July that the Lords would be advised to pass the Bill, but on the following day a dinner was given for Lord Halsbury by several hundred peers and MPs who were determined to carry on the fight.   Halsbury was accepted leader of the ditchers in the House of Lords, but was supported by Milner, Selborne, Carson, Smith, Austen Chamberlain and others in the shadow cabinet.   The dinner was a deliberate slight to Balfour and the formation of a Halsbury Club afterwards was a sign that the split would outlast the current debate.”
Roy Jenkins in his book “Mr. Balfour’s Poodle” set out what followed:
“Balfour, having given the Party his advice and seen it widely rejected, left for Germany before the critical vote was taken.   On 10 August the peers decided their fate; the bulk of the Unionist peers accepted Lansdowne’s advice, sullenly abstained and challenged the government to find its own majority.   However even this did not save the party further embarrassment for 114 diehards kept up the opposition to the last; the Bill was saved only by the votes of thirty-seven Unionists under Curzon who voted for the Bill with the bishops and the Liberals.   The outcome was thus that the Unionist peers split three ways and that the Bill passed – despite all the sound and fury – by Unionist votes”.

But, in spite of all the pressures when the vote was taken it was a close run thing. The bill passed by 131 votes to 114.   The Parliament Act, at last became law and the constitutional crisis was over.
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The provisions of the Parliament Act (1911) were as follow:
(1)     A Money Bill became law within one month of being sent up to the House of Lords, with or without their agreement.   It was to be left to the discretion of the Speaker to certify what was a “Money Bill”, but it must be one, the main object of which was financial.   In practice, Speakers have refrained from so certifying where any policy change is involved.
(2)     Other Public Bills could receive the Royal Assent without the agreement of the Lords.   Such a Bill must have been passed by the Commons in three consecutive sessions (whether of the same Parliament or not), and two years must have elapsed between the date of the second reading in the House of Commons in the first session and the third reading in the third session.   This provision did not, however, apply to a bill extending the maximum duration of Parliament beyond five years or to a Provisional Order Confirmation Bill.   It should also be noted that it did not include private bills.
(3)     The maximum duration of Parliament was reduced from seven years to five years, the idea being to ensure that a Commons which was over three years old, and thus possibly out of touch with the wishes of the electorate, should not be able to pass a bill in defiance of the Lords.
    As regards a Money Bill, the Act really made legal only what the Commons had secured in 1860.   But for other bills it marked a fundamental constitutional change, making it possible to pass legislation without the consent of one House.
  The Act was of major importance in the development of the constitution.   Democracy had been safeguarded – the Lords had no control over the country’s finances, they could delay other legislation for two years, but could not prevent it becoming law eventually, provided the government remained in power long enough.   On the other hand the Lords still had the power, if they felt like using it, to paralyse a government for the last two years of its five-year term.   As for immediate results, the Lords were so incensed at the Liberals, that they used to the full the powers they had left, rejecting the Irish Home Rule Bill, a Welsh Disestablishment Bill, and another Plural Voting Bill; not one of these perfectly reasonable bills had passed into law when war broke out in 1914.   The Liberal Party itself therefore gained very little from the Parliament Act.   Although they had emerged from the crisis “flushed with one of the greatest victories of all time”, as Dangerfield puts it, “from that victory they never recovered”. "Mastering Modern British History" by N. Lowe

Perhaps this was the climax of the Liberal Party’s success.   From here on their orbit was downwards.
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The House of Lords has been an “interim” House since 1911, when it was intended that the Parliament Act 1911 would be followed shortly by another Act replacing the Lords with an elected Second Chamber.   The Preamble to the Parliament Act stated: “And whereas it is intended to substitute for the House of Lords as it at present exists a Second Chamber constituted on a popular instead of a hereditary basis, but such substitution cannot immediately be brought into operation”.   For almost a hundred years every attempt to make the House of Lords a democratic body has been frustrated.   Will it ever succeed?   There are those that argue No, because an elected House of Lords would reflect the elected House of Commons.   If they disagreed, who would represent the will of the people?   We shall see.
In 1911 the House of Commons settled a salary of £400 a year on MPs, thus enabling poor men to enter Parliament and exist without outside help, reducing the possibility of bribery and corruption.   This was the first stage to professionalising the political classes.   The salaries and expenses of MPs is a controversial area, which lasts to today.

With the passing of the Parliament Act the Irish Nationalists looked to Asquith to redeem his promise of Irish Home Rule for their support in passing the Parliament Act.   Asquith kept his promise and introduced a Bill giving Home Rule to Ireland.   Three times it was passed by the House of Commons and each time it was rejected by the House of Lords.   The Liberals invoked the Parliament Act and Home Rule was due to be implemented in 1914.   Unfortunately due the outbreak of the Great War the implementation was postponed.   An interesting aspect of the Bill was that it contemplated the United Kingdom in a federalist structure with separate Parliaments for England Scotland and Wales as well as Ireland.
The Home Rule Act 1914 had the following provisions:
·         A bicameral Irish Parliament to be set up in Dublin (a 40-member Senate and a 164-member House of Commons) with powers to deal with most national affairs.
