Local Democracy and Central Policy: The Issue of Pauper Votes in the 1920s

Abstract

It was axiomatic throughout the greater part of the nineteenth century that anyone who received public assistance should suffer a reciprocal loss of civil rights. The fundamental principle of the New Poor Law that the condition of the pauper should remain ‘less eligible’ than that of the poorest independent labourer obviously involved exclusion from the franchise. Indeed, it had long been the common law of Parliament that any person dependent for his livelihood upon the bounty of his fellows was thereby prevented from exercising a free vote. Thus John Stuart Mill, an ardent campaigner for female suffrage, saw no grounds for extending the vote to paupers: ‘I regard it as required by first principles, that the receipt of parish relief should be a peremptory disqualification for the franchise. He who cannot by his labour suffice for his own support has no claim to the privilege of helping himself to the money of others.’ In practice, of course, disqualification did not become an issue of real substance until the Reform Act of 1884, by which time the dogmatic individualism which underlay the Poor Law was being eroded—or at least more selectively applied.