'Gender provides the key to understanding the history of the politics of disruption'. Discuss Flashcards
1867 Second Reform Act
increased the English borough electorate from under
500,000 to almost 1.2 million, rising to nearly 1.7 million by
the early 1870s as a combination of legislative changes and
legal test cases expanded the definition of the ‘householder’
franchise. Its impact in the counties was much more modest—
here the electorate in England and Wales rose from 540,000 to
790,000,
Rhetoric and politics in Britain, 1850-1950-H.C.G. Matthew, 1987
Vast new electorate and changing press structure meant that the complex structure of extra-parliamentary national debate never recovered rude late-Victorian health
Incr politicians’ words reached only the ‘professional’ audience: media men, the party faithful and their political opponents. Electorate… no longer met its representatives, except occasionally, through verbatim reporting
Partisanship of reporting increased markedly
During the inter-war years chief means of political communication of the late Victorians had become the whim of an agency editor
This process was speeded on its way by the development of radio
Politics and the people: a study in English political culture, c. 1815-1867-James Vernon1993
Print was used to reconstitute the public political sphere in an ever-more restrictive fashion, excluding groups believed to be ‘irrational’ like women and the illiterate poor from the public political debate
This period witnessed marked incr in the political uses of print. Development encouraged by a series of legislative measures which privileged the uses of print in order to erode the public and collective character of oral and visual politics with a conception of politics as the private affair of (male) individuals
Citizenship of the political nation was provisional upon the posession of reason, virtue and independence, and therefore mass political participation had to occur within the private realm of the home, a setting conducive to rational political debate and thought, unlike the often passionate and emotive public arena of the streets.
This period witnessed a marked decline in people’s ability to shape the political appeals available to them as the official political subject was redefined in the image of print
Difficulty of preserving distinctions between audience, actors and producers within the visual public performance meant more likely for visual politics to expand the political arena rather than reduce it
Presence of women alongside disenfranchised male counterparts testified to assertion of a distinct female presence, not afraid to celebrate its skills.
What changed after 1854 was the manner of the press’ reception, which was increasingly private and individual, rather than public and collective.
Print imposed fixed, verbatim meanings.
Access to printed media improved 1850s and 60s, but remained considerably more restrictive than its oral and visual counterparts.
During Gladstone’s speeches, if he used a word wrongly, or if he felt audience had misinterpreted him, he gestured to the reporters to replace the faulty word or to ignore the reactions of the audience
By the 1860s this trend gathering momentum and it was apparent that audiences were increasingly divested of much of their power to lead and shape the direction of the speeches they heard.
Growing use of ticketed media events such as dances, dinners, tea-parties left journalists to report the inevitable.
Ballot papers - illiterate and semi-literate electors required help of a literate person to put their mark or signature in the right place
From the late 1830s, ticketing increasingly became an exclusive rather than an inclusive weapon, used by Chartist and radical groups to discipline the popular political audience
Popular political audience never entirely tamed or discipline. Disruption and hijacking of meetings to pass contradictory amendments and resolutions was not new.
Women were at the centre of this redefinition of radical and Tory political culture. Hitherto, women who had entered the political arena independently of men had been castigated as wayward, wicked women. Feminine respectability belonged only to those women who did not step outside their clearly delineated private roles as wives and mothers. Redefinition of both radical and Tory cultural politics during the 1830s did not lessen the exclusive manliness of the public political sphere, rather it sought to facilitate women’s public support of masculine political crusades by organising ‘social events’ which encouraged the participation of whole families. Women were only politically enabled if they stuck to the social politics of the family. Culture of politics was re-gendered in an equally exclusive fashion
Citizenship of the new model democracy entailed duties and responsibilities which could only be fulfilled through the virtuous independence afforded by reason and education and their natural vehicle print. In short, print allowed politics to be taken off the streets, it transformed the popular public and collective experience of politics to one centred upon the primarily male individual as head of the private family home
Curtailing of visual politics
1827, Election Expenses Regulation Act banned distrib and use of ‘any Cockades, Ribbon, or other Marks of Distinction’ for 6 months either side of an election.
