Electoral Reform in War and Peace, 1906-18

The Fourth Parliamentary Reform Act of 1918 gave the vote to nearly thirteen million men and over eight million women and determined the structure of electoral politics in twentieth-century Britain. Electoral Reform in War and Peace, 1906–18 (originally published in 1978) is the first attempt to explain this turning-point; it does so partly by exploring the relationship between reform of the franchise and reform of the electoral system between 1906 and 1918. The author’s analysis of the debate on Proportional Representation and the Alternative Vote sheds new light on the Liberal-Labour relationship in this period and shows why the Liberal and Labour Parties failed to reform the electoral system in 1917–18, thereby exposing themselves to twenty years of Conservative hegemony under the democratic franchise.

The book attacks the status conventionally accorded to the militant suffragettes, particularly the Pankhursts, in the achievement of votes for women; it argues that the Pankhursts played a negligible role, at best, after 1914, and that the real progress made before the war was the work of the non-militant women largely ignored by historians. The author also offers a reinterpretation of wartime politics as a struggle over the timing of the General Election delayed from 1915 to 1918 and shows how this led to the emergence of a Reform Bill, more by accident than by design, through the innovation of the Speaker’s Conference. He considers the struggle over the Bill itself and the light thereby thrown upon the decline of the Liberal Party.

Finally, the book analyses the relationship between wartime experience and political reform by arguing that reform grew essentially out of pre-war conditions, and by demonstrating how resilient attitudes remained under the impact of popular participation in the Great War. This forms a salutary corrective to the assumption that twentieth-century mass warfare had a democratising effect on British society.