·         A number of Irish MPs would continue to sit in the House of Commons in Westminster (42 MPs, rather than 103).
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            Another consequence of the passing of the Parliament Act was the determination of the Liberals to abolish plural voting.   They were convinced that it worked to their disadvantage and there was  still some bitterness over their defeat by the House of Lords in 1906 when they had tried to abolish it.   Now, they wanted revenge.   They therefore introduced the Franchise and Registration Bill in 1912, designed to give full manhood suffrage.   Also included in this Bill was a proposal to abolish the University seats, which no Liberal had won a single seat in since 1886.   The electorates of these seats were graduates and the system of election used was that of proportional representation.   It is somewhat ironic that the Liberals wanted to abolish a system of election which later they campaigned hard to get the whole country to adopt.
                The other issue bubbling along unresolved was that of women’s suffrage.   By November 1912 Asquith and the Liberals had accepted the principle of women’s suffrage, so an amendment was made to the Franchise and Registration Bill to give the vote to certain categories of women.   In January 1913 the Speaker of the House, in a ruling of questionable merit ruled that the amendment could not be allowed since it changed the whole nature of the Bill.   The Speaker could not be challenged.   This power remains unchanged today.   The Bill was in serious trouble and the Government decided that it was not worth pursuing, so dropped it.   As a consequence three important measures to improve our democracy were abandoned.
                The effect of dropping the Bill was catastrophic for it set off a wave of violence by the suffragettes, who felt they had been betrayed.   Lloyd George was about to move into a new house, only to find that Mrs Pankhurst had bombed it, for which she was to receive a sentence of three years in jail.   One of the most dramatic events occurred at the Derby in 1913 when Emily Davidson threw herself in front of the King’s horse to try and trip it up and was trampled to death.   Mary Richardson, a suffragette who was later to be sentenced to 18 moths hard labour for damaging Velazquez’s “Rokeby Venus” at the National Gallery described what happened:
                “She stood alone there, close to the white-painted rails where the course bends round at Tattenham Corner; she looked absorbed and yet far away from everybody else and seemed to have no interest in what was going on around her.   A minute before the race started she raised a paper of her own, or some kind of card, before her eyes.   I was watching her hand.   It did not shake.   Even when I heard the pounding of the horses’ hooves moving closer I saw she was still smiling.   And suddenly she slipped under the rail and ran out into the middle of the racecourse.   It was all over so quickly.   Emily was under the hoofs of one of the horses and seemed to be hurled for some distance across the grass.   The horse stumbled sideways and its jockey was thrown from its back.   She lay very still”.
Asquith suffered several attacks including being beaten over the head with dog whips.   On one occasion when he was on the Lossiemouth golf course some extremists tried to tear his clothes off.   Churches and railway stations were set on fire.   This could not be allowed to continue and there was bound to be an adverse reaction from the authorities.

As the suffragettes became more militant, the government response became harsher.   When suffragettes went on hunger strike in prison, the government authorised them to be forcibly fed.   This then provoked criticism, to which the government responded with the ridiculous “Cat and Mouse Act” of 1913; which is the usual name given to the Prisoners, Temporary Discharge for Health Act.   This Act permitted the release from prison of women who were in a weak physical state because they had been on hunger strike, and allowed them to be re-arrested when they had recovered their health.   The logic behind the Act was simple: a Suffragette would be arrested; she would go on hunger strike; the authorities would wait until she was too weak (through lack of food) to do any harm in public.   She would then be released ‘on licence’.   Once out of prison, the former prisoner would start to eat once again and re-gain her strength.   If she committed an offence while out “on licence,” she would be immediately re-arrested and returned to prison.   Here, she would then go back on hunger strike.   The authorities would then wait until she was too weak to cause trouble and then she would be re-released ‘on licence’.  The nickname of the Act came about because of a cat’s habit of playing with its prey (a mouse) before finishing it off.
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On the question of the Sovereign exercising his prerogative powers Lord Esher advised George V in 1913 “The Sovereign cannot act unconstitutionally so long as he acts on the advice of a minister supported by a majority in the House of Commons”.   Ministerial responsibility is the safeguard of the monarchy.”   This precedent is relevant today.
In 1914 the Liberals tried to create the most favourable conditions for their next appeal to the country, expected in 1915, by pushing through a Bill to abolish plural voting.   It was thought that this anomaly had given an extra thirty seats to the Unionist’s in the General Election of 1910.   The Government’s measure awaited its third and final reading when the coming of war disrupted its planned legislative programme.
When war broke out in 1914 the suffragettes abandoned their campaign and the women’s efforts in supporting the war over the next four years repaired much of the damage done by the violence.   Women during the War did many of the jobs previously done by men.   By the end of the war the case for women’s suffrage was unanswerable.
The Great War changed the whole approach to politics and led to immense change in the political landscape.   A General Election was due in 1915, the outcome of which neither Conservatives nor Liberals were confident of winning.   In the event it was never held – General Elections were suspended during the War.   What was to happen to legislation going through Parliament?