Statutes of this Act reaffirmed by Corrupt Practices Acts of 1853 and 1883
1872 Secret Ballot Act removing potential for disruption according to Vernon
indoor polling booths assured the dispersal of potential crowds of ppl, thereby reducing the risks of intimidation and disorder.
No longer could disenfranchised vote at the nomination or hold a vigil beside the hustings to intimidate the voters.
Decline of range of electoral ceremonies like processions to and from the hustings
Vernon on the ‘politics of disruption’
Politics of disruption was important because it was the means by which competing political groups contested each others’ rights to restrict the freedoms of speech and assembly and, by inference, the exclusive definition s of the public political sphere that ticketing inevitably entailed.
As the century progressed and the disciplines of party politics hardened, so the tempestuous disruption of meetings declined. They became increasingly newsworthy precisely because they had become so unusual
Vernon on party and the politics of disruption
Invention of party was central to the closure of the public political sphere.
disciplined, regulated and disabled popular politics. Print pivotal to the invention of party as it enabled construction of national party organisations
Grammars of Electoral Violence in Nineteenth-Century England and Ireland-K. Theodore Hoppen1994
Indictable offences in 1871 34.6 per cent higher in England and Wales than in Ireland
Ireland maintained a modest lead of I4 per cent in 187I as regards ‘offences against human life’ (such as murder, attempt to murder, shooting at, stabbing at, doing bodily harm, and manslaughter) and a very substantial one of around 8o per cent with respect to riot, breaches of the peace, assaults, malicious offences against property, and attacks upon ‘peace officers’.
What, in this respect, lay at the heart of the distinction between nineteenth-century England and Ireland was the increasingly divergent nature of the two societies. England continued to industrialize and urbanize. Ireland remained rural and agricultural. In 1861 about 58.7 per cent of the population of England and Wales lived in ‘towns’ of 2,500 and more inhabitants; in Ireland only 19.4 per cent lived in places of even 2,000 and more.4 Inevitably English crime became a town phenomenon while Irish crime did not
As people moved into towns so their interest for, the kind of communal protest characteristic to evaporate. Whereas election rioting had once constituted ment, so to speak, of communal violence in general, with the decline of the latter it became isolated and marooned
From having been closely related both to agrarian patterns of violence and to the sense of carnival which public political activity had long displayed, electoral disorder (where it survived at all) soon lost touch with the former and eventually even the latter
in England, seventy-one ‘separate incidents of serious disorder which broke out in conjunction with election cam- paigns from I865 to i885.
Yet, despite this, he was unable to discover even a single fatality
English election mobs tended more and more to consist in whole or part of toughs hired for the day at so much an hour - a kind of induced violence.
During the I867 Birmingham by-election the centre of the town was described as being in ‘the possession of blacklegs, prize fighters and thieves’.
In certain boroughs the ‘rent-a-mob’ system had become so institutionalized that participants were accorded special local titles, ‘bullies’
at Warwick
electoral versions of the pastoral to be found in Ireland were dramatically more violent in every way
Generated by rural concerns.
The fact that all kinds of outrages in nineteenth- century Ireland (whether agrarian or not) were more common in rural than urban areas suggests that, in a continuingly agricultural society, it was above all the discontents of the countryside which helped to deter- mine the nature of crime and violence in general.
The shifting imperatives of tenant farmers, plots of potato ground on a regular basis from cash and labour payments), and landless labourers security of tenure, wages, and the availability - could easily take on a formal political and electoral character.’ The ‘faction fights’
in Ireland the greater violence of the mobs gave those without the franchise an altogether higher profile.
