Constitution Reform: Take Five

By Bukka Rennie
October 08, 2003

The last column concluded as follows:

"...It took us 112 years to move from emancipation (1834) to adult suffrage (1946) as compared to the British experience that took them from the Magna Carta declaration of 1215 to full franchise (Equal Franchise Act) in 1928, a period of 713 years.

"What does that tell us about the affairs of humanity, then and now? And, indeed, there are interesting parallels in terms of the interlinking of the struggles for democracy within production, on the factory floors, and the struggles for political democracy and political power. In fact together these two struggles have always provided the catalyst to constitution reform. That is the point..."

Just as the workers of T&T in the period 1932-1945 did not separate their struggle for democracy within and on the shop-floors from their political struggle for the franchise and home rule, so too interestingly did the British working-class in the previous century.

While the slave labour force in the Caribbean was seeking to finally break the backbone of the plantation production system and free itself from slavery around 1833, the working masses of Britain were seeking to rid their society of child labour.

In fact, from 1802, with the passage of the Health and Morals of Apprentices Act, they had won some amelioration with the age limit to child labour being raised to age seven. To comprehend and visualise the deplorable, austere conditions under which children laboured in early 19th century Britain, one will have to read the literature of the conscious writers and poets like Dickens and William Blake.

The first serious Factory Act to regulate the conditions of work was passed in 1833. That Act legislated that no child under 11 years must work more than nine hours a day, then the limit was raised to 12 years; a worker under 18 was prohibited from night-labour; also the Act legislated that time had to be set aside for lunch, Christmas Day and Good Friday had to be granted holidays; and each worker was entitled to eight half-days a year. And that, mind you, was a big step forward from what obtained prior to 1833.

In fact, a Factory Inspectorate (sounds familiar?) was set up and the factory inspectors had, by law, to visit factories and report their findings to the Royal secretaries.

Side by side with the series of Factory Acts were a series of Reform Acts that were also passed around this time. It was as result of constant agitation from below that this series of Reform Acts were passed in Britain between, say, 1832 and 1928.

The 1832 Act extended the right to vote to "any male owning household worth of 10 pounds" and this it was estimated added some 200,000 new voters to an electorate that was somewhere in the vicinity of 450,000.

Many historians attributed this attempt by the Crown to re-apportion representation in the House of Commons to reflect the growth and economic development of the industrialised cities in the North of England.

The fact that as a result this specific constitutional reform brought the vote to "one man in every five" has led other historians to insist that this Reform Act brought to the British similar rights to what the French Revolution of 1789 brought to the French. Be that as it may, the reforms of 1832 did not suffice and the "Chartist Movement" sprung up in response.

In 1838, four years after emancipation and the very year of the collapse of the attempted apprenticeship system in the Caribbean, the Chartists drafted their "People’s Charter" (remember that Dr Eric Williams also did a "People’s Charter" in 1956 for the launch of the PNM), in which they demanded the following: votes for all men; equal electoral districts; abolition of the requirement that Members of Parliament be property owners; payment for MPs; annual general elections, and secret ballot.

The Chartists collected 250,000 signatures supporting their demands and, in 1839, presented a petition to the House of Commons which was rejected by 235 votes to 46.

The leaders of the Chartist Movement threatened to take strike action and were promptly arrested, and when their supporters marched in the prison demanding their release, 24 of the latter protesters were killed and many wounded.

1842 they collected three million signatures yet the proposed reforms were rejected in Parliament. In 1848, there was a third attempt that was also rejected and the Chartist Movement thereafter died a natural death.

The Chartist Movement attempted to fashion constitution reform in order to guarantee a working-class voice in Parliament and to have influence on the political and economic decisions. In fact, there had been much debate and public opinion on the Corn Laws that many felt were anachronistic.

The British landowners had enjoyed the subsidies on corn since the late 1600s, it allowed them to keep prices high by debarring corn imports. But due to pressure from the aggressive, bludgeoning middle-class merchants and entrepreneurs in the industrialised cities, the British Government was forced to remove the subsidy in 1846, the very year that preferential treatment for Caribbean sugar was likewise removed.

The repeal of the Corn Laws meant that the merchant classes had assumed ascendancy over the more traditional landowners, and that this supremacy needed to be reflected in constitutional reform.

By 1867 another Reform Act had to be passed to extend the vote to millions more workers in the industrial cities. People actually debated in England whether this extending of the franchise to common folk would not have a negative impact on "high culture". Imagine that!

The reforms of 1884 and 1885, the Redistribution Acts, took the extending of the franchise now to agricultural workers and peasants and so tripled the British electorate, who by then were seeing the vote not as a privilege but a civil right.

Many will be amused to know that the Reform Act of 1918 gave the franchise to "all men over 21 and women over 30", and that it was not until the 1928 Equal Franchise Act that universal adult suffrage came to exist in Britain.

In each stage, however, it was the growth and development of the people at the bottom of society, in the factories and in their new industrialised cities, that fashioned the constitution reforms, even though piecemeal as they were indeed.

In T&T we know that we have to build the in-shore industrial/manufacturing sector into a sustainable integrated home economy. The question is: how is this to be reflected in constitution reform? For everything else can be deemed "bells and whistles".

Pt I | Pt 2 | Pt 4 | Pt 5 | Pt 6