Millions of working-class men got the vote 100 years ago too The focus this week will understandably be on the women who got the vote for the first time 100 years […]

The focus this week will understandably be on the women who got the vote for the first time 100 years ago – but the 1918 Representation of the People Act changed more than just that.

Britain is fond of its “mother of all Parliaments”, but until the reforms of the last century, its democracy was restricted to the few: wealthy men, some of whom could even vote in more than one constituency.

When the 1918 Act became law on 6 February 100 years ago, it ushered in a wholesale philosophical change. Suffrage for men was no longer based on owning property or at least paying a handsome rent – it was a right that every citizen had automatically if they were over a certain age.

Along with the millions of women who were eligible for the first time, a generation of working-class British men, including many who had fought (or were still fighting) the First World War, had a chance to choose their own representatives.

All change

The horrors of the war had left their mark on British society in a number of important ways, shutting the door on the Victorian age and dragging Britain to the uncertain 20th century at last.

Looking at the state of British democracy in 1918, the civic-minded citizen might have noticed the following things: firstly, the suffragettes had mostly taken a patriotic step back as the men of the country went to the trenches, with Christabel Pankhurst and her supporters handing out white feathers to any young men they found on the street in civilian dress.

“Women, your country needs you,” Millicent Fawcett had written in 1914.

“As long as there was any hope for peace, most members of the National Union probably sought for peace, and endeavoured to support those who were trying to maintain it. But we have another duty now… Let us show ourselves worthy of citizenship, whether our claim to it be recognized or not’.

But secondly, as peace loomed, the prospect of radical protest or even a resurgence of violence from campaigners would have been a difficult prospect for a fatigued nation.

Old militancy

“Yet the memory of the old militancy, and the certainty of its recurrence if the claims of women were set aside, was a much stronger factor in overcoming the reluctance of those who would again have postponed the settlement,” said Sylvia Pankhurst in 1918.

Thirdly, no one could question the contribution of Britain’s women to the war effort, through working in industries previously dominated by men and through conscientious consumption. Women made great sacrifices on the domestic front and, many politicians thought, had a earned their vote.

But finally and something that would have been important to the British establishment, giving women the vote under the same rules as men was dangerous. Hundreds of thousands of British soldiers had died in the war, leaving not only fewer men in bulk numbers in the population, but also a demographic gap as that generation grew older and gained the vote under the old rules.

Majority of women

We see the problem: giving the vote to women without restriction could result in an almost permanent majority of women – a serious worry for conservatives given the decades of propaganda about how female voters might be unsuited to the job.

If Britain’s democracy was going to open up – and there was plenty of opposition, including from an MP who attempted to call a referendum on the matter – it was going to have to open up to more men, too.

An obvious constituency of men presented themselves: those who had fought in the war but who, because of their class or wealth, had no right to vote.

In 1910, only 60 per cent of men had the vote. The position of men as a whole was not that of full citizen by contrast to ignored women. Britain’s was an elite democracy – up until the moment, in 1918, when it took a major step to change that.

When the Act passed into law, on 6 February 1918, it wasn’t just about women’s suffrage. As well as enfranchising eight million women, more than five million men suddenly became eligible too.

Britain’s soldiers

The change brought in the generation that did much of the fighting in the Somme and Gallipoli, bringing the age bar down from 30 to 21. For those still in active service – the war was still going on, after all, the age was brought down to 19, and those who were overseas were allowed to vote by post or by proxy.

The Home Secretary, George Cave, reminded his fellow parliamentarians that the sacrifice of those men should render questions about class and qualification redundant.

“War by all classes of our countrymen has brought us nearer together, has opened men’s eyes, and removed misunderstandings on all sides,” he said.

“It has made it, I think, impossible that ever again, at all events in the lifetime of the present generation, there should be a revival of the old class feeling which was responsible for so much, and, among other things, for the exclusion for a period, of so many of our population from the class of electors. I think I need say no more to justify this extension of the franchise.”

Imperfect system

Of course, there was still plenty about the new system that differentiated it from what we recognise now as the British system.

It was far from one person, one vote, with 7 per cent of the population having the writing to cast more than one ballot. University graduates could vote in their university seat as well as their home, while there was also a provision for businessmen.

The best the 1918 Act could do was reduce the maximum number of votes per person to two.

It also excluded women under 30 and those who did not meet property requirements – a fairly open effort to keep the male majority.

Equal franchise

But when women did finally get the vote on the same terms as men in 1928, it was on the grounds of “equal franchise” – giving them the rights men had been granted in 1918.

The Act repealed 27 statutes and modified one more, sweeping away much of the complex political engineering built into the franchise system.

The 1928 bill added five million more voters and made women the majority, at last, in the 1929 general election.

Almost a century on, no one would argue – apart from billionaire Peter Thiel, perhaps – that that has had anything but a positive effect on society.