The Home Rule Bill and the Welsh Disestablishment Bill became law in the Autumn of 1914, but were then suspended for the duration of the war.   It was agreed between the parties, and a pact was entered into on 6th August, that there would be no contested by-elections, the first casualty of democracy.

The waging of war perhaps understandably brought with it a curtailment of freedoms and liberty.   Restrictions were placed on the freedom of the press.   There was the internment of enemy aliens.   The Defence of the Realm Act, wiped out Magna Carta, The Bill of Rights, etc., in a few lines, curtailing traditional liberties.   Even so, voices of caution were heard.   Politics did not stand still during the war.   In 1916 the House of Commons voted with a majority of 330 to give votes to wives over thirty years of age.
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In August 1916 the Tory Local Government Board Minister Walter Long proposed:
         a “representative conference of earnest men holding strong views, bitterly opposed to each other” which could thrash out a “lasting settlement” for the future of the franchise.   This became known as the Speaker’s Conference.   The Speaker took the chair, and the membership of the committee included a string of lords, knights and dignitaries from the great and good in the Commons.   The original list included such bitter opponents of franchise extension as the Marquis of Salisbury and Sir Frederick Banbury – though these two resigned (presumably in protest at the pro-suffrage balance in the committee) on the day of its first meeting, 12 October 1916.   The Conference sat 26 times until 26 January 1917, and debated 37 resolutions of which 34 were passed unanimously.   Not unanimous was a decision to extend the vote to women, though not to all women, for some reason young women were deemed a greater threat to the established order than older women.   The Conference was undecided as to the age at which the vote should be extended to women – some thought 30, some thought 35, but no one argued against votes for women in principle. "The Vote" by Paul Foot.
   The Speaker’s Conference came up with a number of recommendations after much wheeling and dealing in smoke filled rooms.   It had originally been prompted by the Conservatives demanding that the franchise should be extended by giving votes to the servicemen serving in the armed forces.   The deal that was hammered out was that the Conservatives would accept a widening of the franchise if the Liberals accepted some plural votes and a redistribution of seats.   As the Liberals had wanted a wider franchise and the Tories redistribution for some years both sides accepted the deal.   There was another problem though – the Labour Party had made considerable headway in recent times and they needed to be brought on board.   The answer was proportional representation, which would enable them to consolidate their position.   Everybody attending the Conference seemed to be satisfied, but when their proposals were published they met with a hostile reaction from the Unionists.   The penny had dropped that with a redistribution anything could happen, and it was by no means certain that the Unionists would benefit.
   In the first decade of the century the population had increased in Unionist areas, whereas in Liberal and Nationalist areas it was static.   The population of Ireland had fallen by 2%.   The middle class were moving to the suburbs and out of the city centres.   Before the war there was a feeling that redistribution would benefit the Unionists but now they were not so sure.   Ireland was clearly over-represented, but when redistribution eventually took place Ireland retained the same number of seats.   Nevertheless the Unionists gained about thirty seats, a useful addition to their numbers.
It was clear that the First Past the Post system of elections was distorting democracy.   With the advent of the third Party (Irish Nationalists) representation in Parliament had become haphazard.   Now there was another Party in the frame – the Labour Party.   After winning two seats in the General Election of 1900 they went on to win 29 seats in 1906 and 42 seats in the General Election of December 1910.   Together with the Irish Nationalists, the Labour Party had become the swing vote, but unlike the Irish they fundamentally threatened the Liberal Party and in the eyes of the Conservatives threatened the country.   Revolution was on the agenda in Russia so how far could the working-class be appeased?   All of this was happening whilst some MPs were fighting on the front line. 
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The recommendations from the Speaker’s Conference lead to a new Representation of the People Bill.   In May 1917 the Bill was tabled in the House of Commons by the Home Secretary, Sir George Cave.   Cave believed that the War had brought an end to class divisions and that the contribution that women had made to the work necessary to carry on the War justified them having a voice in the future of the country.   In spite of some opposition on 22 May the Bill got a huge majority on second reading, 341 votes in favour with only 62 against.   It then went into a committee of the whole House that went on for some months.   Many Unionists felt strongly about individual clauses in the Bill but could not bring themselves to oppose the principle.   In principle they were in favour of extending the franchise, particularly in relation to servicemen, after all this had been their original concern.   They wanted an equitable scheme for redistribution, but as we know the devil is in the detail.   They wanted the registration of voters to be simplified, the powers of the second chamber to be examined.   Finally they wanted the proposals to be applicable to the whole of the United Kingdom.   This was particularly important because Ireland was grossly over-represented in Parliament.   Sooner or later this had to be rectified.   Summing up, the Conservative and Unionist Party wanted electoral reform but it had to be comprehensive and done at the right time.
 Passage of the Bill was lengthy, with many amendments being made by the Unionists.   The Boundaries Commission remit was altered so that not only did they have to consider population in drawing up the constituency boundaries they also had to consider economic interests.   The Unionists were worried about the agricultural seats.   The rules on plural voting were altered to the advantage of the Unionists giving them thousands of extra votes.
