As the country gears up to vote in what has been termed the “Brexit Election”, we’ve been given some thought to the universal suffrage movement and the right to vote.

For many groups of people the right to vote has been hard won. The concept of universal franchise, also known as general suffrage or common suffrage of the common man, encompasses the idea that every adult should have the right to vote, regardless of wealth, income, gender, social status, race, or ethnicity, subject only to minor exceptions.

In early-19th-century Britain very few people had the right to vote. A survey conducted in 1780 revealed that the electorate in England and Wales consisted of just 214,000 people – less than 3% of the total population of approximately 8 million.

During the late 18th century and the early 19th century, pressure for parliamentary reform grew rapidly. Influenced by works such as Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man radical reformers demanded that all men be given the right to vote. Reform groups were committed to universal ‘manhood’ (i.e. adult male) suffrage.

The three parliamentary reform Acts introduced in 19th-century Britain (in 1832, 1867 and 1884 respectively) satisfied moderate reformers rather than radicals. The Prime Minister, Lord Grey, supported reform to ‘prevent the necessity of revolution’ and was responsible for the Great Reform Act of 1832. However, the Act gave the vote in towns only to men who occupied property with an annual value of £10, which excluded six adult males out of seven from the voting process.

The Tory politician Lord Derby described the second Reform Act (1867) as ‘a leap in the dark’. And yet only two in every five Englishmen had the vote in 1870. Even the third Reform Act (1884) – which enfranchised all male house owners in both urban and rural areas and added 6 million people to the voting registers – fell some way short of introducing universal manhood suffrage.

During the early 20th century, suffrage movements grew including the well known women’s suffrage campaign. In 1894 the Castle Bromwich Race Course was opened by what is now Bromford Bridge, In May 1914, the grandstand was burnt down by women of the Suffragette Movement. The cost of the damage ran into many thousands of pounds. Lilias Mitchell was sent to Winson Green prison for her actions in this and for placing a bomb on Birmingham Railway Station. She went on hunger strike (not for the first time), became ill and was subsequently released.

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References

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/citizenship/struggle_democracy/getting_vote.htm