In Ireland sectarianism pursued an altogether more rugged existence. The violence of English religious riots (most of which were of an anti-Catholic nature) paled into gentility when compared with the outbreaks at Derry in I869 and Belfast in I864, I872, and I886
In almost every sense, the electoral violence of the I85os and i86os and early I870s was identical with that of forty years before.
great majority of election mobs came from the countryside, that, more often than not, it was a case of labourers and cottiers invading the nearest urban polling place armed with the weaponry of their rustic quarrels and pursuing agrarian disputes by other means
Eventually, however, the post-Famine demographic collapse of the cot- tiers and labourers (who had always provided the shock troops for elec- toral and other rioting) helped to change the entire character of political culture. Popular politics became increasingly defined by the aspirations of the rising tenant farmers, whose particular priorities came to inform that symbiotic combination of certain kinds of agrarian and political demands which constituted the core of Parnell’s Home Rule movement of the I88o
confused nature of the Irish franchise before I850, when many prosperous men were without the vote and quite a few poor men found themselves on the registers, made it difficult for O’Connell to sustain unambiguous campaigns aimed at clearly-defined audiences.3 His constant need to appease a wide and variegated public, including not only well-to-do farmers but the more numerous and marginal cottiers and agricultural labourers, gave his condemnations of violence - in the microcosmic electoral sense, if not the larger revolutionary one - some- thing of a hollow ring
By achieving so strong a dominance, especially after the replacement of the Land League by the National League in 1882, Parnell unwittingly helped the farmers to establish a more sophisticated repertoire of agrarian action and, at the same time, to ‘modernize’ electoral processes by excluding much of the ‘primitive’ rustic violence of former times.
In part flowed from changing social make-up of the Irish countryside.
Parnell helped to align Irish electoral culture more and more closely to the models which had long characterized the English scene
barrister E. W. Cox, in a famous guide to electoral practices which went through ten editions between I847 and i868
Generally, an election crowd is very good-tempered. At a nomination they will sometimes try to silence, and even to drive away, a candidate personally or politically disliked, and occasionally they endeavour to help, as they think, a favourite, by frightening opposing voters from the poll. But these are excep- tional cases, and, as a rule, an election assemblage is good-tempered enough … thoroughly English, and has the English admiration for ‘pluck’; face it and fear not.
press on politics of disruption 1874
reporting that in England ‘mobs, processions, favours, free fights, and punch-drinking have become for the most part things of the past’, and certainly that year’s brief general election campaign was notable for its calmness and quiet
Threatening letters and notices (not a species of outrage to be dismissed lightly) proved as useful at elections as they had long been in disputes between farmers, proprietors, and labourers over the availability and cost of land.
1852 example
. A Horible Notise to John Harroughty … not to vote wth Gore if ye do i will Leave yor head soar fur i am Moly Maguire … i will hough, skin and rake yor carcass by hind the fire … ill card ye to the bone but if ye vote for Mr Swift i wil let ye alone.
County Louth 1865
traversed by mobs 30,000-strong carrying ‘bludgeons, scythes, and other weapons
The Nineteenth-Century Gentleman Leader Revisited-Belchem, John ; Epstein, James1997
Hunt and O’Connor vouchsafed the platform’s self-sufficiency:
integrity above the factionalism and apostasy of party politicians and
the specious independence of other parliamentary radicals.
For Bright and Gladstone, by contrast, constitutionalism became a self-selective language of
acceptability, drawing aspiring new citizens away from the crowd into an enclosed culture of
progressive improvement, party politics and constituency organization. Responsible citizenship
was integrally linked to the civilizing process
As exercised by Bright and Gladstone, ‘charismatic
leadership’ was sanitized and divorced from the lively interaction and open access idioms of the
past.
As they carried constitutional radicalism to its limits, Hunt and O'Connor drew upon another tradition of gentlemanly politics, that of high-class rabble rousing.