Not resolved in the smoke filled room was the issue of proportional representation and even today we are still searching for a solution.   In the original Bill presented in 1917 it was proposed that Proportional Representation should be used for voting in the Cities.   The Commons could not reach agreement.   One day they voted in favour only for it to be overturned the next.   In the end the vested interests of the sitting MPs dominated.

The 1918 Representation of the People Bill was passed in the Commons with 385 votes for and 55 against.   The Bill went on to the House of Lords where, by one of those ironic twists of fate, the Government spokesman was Lord Curzon – President the National League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage.   Surprisingly the Conservative Lords were in favour of proportional representation, but pragmatism ruled the day and in the end the status quo prevailed.
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The House of Lords were strongly in favour of Proportional Representation.   They saw it as a way of preventing extreme legislation being forced through the House of Commons.   A compromise was suggested that the electoral system to be used should be the Alternative Vote, but this compromise failed also to get agreement.   The two Houses were divided.   Almost inevitably the end result was stalemate, but in the end no new voting system was introduced with a minor exception being that Proportional Representation was kept in the university seats.   With a touch of arrogance Parliament thought that university graduates would understand the complexities of Proportional Representation, whereas the rest of the population would not.
The Representation of the People Act received the Royal Assent and thus became law in February 1918.  As a result the electorate was increased from the 7.7 million in 1910 to 21.4 million in 1918.   Allowing for deaths in the intervening period and for those too young to vote in 1910, only about a quarter of the electorate of 1918 had entered a polling booth before.   Women now made up 39.6% of the electorate.   If women had been enfranchised on the same basis as men they would have been in a majority due to the large number of men killed in the war.
        The Representation of the People Act, 1918, carried out far reaching reforms:
(1)       It substituted a simple qualification to vote, instead of the numerous qualifications, which then existed; henceforth all that was necessary was 6 months’ residence or the occupation of business premises.   Effectively the         vote was given to all males over the age of 21.
(2)          The vote was given to women over 30 years of age, provided she or her husband was qualified to vote at local government elections.   This enfranchised 8,479,156 women.   Excluded were those women under 30 and of those over 30, 22% did not meet the property qualification.   Women were still not treated on an equal basis.
(3)          It removed the disqualification of receipt of poor relief.
(4)         It provided that, at a general election, all elections were to be held on the same day and that no elector could vote in more than two constituencies.
(5)       It introduced the requirement that a candidate should deposit £150 with the returning Officer, to be forfeited if he does not poll one-eighth of the total votes cast.
(6)       It redistributed seats on the basis of one member to every 70,000 of the population.   This was the first time an attempt had been made to create equal size constituencies.
In effect the Act increased the electorate by 13.7 million. The political impact of it was not just to empower Labour.   It is wrong to assume that all vote-less males prior to 1918 were working class and therefore natural Labour supporters.   Because the existing franchise favoured householders and against lodgers many middle class men could not or did not vote because their work made them mobile or the difficulty of qualifying as a lodger was too great to overcome.

The Representation of the People Act 1918 did not make votes of equal value.   7% of the suffrage still had plural votes.
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The Reform Acts of the nineteenth century fell short of creating universal manhood suffrage.   The franchise was significantly limited by difficult residence qualifications, which meant that only about 60 per cent of adult males were on the electoral register.   Only about 12 per cent were formally excluded by the residence qualification.   The remainder changed residence too regularly or merely failed to register.   The restricted pre-war franchise left about half the working class without the vote.   Although there were working class Conservatives and Liberals the main impact was to limit Labour’s ability to tap into its natural source of support.   When full male suffrage was achieved in 1918 a working class electorate turned to Labour.   How many votes the introduction of universal franchise was worth to Labour we do not know, but it was a critical element in the emergence of the Party as a major political force.
 The biggest impact of the Representation of the People Act 1918 was the enfranchisement of women.   At last it had happened.   They were not fully enfranchised but a major breakthrough had been made.  
At the same time as the Representation of the People Act 1918 was passed the Parliament (Qualification of Women) Act 1918 was passed by 274 votes to 25, making women eligible to become Members of Parliament.   The Act received the Royal Assent on 21st November 1918, the same day that Parliament was dissolved for the General Election.   It enabled Constance, Countess Markiewicz to be elected, as the first woman MP, but in common with other members of Sinn Fein she did not take her seat which was St. Patrick’s, Dublin.   She contested her seat from a cell in Holloway prison where she was being held under suspicion of conspiring with Germany during the War.   In the General Election of 1918 out of 1,600 candidates 17 were women.   In November 1919 at a by-election in the Plymouth Sutton division Nancy, Viscountess Astor, who was American born, became the first woman to take her seat in the House of Commons.  Her husband had created the by-election vacancy on his accession to the peerage on the death of his father.   Two years later, after the death of her husband Tom, who had held the seat, Margaret Wintringham contested the Louth by-election and became the first British born female to sit as an MP.   The first three women MPs to take the oath were all elected for seats which had been held by their husbands.   By one of those quirks of law if a woman was over twenty-one she could now stand for parliament but unless she was over thirty she could not vote for herself.   This had to change.
