The Vote

Description

The dramatic story of the peoples’ fight for the right to vote in Britain

The culmination of a lifetime’s work by the great journalist and historian Paul Foot, The Vote tells the thrilling story of the hard, long-fought struggle for the right to vote in Britain, and the slow erosion that followed.

In the tradition of “history from below,” Paul Foot examines the great democratic debates that dominated the fight for electoral democracy. Taking readers from the smoke-filled church of the Putney debates, to the dramatic arguments between Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke in the aftermath of the French Revolution, to the rise of Chartism and the struggles for votes for women.

Throughout, Foot shows how vested interested first delayed and then hobbled the progress of parliamentary democracy. Concentrating on the vital role played by direct action, he shows how rank-and-file resistance to ruling-class injustice was followed by retreat into parliamentary impotence. Into the twentieth-century, Foot exposes the gaps between the promises of a succession of Labour governments and their actions once in power, and its abandonment of any aspiration to economic democracy.

A gripping work of narrative history, written in Paul Foot’s inimitable energy and engaged style, this book is a classic work of history, and a must-read for anyone interested in how today’s political scene was formed.Introduction

PART I: How the Vote was Won
1647: Crows and Eagles at Putney
1790-1832: The Not-So-Great Reform Act
Revolt of the Chartists
The Leap in the Dark
Women

PART 2: How the Vote was Undermined
1918-18: Mond’s Manacles
The Grey Decade
1940-51: The Stupendous Convulsion
Unstable Compound I: 1951-70
Unstable Compound 2: 1970-79
New Labour = Old Tory: The Tory Counter-attack and the Labour Surrender
Conclusion: Their Democracy and Ours

Bibliography
Index“Foot’s greatest book”
—Tony Benn

“Passionate, energetic and invincibly cheerful: the qualities of his final book are also a monument to the man himself”
—Francis Wheen, Guardian

“Foot at the height of his powers. Here is the superb journalist, historian, advocate again saying the unsayable”
—John Pilger

“A work of true scholarship … irresistibly readable”
—Roy HattersleyPaul Foot was the outstanding left-wing journalist of his generation. For many years he was an investigative journalist for the Daily Mirror. In his later years he wrote for Private Eye and the Guardian. His many books include The Politics of Harold Wilson and Murder at the Farm. Paul Foot died in 2004.GB

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