Feted on the streets as a ‘lord of misrule’,
Wilkes briefly enabled the crowd to remind the established authorities of the limits beyond
which free-born Englishmen were unwilling to be pushed
As the personification of the radical cause, the gentleman leader’s independence cut two
ways. On the one hand, freedom from financial dependence meant that he was less prone quite
literally to ‘sell out’ the movement,
on the other hand, it was difficult
for the radical movement to hold leaders like O’Connor and Hunt strictly accountable,
particularly with regard to specific policies.
mutual flattery of the platform was a stylized form of bonding. Thus following Peterloo (16 August 1819) working people throughout Lancashire and Yorkshire donned white hats in imitation of Hunt:
Where Hunt had stood forward as ‘an humble country gentleman’, embodying
romantic and charismatic larger than life figures
Popular radicalism resisted co-option, remaining independent of compromising extra-parliamentary
alliances, as well as from party and parliament: indeed, this was the oft-repeated advice
of both Hunt and O’Connor. The independence of the gentleman leader, committed only to
the programme and forces of radicalism, mirrored radicalism’s own independence and reliance
on the support of an oppressed and excluded ‘people’. During the 1840s O’Connor laboured
to translate the independence and energy of the mass platform to the National Charter Association
Biagini, in particular, has stressed the continuity between popular radicalism and popular
Liberalism’s demand for the suffrage.34 However, formal programmatic similarities can prove
misleading. The meaning of’universal’ suffrage and notions of’democratic’ citizenship are very
unstable, shifting over time and space, gender and race
Both Stephens and Bright used evocative
religious language, but the contexts were quite different in terms of the dynamics of public
space and symbolic power: meanings were not the same. O’Connor’s appearance at torchlight
meetings and his loyalty to Stephens played a role similar to that of Hunt’s presence at Spa Fields
and Peterloo and his attendance at the trial of the Pentridge rebels; both gentlemen associated
themselves with popular radicalism’s threatening edge, both embraced the politics of ‘forcible
intimidation’
In this period
nearly every radical gentleman of the platform suffered imprisonment in connection with
public demonstrations: Hunt, O’Connor,
The public meeting was in itself a challenge to authority
the massive occupation of public
space transgressed elite views of order and legitimate participation
Improved efficiency on the part of the police, nuisance and
other municipal authorities brought greater control of key sites of assembly and display
Liberal moralization of political discourse. Through a series of oppositions and exclusions,
manhood and independence came to be identified with the vote as the just reward for the
respectable
In the debates of 1866-7 Liberal politicians like Gladstone and
Bright sought to fix as citizens respectable working men, standing against the ‘polluting’
residuum of the poor as well as reinforcing ‘proper’ relations between the sexes.68
On the new-style platform, popular Liberalism was able to legitimize its exclusive character
in familiar fashion, by mutual admiration between leader and audience
Bright and Gladstone borrowed many of the tropes associated with the radical gentleman of
the platform, but they did so only when it suited them, on an occasional and very selective
basis. Both ‘demagogues’ went for long periods without addressing any public meetings.
But these men were also adroit insiders
They met their
publics very much on their own terms, whether on the printed newspaper page, within the
controlled space of the indoor meeting or political dinner, from special trains on whistle-stop
tour, on pilgrimage to Hawarden Castle. The streets and taverns, torchlight meetings and moorland
summits, the birthing places of plebeian radicalism and its language were left behind, as
were many labouring men and women and finally an older style of gentlemanly leadership.
The cultural context of popular politics had changed together with its associated meanings.
Speaking for the people: party, language and popular politics in England, 1867-1914-Jon Lawrence1998
Popular politics
remained far from ‘tamed’ before 1914
far from being an ‘anachronistic and irrelevant
aspect of public life’, the stylized repertoire of election violence and
intimidation could be used to legitimate genuinely radical and subversive
forms of popular politics
professional politicians were frequently mythologised for their
acts of bravery and strength in facing down the ‘politics of disruption’
Violence itself was not
‘manly’ by this code - only when ‘provoked
before the First World War popular politics
were inextricably linked with definitions of ‘manliness’ which stressed
physical strength and bravery.118
When ‘suffragette’ protesters began disrupting political meetings in the
1900s they were thus consciously appropriating the rituals of (male)
popular politics to highlight their own exclusion from political power.