 To remedy the problem of multi-size seats, the Redistribution Act passed in the same year increased the House of Commons to 707 seats and adopted the principle of equal constituency sizes.   At the same time, other elements of the political system which we have today appeared.   In 1918 Postal voting in the United Kingdom was first introduced for people with a physical incapacity and for those required to undertake a journey by sea or air, and has continued.   The prompt for this was the number of servicemen who had not returned from the First World War in time to vote in the 1918 general election.
 The natural minority of Unionist MPs perhaps created fears that they would never get back into power in the House of Commons.   This could explain their behaviour in the House of Lords, which might have been their only bastion.   Of course matters would change in 1928 when women at last got the full franchise.
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The post-war election was held in great haste within a few weeks of the Armistice, and even before the votes of the armed forces could properly be canvassed or even registered.   Just 57 per cent of those entitled to do so cast their vote.   Many seats were uncontested.   Once again we can see a distortion in the votes.   The Labour Party got 21% of the votes but only 57 MPs (8.1% of the seats).   Compare this with the Election of 1910 when they got 42 MPs with only 6% of the vote.   In spite of all the electoral reform much was left to do.   75% of the newly enfranchised male voters could not vote in Municipal elections, reversing the previous position whereby more men and some women could vote locally but were not enfranchised nationally.
The General Election was held on December 14th 1918.   It was the first since December 1910.   It is remembered as the “coupon election” so-called because those candidates for the Liberal Party who had supported the coalition government of Lloyd George during World War One were issued with a letter of support  signed by both Lloyd George and Andrew Bonar Law, leader of the Conservative Party to show the electorate who were genuine coalition candidates.   Herbert Asquith, the official leader of the Liberals, referred to the letter as a “coupon” and the title stuck with regards to the name of the election.   “Coupons” were issued to 159 Liberal candidates and 364 Conservatives.   Where a ‘Coupon’ Liberal stood for election, no Conservative challenged him.   Where a Conservative stood, no ‘Coupon’ Liberal challenged him.   Therefore there was no chance of coalition candidates competing against each other.
Those Liberals not issued with the “coupon” were faced with a huge political mountain to climb and only 26 Liberals who supported Asquith won a seat.   Even Asquith lost his place in the Commons when he lost his seat for East Fife   The result of the election was difficult to predict because of the large number of extra voters – six million women and two million men – enfranchised by the Representation of the People Act 1918.   In the event the coalition won easily mainly because of Lloyd George’s great popularity as the man who had led Britain to victory, and his promises to create a “country fit for heroes” and to make Germany pay “the whole cost of the war”.
The Election was also known as the khaki election, due to the immediate post-war setting and the role of the demobilised soldiers.   Making Germany pay “the whole cost of the war” was popular but in the end it bankrupted Germany with fateful results.

In spite of all the electoral reform the House of Commons was clearly not representative of the people.   The coalition Conservatives with 332 seats secured 47% of the seats on 33.3% of the votes, the coalition Liberals 127 seats (18%) with 13.4% of the votes.   The Liberal Party with almost the same number of votes (13.3%) got only 36 seats.   Ireland was again distorted with Sinn Fein getting 73 seats (10.3%) with only 4.8% of the votes.   Of the 73 Sinn Fein MPs elected 47 of them were in jail at the time of the election!   None of Sinn Fein’s (Ourselves Alone – founded in 1904 by Arthur Griffith) MPs took their seats at Westminster.   Instead they issued a proclamation that there was now an Irish Republic with its own Parliament (Dail Eirann – Assembly of Ireland) in Dublin.   They elected Eamonn de Valera as Leader.   You can still be elected if you are in jail, but of course you cannot take your seat!   The Unionists did not stand as a separate party.
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No sooner was the Great War over and the General Election held before the problems of Home Rule jumped to the forefront of politics.   Wales was easily sorted out.   They wanted the Church of Wales to be disestablished and Lloyd George duly disestablished it in 1920.   This was followed by a Church of Scotland Act in 1921, which gave self-government to the Church in Scotland.   Ireland was not so simple and was to prove the most divisive issue. Trouble flared up in Ireland immediately after the 1918 general election.   The 73 Sinn Fein MPs, out of a 105 total Irish seats, who wanted Ireland to be independent from Britain, set up their own Parliament (Dail Eirann – Assembly of Ireland) in Dublin and proclaimed the Republic of Ireland.  
Eamonn de Valera, the Leader of Sinn Fein had survived the Easter Rising in Dublin when Irish Nationalists seized control of the centre of Dublin in 1916.   After much bitter fighting they were suppressed by the British army.  
