Redistribution of Seats Act 1885

Background

The first major reform of parliamentary seats took place under the Reform Act 1832. The next redistribution of parliamentary seats occurred in three parliamentary acts in 1867–68. The Reform Act 1867 applied to English and Welsh constituencies. This was followed by the Representation of the People (Scotland) Act 1868 which redistributed Scottish seats and gave Scotland extra seats at the expense of England. The third act was the Representation of the People (Ireland) Act 1868.

The 1868 redistribution had proved unsatisfactory and there had been only superficial attempts to match the numbers of representatives to the population of a constituency. A few of the largest towns were given three MPs, but electors could only vote for two candidates. As a result, the political importance of these boroughs was reduced: for example, a borough formerly represented by two Liberals was now usually represented by two Liberals and one Conservative. In a Commons vote on party lines, the Conservative neutralised one of the Liberals, so that the borough only counted for one vote. Smaller boroughs with two members of the same party had twice the voting power in the house as the larger boroughs.

By the 1880s, continued industrial growth and resulting population movements had resulted in an increased imbalance between the constituencies in terms of the numbers of MPs and the population.

The Third Reform Bill

William Ewart Gladstone, leading a Liberal government, introduced a Representation of the People Bill in 1884, which sought to greatly extend the franchise but not to alter the boundaries of constituencies. The Liberals had a large majority in the House of Commons, and the measure passed through the House easily. The House of Lords, on the other hand, was dominated by the Conservative Party. The Conservative leader, Lord Salisbury, was opposed to the bill. The majority of the Conservative party's MPs were elected by the counties, with the Liberals being electorally strong in the boroughs. He realised that the bill's extension of household suffrage into the counties would enfranchise many rural voters such as coalminers and agricultural labourers who were likely to vote for the Liberals. This, he claimed, would lead to "the absolute effacement of the Conservative Party". Salisbury hoped to use the Conservative majority in the Lords to block the bill and force Gladstone to seek a dissolution of Parliament before the reforms could be enacted. The Lords duly rejected the bill and returned it to the Commons, provoking outrage among the Radical wing of the Liberals. A campaign organised around the slogan "The Peers Against the People" called for reform or abolition of the Lords if they rejected the bill a second time.

The "Arlington Street Compact"

In October 1884 Queen Victoria intervened in what was rapidly becoming a constitutional crisis, urging the party leaders to meet and break the deadlock. Negotiations duly started at Salisbury's London home in Arlington Street, Westminster, between the Conservative leader and Sir Charles Dilke, a member of Gladstone's cabinet. Salisbury agreed to allow the reform bill to pass on condition that a bill to redistribute parliamentary seats was also enacted. The two parties reached an agreement, known as the "Arlington Street Compact", whereby the majority of MPs would be elected in single-member constituencies. Salisbury calculated that this would minimise the adverse effect on the Conservatives of the extension of the vote: dividing the counties would allow Liberal voting and Conservative voting districts to be separated. The division of boroughs would allow the suburban areas of towns to be represented separately from the inner cities, allowing the growth of "Villa Toryism". Dilke, a member of the Radical wing of the Liberal Party, also favoured the division of boroughs in order to weaken the influence of the Whig faction in the party. In many existing two-member boroughs one Whig and one Radical were nominated by agreement, often leading to uncontested elections.

The Boundary Commissions

Three boundary commissions were appointed in late 1884, one for England and Wales, one for Scotland and one for Ireland. Each commission was given similar instructions.

In dividing the counties they were to use Ordnance Survey maps and other documents in order to determine the boundaries of divisions. In doing so they were to ensure that each division of a county was to have an equal population "so far as practicable". In addition they were instructed "in all those cases where there are populous localities of an urban character to include them in one and the same division, unless this cannot be done without grave inconvenience, and involving boundaries of a very irregular and objectionable character". Subject to these rules, the divisions were to be as compact as possible and should be based on "well known local areas" such as petty sessional divisions or other aggregations of parishes. If necessary, an individual parish or parishes could be added to existing areas in order to equalise population, but under no circumstances was a parish to be divided. The county divisions were to be named after an "important town or place" within it, "preference being given to any merged borough or boroughs, or when it consists mainly of a well-known area, from that area". When the commissioners had devised a scheme of divisions for a county the details were to be advertised in the local press. A date would then be announced when one of the commissioners would attend at "a principal town" in the county to hear objections or proposed alterations.

The procedure for boroughs (or burghs in Scotland) was similar. Firstly the commissioners were to determine whether the present boundaries, or the boundaries proposed in the bill, embraced "the whole of the population which ought to be included within the borough". They could decide if an area formed a "community of interest" with the town and should be included within the borough boundaries. Where suburban areas had a sufficiently large population and distinct identity they might form a county division rather than be included in the borough. If boroughs were extended, existing "well-established" boundaries were to be used if possible. Where boroughs were to be divided, the population of each division was to be approximately equal, and "special regard" was to be had to the "pursuits of the population". This was clearly understood as meaning that working class and middle class parts of towns were to be separated where possible.