Women thus found that the traditional political tactics of disruption and mass protest were effectively denied them by the willingness
of their opponents to use physical violence. This was in part because violence
was still integral to English popular politics
also because the case against
women’s suffrage still drew on the argument that citizenship rights were
derived from the ability to bear arms in defence of the state
much was done to de-legitimize the role of violence in
politics after the First World War
Three main factors may lie behind this apparent shift in the
character of British politics. Firstly, it seems likely that the desire to de
legitimise political violence was part of a much broader desire to restabilise
society after the traumas of war, and to purge public life of ‘masculinist
fantasies’
fear that civil society brutalised
Secondly, the growth of far Right and far Left politics
underline the dangers of war producing
a brutalised polity. As ‘the politics of disruption’ came to be seen
as the special tactic of fascist and communist group
Finally, there was also the influence of partial female enfranchisement in
1918. The political parties were very unsure how to address the new
female electorate, and decidedly fearful of how it might vote.
Many felt that electoral politics would have to be ‘feminised’
disruption examples
Lansbury recalls how party activists organised the disruption of
Tory meetings in the locality, and how they were able to thwart their
opponents attempts at retaliation by hiring local ‘heavies’ to defend
Liberal speakers and to despatch hecklers
Colonel Fred Burnaby, the famous soldier and adventurer, was the
subject of particularly colourful myth-making after he was killed in action
on the expedition to relieve Gordon at Khartoum. A strong Conservative
and imperialist he had fought Chamberlain and the Liberal caucus at
Birmingham during the 1880 General Election - a pretty hopeless
prospect.
study of his life published in 1908
tells of him silencing two hecklers at a difficult meeting in Wolverhampton by leaning over the platform and pulling them out of the audience - one on each arm
met police mid-1880s
went to great lengths
to curtail the right of socialist agitators, and their libertarian supporters,
from holding political meetings in public places such as Dodd Street in
the East End, and most controversially, Trafalgar Square in the West
End
Contesting the male polity: the suffragettes and the politics of disruption in Edwardian Britain-J. Lawrence, 2001
in many constituencies pitched battles over the right to hold meetings in front of the town hall.
Ticketing frequently exposed a party to the charge that it was too unpopular to hold a genuine open meeting. The alternative was to rely on a plentiful supply of burly stewards and on the fighting instincts of one’s supporters
Thus, force was central to the dynamics of the English political meeting during the era of (partial) male democracy between 1867 and 1914.
Manliness celebrated - meaning forbearance and self-control, but also control of one’s body and physical “presence”.
Presence of women at a meeting often encouraged as a symbol of respectability, politicians arguing that ladies need have no fears of being outraged at their meetings
women continued to assert a presence in many of the more theatrical forms of street politics - especially at the hustings
Women more visible as public political figures in the late 19th C
As campaign of militancy evolved, so the suffragettes’ understanding both of the existing political system and of the impact of their own actions evolved with it
WSPU’s message oft suffered from dissonance introduced by engagement with the messy world of popular or “street” politics
Disruption tended to be viewed both as appropriation of male rights and customs by women and as a strategy designed to expose the brutality and misogyny at the heart of the existing male polity
Suffragettes disrupting the wrong meetings - set-piece ticketed - for the wrong reasons - national publicity.
Became easy to accuse suffragettes of being hooligan outsiders
Women who disrupted meetings frequently subjected to considerable violence both by party stewards and mems of the audience
Suffragettes became part of the sport of politics for many men
For self-proclaimed female rebels, hard to mobilize ideals of chivalry and morality as defense against male violence.
Once response to this problem was for suffragette protesters to make habit of dressing in fine and ostentatiously feminine attire
Brutality vs women at polit mtg suggested men fell short of own standards of manliness and chivalry - could no longer be trusted w political power.
Belief that violence done to women demonstrated the desperate need for the polity to be “feminized” as soon as possible.
Billington-Grieg 1906
- revealing abuses to shake men out of complacency.
By engaging in politics of disruption suffragettes may have been locking themselves and allies into world of partisan street politics, where recourse to physical force routine and struggles over local “legitimacy” more import than abstract claims to chivalry and sex equality.