He was one of the few surviving leaders of the Easter Rising and became the symbol of Irish republicanism.   Together with Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith, he organised an effective government, which ignored the British and ran the country in its own way, collecting taxes and setting up law courts.   The British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, hoped that the Government of Ireland Act (February 1920) would win moderate support back to the British.   This was a revised version of the original Home Rule Bill of 1912, delayed by the Lords and then by the war; this time Ireland was partitioned, with one parliament for the South at Dublin and another for the six counties of Ulster at Belfast.   The Belfast parliament was for the benefit of Ulster Protestants, who still refused to be ruled by a Dublin-based Roman Catholic government.   Although Ulster reluctantly accepted their parliament, Sinn Fein rejected the entire act, because it gave them control only of certain domestic matters, whereas they were determined on a complete break with Britain; also they wanted control of Ulster. Mastering Modern British History by N. Lowe
 Vicious and bloody violence now erupted in Ireland.   The Irish Republican Army (IRA) began a campaign of terrorism against the police.   Of course the Irish Republicans would call themselves freedom fighters.   The IRA (Nationalists) attacked the Royal Irish Constabulary (Government forces) mercilessly.   To try and balance up the forces Lloyd George sent in the Black and Tans.   They consisted mainly of ex-soldiers that had fought in the Great War.   They had no qualms about taking on the IRA.   Both sides committed atrocities.   The situation could not be allowed to continue.   The violence was escalating.   Politically and militarily it was a disaster exhausting both sides.   Pressure was growing on the Prime Minister from the Labour and Liberal Parties to enter into negotiations with Sinn Fein; even King George V made a plea for peace.   In the summer of 1921 the IRA agreed to enter into talks and sent a high-level delegation lead by Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins to London.   With the agreement of all parties including the Conservatives a Treaty was signed in December 1921.
The Treaty partitioned Ireland and set up the Irish Free State with a Parliament in Dublin and a Parliament for Northern Ireland at Stormont in Belfast.   Ulster remained part of the United Kingdom.   The Republic of Ireland was given a similar status to that of Canada as a dominion within the British Empire.
Lloyd George thought he had found a settlement of the Irish problem by partitioning Ireland, but in doing so he made many enemies.   The Liberals resented his use of the Black and Tans. The Conservatives were angered because the union between Britain and Ireland had been destroyed.   These were not the only reasons for Lloyd George’s unpopularity.   Fundamentally the Liberals had collapsed and the Conservatives wanted to run the country.

Collins and his colleagues went back to Ireland thinking that they had triumphed in the negotiations, only to be met by outright hostility and opposition by the Sinn Fein Leader, Eamonn de Valera.    He would have none of it.   He blankly refused to ratify the Treaty.   His main grievances were the exclusion of Ulster and he wanted full republican rights without any strings attached.   
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In March 1922 Parliament passed an Act setting up the Irish Free State excluding the six counties of Ulster, the Free State to be effective from December 1922.
The Treaty agreeing to the setting up the Irish Free State said:
1)       Ireland shall have the same constitutional status in the British Empire as a self governing Dominion, with a parliament having the power to make laws; it shall be known as the Irish Free State.
2)       As with the other dominions, the British monarch would be the head of state of the Irish Free State (Saorstát Éireann) and would be represented by a Governor General
3)       The oath to be taken by MPs of the Irish Free State shall be in the following form:
I,…………….., do solemnly swear allegiance to the constitution of the Irish Free State, and that I will be faithful to HM King George V his heirs and successors by law, in virtue of the common citizenship".
4)       The government of the Irish Free State shall allow His Majesty’s Imperial forces:
(a)     In time of peace such harbour and other facilities as may be agreed….
(b)     In time of war or of strained relations with a Foreign Power such harbour and other facilities as the British Government may require.
(c)     British forces would withdraw from most of Ireland.
5)        If an address is presented to His Majesty by the Parliament of Northern Ireland to that effect, the powers of the Irish Free State shall no longer extend to Northern Ireland.
6)       Northern Ireland, which had been created earlier by the Government of Ireland Act would have the option of withdrawing from the Irish Free State within one month of the Treaty coming into effect.
7)       If Northern Ireland chose to withdraw, a Boundary Commission would be constituted to draw the boundary between the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland.
8)       It was agreed that the British navy could have three naval bases.
9)       The Irish Free State would assume responsibility for its part of the Imperial debt.
10)   The Treaty would have superior status in Irish law, i.e., in the event of a conflict between it and the new 1922 Constitution of the Irish Free State, the treaty would take precedence.
11)  Neither the Parliament of the Irish Free State nor the Parliament of Northern Ireland shall make any law to prohibit or restrict the free exercise of any religion, or impose any disability on account of religious belief.
In 1922 all Irish MPs withdrew from the House of Commons except 12 from Northern Ireland.   By moving out the Irish MPs the Unionists gained about seventy seats.    With the thirty they had gained as a result of the Redistribution Act they now had a hundred extra seats.   In a three party Parliament this was almost unassailable.   King George V opened the Belfast Parliament in person.   Ulster members still, however sat in the Westminster Parliament in order to maintain a close connection with Britain.   This was an illogical position.   Ulster members could vote on domestic matters effecting Great Britain but not those of Northern Ireland, which were now dealt with by the Belfast Parliament.   We have the same illogical position today regarding the relationship of Scotland with its own Parliament and Westminster.   Perhaps the “West Lothian” question should have been named the “West Belfast” question. 

The Irish Free State came into existence officially in December 1922.
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However, the disagreement between de Valera and Collins led to civil war between the two factions of Sinn Fein, which continued, until in 1923 the supporters of the Treaty claimed victory, but not before Michael Collins, the hero of Sinn Fein, and many other leading Irishmen had been killed.
