Reform Act 1832 - Assessment

Assessment

Several historians credit the Reform Act 1832 with launching modern democracy in Britain. G. M. Trevelyan hails 1832 as the watershed moment at which "'the sovereignty of the people' had been established in fact, if not in law." Sir Erskine May notes that " reformed Parliament was, unquestionably, more liberal and progressive in its policy than the Parliaments of old; more vigorous and active; more susceptible to the influence of public opinion; and more secure in the confidence of the people," but admitted that "grave defects still remained to be considered." Other historians have taken a far less laudatory view, arguing that genuine democracy began to arise only with the Second Reform Act in 1867, or perhaps even later. Norman Gash states that "it would be wrong to assume that the political scene in the succeeding generation differed essentially from that of the preceding one." E. A. Smith proposes, in a similar vein, that "when the dust had settled, the political landscape looked much as it had done before.

Historians have long pointed out that, in 1829–31, it was the Ultra-Tories or "Country Party" which pressed most strongly for Reform, regarding it as a means of weakening Wellington's ministry, which had disappointed them by granting Catholic emancipation and by its economic policies.

Evans (1996) emphasises that the Reform Act "opened a door on a new political world." Although Grey's intentions were conservative, Evans says, and the 1832 Act gave the aristocracy an additional half-century's control of Parliament, the Act nevertheless did open constitutional questions for further development. Evans argues it was the 1832 Act, not the later reforms of 1867, 1884, or 1918, that were decisive in bringing representative democracy to Britain. Evans concludes the Reform Act marked the true beginning of the development of a recognisably modern political system.