Should be wary of assuming that gender can explain everything when studying women’s impact on public politics
emph on “feminization” misleading - many mainstream politicians from all parties long wished to purge pop politics of disorderly/ violent qualities
WSPU saw contest as marking beginning of new style of Br politics. Pankhurst - most uplifting aspect of Lansbury’s campaign 1912 was no fierce jostling crowds (etc)
Post-war politicians’ perceptions of political instincts of women strongly influenced by pre-war women’s mvmnt
Lowell on disruption, 1908
“Englishmen regard an ordinary political meeting as a demonstration, rather than a place for serious descussion, and as such they think it fair game for counter demonstration”
Wakefield 1868
group of local mill-girls carried out a mock “chairing” involving a fellow female worker dressed in the colours of the Liberal candidate
Fiery female campaigner
Lady Randolph Churchill
Beginning of tactic of intervening at cabinet ministers’ meetings
Oct 1905
Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney at Sir Edward Grey’s meeting at the Manchester Free Trade Hall.
Tactic for women to stand and demand to know whether govt would introduce immediate legislation to enfranchise women on the same terms as men
Manchester mtg not full-blown disruption.
Two women obeyed normal rules - waited until chairman asked for q’s. Didn’t heckle.
Rebellion was in determination to force a “women’s issue” into arena of male party politics
Teresa Billington-Grieg on WSPU change of tactics
from 1906 - interruption policy of heckling
Mary Gawthorpe at Mid-Glamorgan
Oct 1906 - widely celebrated in suffrage circles bc Evans had recently talked out a women’s suffrage bill
Liberal organizers in north Wales
tendency to allow admittance only to women who spoke Welsh, underlining the ‘outsider’ status of the would-be protester
Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence recalls how at the Peckham by-election of March 1908
Christabel Pankhurst on an improvised platform in centre of crowd of men was able to win crowd with her wit and perserverance
Miss Molony
vs Churchill at Dundee by-election 1908. Found enough sympathizers among working men at open-air mtgs to prevent Liberal party stewards from silencing her.
Turned up brandishing large railway-porter’s bell, which she threatened to ring continuously until he issued an apology for allegedly insulting the WFL about its role in recent Peckham by-election
Women’s militant campaign destabilized more than just gender identities
Mary Richardson account of being rescued by a vicious mob by a huge, coloured man, who then admonished the so-called gentlemen for their disgraceful behaviour
men’s involvement in suffrage militancy helped complicate dynamics of gender politics
Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage
Hannah Mitchell - ILP sympathisers in northwest 1890s would form bodyguard
Disruption less important as a suffragette tactic
after the first “truce” of 1910
Militancy never whole movement
Within a yr of Grey’s Free Trade Hall mtg suffragettes, in dramatic break w trads of public politics, had extended campaign vs cabinet ministers into private lives, and also organized their first mass lobby of parliament
Reasons for declining suffragette violence
thoroughness of Liberal counter-measures
Evelyn Sharp tells of a woman mistakenly thrown out of a meeting when she asked only for a window to be opened - story maybe apocryphal, but little reason to doubt polit mtgs became more male-dominated
Ticketing oft stricter or blanket bans. Segregation of men and women became common
First systematic window-breaking
Sylvia Pankhurst, 1909 - “protest against violence done to women”
Lord Cecil Public Meetings Bill
Dec 1908, to prevent disruption of set-piece meetings
The Transformation of British Public Politics After the First World War-J. Lawrence2006
Victorian and
Edwardian customs that had legitimized an active, assertive
popular presence in public politics fell rapidly into disrepute
after 1918
plebeian traditions
of heckling, disruption and disorder reproduced
themselves in the forum of the election meeting, which grew rapidly in importance from the 1870s
Two factors lay behind
this rather liberal approach to public order
test of a politician’s ‘character’
remained a strong sense, derived in part from classical
thinking, that a healthy polity was one based upon a vigilant and assertive citizenry
preferable to
the sterility and ‘illegitimacy’ of holding closed meetings of the party faithful
Even those prepared to concede that ‘oratory will change but few votes’ still believed meetings essential, partly because they were the best means of enthusing supporters, partly because even a few converts could easily decide a pre-war election, but mainly because electors expected and demanded them
1880s on the social background of candidates began to change
with the emergence of Lib-Lab and then independent Labour
politics, and with the Liberals’ growing reliance on professional, ‘carpet-bagger’ candidates
Michael Dawson has argued that in
rural Devon and Cornwall election meetings became decidedly
more orderly after the First World War,
However, in conurbations
such as London, Birmingham, Glasgow and Liverpool, where
pre-war traditions of disruption had been sustained more by
popular custom than party cash, disorder appears to have remained a persistent feature of public politics between the
wars.