The relationship between Britain and the Irish Free State after 1923 continued to change gradually.   De Valera formed a new party, Fianna Fail (Soldiers of Destiny) which won the election of 1932, mainly because the slump and unemployment had made the government of William Cosgrave highly unpopular.   De Valera, Prime Minister for the next 16 years, set about destroying the links with Britain, though without taking the final step of declaring a republic.   The oath of allegiance to the British monarch was ignored and in 1937 the Irish seized the chance offered by the recent abdication of Edward VIII to introduce a new constitution, making Eire completely independent in practise.   Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, made concessions in the hope of winning Eire’s friendship.   Debts amounting to £100 million still owing by Eire were written off, and the three naval bases handed back.   However, Eire remained unco-operative: de Valera would never be satisfied until he controlled Ulster.   Consequently Eire took no part in the Commonwealth, remained neutral during the Second World War, and in 1949 finally declared itself an independent republic. "Mastering Modern British History" by N.Lowe 
        William Cosgrave was the first President of the Irish Free State.   He had taken part in the “Easter Rising”.
        Of course the Irish question was not just a political one.   The impact on the people of the affected areas was immense.   In the fifteen years to 1926, but especially after the withdrawal of the British Army and disbandment of the Royal Irish Constabulary in early 1922, the twenty-six counties that became the Irish Free State witnessed the exodus of no less than 34 per cent of their Protestant population.   A large part of the Protestant population of the Free State was effectively ethnically cleansed out of the Irish Republic and their property grabbed.   Between 1910 and 1925 the Protestant population in the Irish Republic declined from 10% to 7%.
        Protestant homes, churches and public buildings were burnt down, as were many great houses, such as Palmerston in County Kildare, Castle Boro in County Wexford and Desart Court in County Kilkenny.   Massacres took place, for example fourteen Protestants were killed in West Cork on a single day in April 1922 and there was a flood of refugees."Salisbury Victorian Titan" by A. Roberts
 Many Catholics left the North of Ireland.   This was the price paid by many for Irish freedom.
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In November 1922 there was a General Election.   The Conservative and Unionists convincingly won it with 344 seats but once again we saw the distortion in our electoral system.   The Conservatives won 38.5% of the votes.   With a two Party election First Past the Post can produce a representative Parliament, but once you get three or more Parties we have frequently got a large proportion of MPs returned on a minority vote with a consequent distortion.   The Liberals were at a disadvantage; many Liberals came second and their votes were not reflected in the Commons.   In 1922 Liberals polled slightly more votes than Labour, yet won only 117 seats with over 29% of the votes, to Labour’s 142 seats, having risen from 57 seats, with a similar % of the votes.   The real winner was the Labour Party, whose vote nearly doubled – from 2,245,777 to 4,237,349.
   The Labour Party had become the second largest Party in the country and for the Liberals the 1922 result started their long campaign to change the electoral system to one of proportional representation.   Just as the Liberals favoured proportional representation the Conservatives and the Labour Party moved to an anti-position and this hardened with time, as they were the beneficiaries. 
 Taken together the old unofficial alliance of Labour and Liberal parties, captured 58.6 % of the popular vote, but the Liberals were split between the Liberals and the National Liberals.   The latter were a substantial beneficiary of no opposition from the Conservatives.   The Conservatives with just 38.5% won a majority of seats.    With the exclusion of the Irish Nationalists the House of Commons now consisted of 615 seats in total, a reduction of 92 seats from the 707 seats in the General election of 1918.

 The Tories had not been in office for much longer than a year before their leader Stanley Baldwin called another General Election.   The election was held on 6 December 1923.   The result came as a shock to everyone, but highlighted the vagaries of our electoral system.  The Tory vote went up slightly, from 5,502,298 to 5,514,541.   Labour’s rose from 4,237,349 to 4,439,780.   The Liberals, including the National Liberals also gained a few votes – up from 4,139,400 to 4,301,481.   These small changes produced a very different House of Commons – 258 Tories (down from 344), 159 Liberals (up from 115) and 191 Labour (up from 142).   This time the distortion between the number of seats and votes cast was not so great.   The Conservatives with 38% of the votes got 42% of the seats, Labour with 30.7% of the votes got 31% of the seats, whilst the combined Liberals with 29.7% of the votes got 25.9% of the seats.   In spite of being the largest Party in the Commons the Conservatives left it to the Labour Party to form a minority Government.
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Once Labour had formed a government in 1924 without the expected social revolution, Liberal prospects faded, largely through the quarrel between Asquith and Lloyd George.   Anti Conservatives began to vote Labour as the only way to keep Tories out.   It is argued that Baldwin calculated that by putting Labour into power it would either soften them or demonstrate that they were extreme – at which point they could be thrown out by the Liberals and Conservatives acting together.
 Within less than a decade the Liberal Party had moved from being the Party of Government to being the third Party in British politics, and at the same time watched the Labour Party overtake them in public support.   They have stayed in this position ever since.   The major problem for a third Party under our electoral system is that the electorate wants to vote for a Party, which has a realistic chance of forming a Government.   Once a Party is seen to be a third Party it is very hard to escape from that self-perpetuating trap.   In recent years third parties have got more votes from the electorate and the Labour Party has demonstrated that it is possible to move from being a minor to a major Party.   What all this really shows is that once you have three or more parties, the voting system becomes unstable and then substantial, even seismic change is possible.