Passage through parliament

The Bill was introduced to the House of Commons by the Prime Minister William Gladstone on 1 December 1884. The Bill was seen as a compromise measure, and did not include proportional representation. This led to unrest among the Liberals. Leonard Courteney, Financial Secretary to the Treasury, felt forced to resign his post and the party whip. Gladstone had held a meeting with Liberal MPs earlier in the day at the Foreign Office, where he defended the bill. He stated that far from being a compromise it was very much a government bill, and that the discussions with the opposition had been conducted with "no party bias". The bill received its second reading on 4 December 1884, and was then sent forward to the committee stage, which was to commence on 19 February 1885. The delay was to allow the boundary commissions to complete their work, with the boundaries and names of the new constituencies to be included as the schedules of the final Act.

In committee few changes were made to the boundaries recommended by the commissioners. However the committee felt that the proposed names for many of the divisions were unfamiliar, and preferred to use what they termed "geographical" names incorporating a compass point. A compromise was made where both were incorporated in the names of many of the constituencies: thus the seat officially called the "Northern or Biggleswade Division of Bedfordshire" was informally referred to as "Biggleswade", the "Biggleswade Division", "Northern Bedfordshire" or "North Bedfordshire".

The act received Royal Assent on 25 June, and the provisions of both the redistribution and representation acts first came into use at the 1885 general election.

Provisions

The basis of the redistribution under the Act was as follows: The number of seats in the Commons was increased from 652^a to 670.

In total 160 seats were redistributed (or "liberated" as Gladstone described it) in England and Wales. The number of seats in Scotland was increased by 12, and the representation of Ireland in Parliament remained at 103 members, even though its population had declined relative to the rest of the United Kingdom, due to emigration which had continued since the famine. This arrangement was described by The Times as "...obviously dictated by a somewhat pusillanimous calculation that it was better to avoid a struggle with the Parnellite party."

^a The number of seats had been fixed at 658 in the 1832 and 1867/8 legislation, but three two-member boroughs had been disenfranchised for corruption.

Consequences

The division of former two-member constituencies had a direct, clear consequence: it hastened the decline of the domination of Parliament by the aristocracy (formed of those who had won Royal favour and their heirs, many of whom were accurately referred to as the 'landed gentry'). After 1885, for the first time, MPs connected to industry and commerce outnumbered those related to the gentry.

The reduction in the number of two-member constituencies ended cross-party cooperation: before the Act, in many counties and boroughs the two main parties had agreed to nominate one candidate each, and no election was held. Many more contested elections followed the Act: only 13 constituencies were uncontested at the 1885 general election.

The aristocracy continued to dominate the Cabinet until the Asquith ministry; and the landed classes dominated the powerful Lords, who retained until 1911 power to veto legislation. Would-be Prime Ministers from that date would by convention need to be from the House of Commons, otherwise they would likely see votes of no confidence as the government's political leader for failure to steer winning manifesto legislation through the remaining vetoing House of Parliament. Reflecting a growing educated, urban population, the last Prime Minister in the Lords left office in 1902 in favour of an elected representative.

There was a growing radicalisation of political parties, which also became more professionally organised. Immediate expansion of the working class electorate caused the number of 'Lib/Lab' MPs to rise from 2 in 1874 to 13 in 1885. The Act's new seats saw a 1% single-party swing to the Conservatives and so a gain of only 10 seats and a similar gain of 11 seats by Independent Liberals, the latter often slightly more radical (redistributive) than both mainstream parties who may have been assisted by the broader electorates.

The sudden balance of power of seats held by the Irish Parliamentary Party was also connected with the Act. The IPP were often labelled particularly by the media and Conservatives as 'Parnellites'. This saw Gladstone make Home Rule his touchstone but, in so doing, distance his party from the legislative control of the Conservative peers who wielded equal or greater power, a change spurned on by the legitimacy of the Commons and a rise in the left caused by the Act. Opposition among Liberals was also growing to Home Rule. Conservatives could only form an overall majority from this date in the House of Lords until the Parliament Act 1911 which finally ended the constitutional equal power of the House of Lords.

132 small boroughs were merged with their surrounding county constituency, which had previously returned two members. These new single-member constituencies, particularly the most enlarged boroughs, assisted the Conservative party, which took a position of national strength and unity in opposing Chamberlain's radicalism (but also patriotism) in favour of education reform and opposing Gladstone's Home Rule "crusade" in favour of budgetary concessions and support for unionist Irish businesses. The Liberal Party won the 1885 General Election.

Under the single-member, single-choice system, bipartisan cooperation of two locally returned MPs was no longer possible, so it became easy to win votes by countering "weakness" and "division" from the line of a party leader which proved a flaw in the broad church of the Liberal Party until the formation of the final splinter group of 1931. Opposing political parties depicted Gladstone's resolute position on Home Rule, notably his failed first and second Irish Home Rule bills in 1886 and 1893 as the root cause of Liberal Party disintegration. This opposition by many incumbent Liberals and defeat in the House of Lords led to electoral landslide victories for the Conservative party in 1886 and 1895 to break the deadlock.