As the 1920s progressed, politicians gradually became more confident in their ability to mobilize the new voters. Canvassing techniques were refined to cope with a mass electorate, and many of the populist techniques of pre-war electoral politics
were rediscovered. In part this was an economic story. Rapid deflation after 1920 meant that statutory election expenses
(which remained unchanged) began to stretch further
Thanks to the combined impact of the motor car and electric amplification (widely available from 1924), politicians expected to hold more election meetings, and reach more electors, than
ever before
The extension and feminization
of the franchise, the collapse of ‘deferent practices’,
and the proliferation of fears about ‘brutalization’, revolution
and later fascism transformed the context of popular politics
after 1918 and convinced the majority of politicians from all
three main parties that the ‘old ways’ could no longer be tolerated.
taming of politics of disruption, Lawrence
Conservatives who did most to orchestrate
the attacks on Labour ‘rowdyism’ during the general elections
of 1923 and 1924.
. At a Conservative meeting in Erith, south-east London, a local Labour leader was dragged from the platform when he tried to appeal for ‘fair play’
Labour still held revivalist-style meetings, and some of its key leaders, such as MacDonald and Philip Snowden, were amongst the greatest exponents of old-style public
oratory, but this should not obscure the fact that the average election meeting was a rather humdrum affair in interwar Britain.
In early 1922, the Labour Organiser went further in its critique of the old-style politics, claiming that the ‘printed word is fast assuming the power and importance enjoyed hitherto by the spoken word’.
After 1918 men excluded from the franchise were
termed ‘youths’ rather than ‘non-electors’
Lawrence taming post-1918 factor 1
combined impact of legal changes to the conduct of elections and the expansion of the electorate under the ‘Fourth’ Reform Act
significant reduction in election expenses allowed
under the Corrupt Practices Act.
This hit hardest in 1918,
when wartime inflation meant that costs were running at more than twice their pre-war level.
Michael Dawson, ‘Money and the Real Impact of the Fourth Reform Act’
Lawrence taming factor 2
the changed character of the
electorate, especially the enfranchisement of women on a large scale and the elimination of the male ‘non-elector
low turnout (57.2%) in 1918, and at many subsequent by-elections, confirmed the impression that the 1918 act marked a great watershed in British politics, undermining old certainties about electioneering
Unaware that
turnout had also been low for most of the nineteenth century
(1885 marked a clear break here), political activists sought ways to energize the apathetic new voters
feminization
of the polity in 1918 transformed the context of public politics,
greatly weakening the perceived legitimacy of old-style ‘macho’ electioneering.
The Times warned that the public would not
stand for women being ‘exposed to physical violence’ in this way,
Lawrence taming factor 3
the breakdown of ‘deferential practices’ and of belief in ‘natural’ social hierarchies under the strain of war and post-war transition
Lawrence taming factor 4
impact of post-war fears about revolution and ‘brutalization’ on notions of legitimate and illegitimate forms of popular involvement in politics
Labour leaders were determined to portray themselves as the
voice of an organized, self-disciplined and, above all, rational public
sober, rational and essentially domestic ‘public opinion’ increasingly idealized in the rhetoric of interwar politics
W. G. Runciman
‘deferent practices’, that is reciprocal social roles performed to
smooth relations between individuals with different levels of
power and social prestige, ‘cease[d] to be functional for either
side’ in the years after 1914
persistence of politics of disruption
despite politicians’ rhetorical appeals to a domesticated,
‘privatized’ public, in urban areas large sections of the
British public remained stubbornly wedded to the ‘old ways’.