During its brief period in office in 1924 the Labour Government proposed the abolition of the second votes for business proprietors – a move that would have seriously affected the Conservative Party.   Unfortunately, the Labour Party could not get their Bill through Parliament.   These undemocratic second votes persisted in our electoral system until the Labour Government abolished them after the Second World War – a move that kept Labour in power after the General Election of 1950.   These votes were particularly helpful to the Tories in city centre seats.

At the end of 1924 in yet another General Election Labour were thrown out of office.   The Labour vote increased by over a million votes though they lost 40 seats.   The chief reason for their defeat and the huge increase in Tory seats – to 412 – was the final demise of the Liberal Party, which lost 118 seats leaving it with a rump of 40 seats.   The Conservatives got 7,854,523 votes, a staggering increase, yet the distortion in our electoral system was as great as ever.   With 46.8% of the votes the Conservatives got a massive 67% of the seats.   Labour were not too badly off getting 24.6% of the seats with 33.3% of the votes, but the poor old Liberal Party were decimated only receiving 6.5% of the seats, although they had 17.8% of the votes.   General Elections were now clearly a lottery and have remained so since.  
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After the General Election pressure began to build to complete the unfinished business of reform of the House of Lords.   During an unguarded moment Lord Birkenhead, who was in the Cabinet committed the Government to bring in a Bill to reform the Lords.   It proved impossible on this occasion as on many other occasions in the future to agree a consensus on any scheme.
Over one hundred Conservative MPs opposed the Bill.   Conservative MPs often saw themselves as retiring to the House of Lords.   It was regarded as a great club.   The opposition to the Bill was lead by the newly elected MP John Buchan in his maiden speech.   He argued for the status quo saying that when the people wanted constitutional reform they would demand it.   The Bill fell.
1925 brought one of those quirks in British history, which have a profound effect.   During a debate on a private member’s Bill to give the vote to women at the age of 21 the Conservative Home Secretary, William Joynson-Hicks responded to an interruption by Lady Astor who was a passionate supporter of reform, with a pledge to introduce the reform at the next election.   What is more, he used a quotation by the Prime Minister in support of the pledge.   Although there had been no discussion in Cabinet, because Joynson-Hicks had used the Prime Minister’s name the Cabinet felt obliged to honour the pledge.   So, history is made.   As Winston Churchill wrote of Joynson-Hicks “Never was so great a change in our electorate achieved so incontinently.   For good or ill he should always be remembered for that”.
The Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925 made the purchase of honours a criminal offence.   This helped to prevent the purchase of peerages, but in practise it continued, but with a little more subtlety.   Under Lloyd George the selling of honours had been rife.   The press baron Alfred Harmsworth half jested “When I want a peerage, I shall buy one, like an honest man”.   He later became Lord Northcliffe!          

The sudden death of Sir Henry Craik, who held one of the university seats, in March 1927, had given John Buchan, the author of “The Thirty-nine Steps” the opportunity to enter public life.   There were twelve university seats in total and graduates of their respective universities elected their members in a postal ballot with what was in effect a second vote.   University members tended to sit loose to party affiliation and take an interest in educational matters.   There was little electioneering and few constituency engagements.   It was less physically demanding than a more conventional seat.   Buchan was raised to the peerage in 1935.
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Under the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act passed in 1928 women were given the vote on equal terms as men and the electorate rose to 28 million.   There was little opposition in Parliament to the bill and it became law on 2nd July 1928.   All men and women over the age of 21 now had the vote.   This was a triumph for democracy.   After all the pain and hard work at last women were now treated as the equals of men in our electoral system.   By one of those strange touches of irony, 1928 was also the year in which that great suffragette Emily Pankhurst, latterly a respected Tory MP, died, just one month before the Bill she had campaigned for, was passed.
By a touch of irony, Janet 'Jennie' Lee (1904-1988) was elected to Parliament as Labour MP for North Lanarkshire at a by-election in March 1929 when she was twenty-four years old. She was unable to vote for herself, as she was too young: the Equal Franchise Act, which had lifted the 30-year age restriction for women to vote, had not yet come into force.
Much progress on the road to democracy had been made.   All adults over the age of twenty-one now have the vote, but a flaw has appeared in the system used for electing our representatives.   Representation has become distorted with the use of the First Past the Post system of election.   With a two Party state representation is reasonably accurate, but with first of all the rise of the Irish Nationalists and then the Labour Party, Parliament was no longer representative of the people.   The necessity for proportional representation had arisen.
 Religious discrimination still existed.   The established Church no longer represented the whole of the United Kingdom yet it still had 25 Bishops in the House of Lords.   In Northern Ireland having abandoned proportional representation, the establishment of Stormont using First Past the Post brought with it no protection for the Catholic minority with tragic consequences for the next 75 years.
The search for real democracy continued.


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