Standing as a ‘National Labour’ candidate at Leicester West in
1935, Harold Nicolson recorded facing hostile meetings with
‘working men and women lowing in disgust and hatred
at the end of such meetings ‘the people who had yelled
loudest came up to me and said they hoped I hadn’t minded, and that they wished I was on their side’
‘Pictorial Lies’? Posters and Politics in Britain c.1880 1914-J. Thompson2007
Hedderwick’s 1892 description of posters as ‘weapons of the
ancient electioneering hurly-burly’ highlights continuities in the politics of disruption in which posters continued to be ripped down or covered up
Small-scale locally produced
pictorial posters, drenched in highly particular allusions,
mayhave been on the decline, in part usurped by the greater use of photographs, but window-postering remained popular and local letterpress posters abounded
posters were part of the contest for public space, within the charged atmosphere of a political culture which acclaimed strong convictions, vigorously expressed
Electing our masters: the hustings in British politics from Hogarth to Blair-Jon Lawrence,Oxford Scholarship Online (Online service)2009
irreverent spirit of the hustings
lived on long after the formal abolition of public nomination
and open voting in 1872. Plebeian traditions of heckling,
disruption, and mockery resurfaced in new contexts, most
obviously in the election meeting, which grew massively in
importance from the 1870s
age-old contest between heckler and speaker at British
elections can therefore be read as a highly developed
manifestation of class war. On one level, heckling simply
underscored the forced egalitarianism
What changed after 1867 was not so much the level of
disorder, as the political and social context in which disorder
was understood. In many boroughs non-voters were for the
first time in a minority
after the introduction
of the secret ballot in 1872, it became impossible to determine who was a bona fide party supporter—selection came to rest instead with party members, or, more often, with the ruling
committees of local party organizations
no accident that, alongside
the Ballot Act, the government also introduced a bill to
prohibit the use of public houses for election meetings or as
committee rooms
Act itself also introduced new powers to
prevent disorderly behaviour in or around polling stations
widespread fear of mob violence and intimidation
henceforth no MP was to be unseated for intimidation, but it had always been notoriously difficult to prove intimidation
even if electoral politics was not transformed overnight by
the legislation of the 1870s, historians are right to see these changes as a deliberate attempt to tame the excesses of popular political culture
all agreed that a
closed meeting was next to useless as a propaganda tool.
Instead, they were advised to secure adequate stewarding to control troublemakers. They were also told to encourage women to attend in large numbers, as this usually improved behaviour
tendency for
candidates to plough on with a speech despite such vociferous
disruption that they would be inaudible even to the
strategically placed press reporters. In part this was simply a
displaying
‘pluck’, but it also reflected awareness of the
customary belief that (p.62) a meeting had not been ‘broken
up’ if it lasted more than an hour.
any truly
popular candidate would be able to rely on his friends and
supporters to ensure a successful public meeting. True,
organized disruption was generally deplored, but few
candidates saw much to be gained by advertising the misdeeds
of their opponents. When forced to explain the disruption of
their meetings, they usually sought to portray the culprits as
unsavoury hirelings from outside the constituency
Politics as a whole
was becoming more, rather than less, populist at the close of
the nineteenth century, as the parties grappled with the
challenges of the new mass politics. At Westminster politicians
might seek to tame popular political customs through
legislative reform, but in the constituencies they tended to
bow to the logic of electoral necessity
In an
important sense Labour politics represented not the beginning
but the end of class politics in Britain—henceforth it could no longer be assumed that a vast social and economic gulf
separated the candidate from most ordinary voters. In
consequence, rituals which fed off class distinction, and the symbolic disavowal of social difference through face-to-face public contact began to lose some of their cultural power
vulgar populism
characteristic of Edwardian elections was already losing
favour before cinema or radio came on the scene. Three main factors were crucial here: the political and cultural lessons
drawn from ‘total war’ and its chaotic aftermath, the impact of female enfranchisement in 1918, and reactions to Labour’s sudden post-war breakthrough—
