After the 1906 election, the Liberal Party were elected on a huge landslide victory over
their main rivals, the Conservative party.
They had a transformative manifesto, promising the foundations of Britain’s modern welfare
state; national insurance, unemployment benefits, sickness pay, free healthcare for children,
school meals, old age pensions, workplace injury compensation, and the whole thing would
be paid for by...the wealthy aristocracy.
This was known as the People’s Budget.
But of course the wealthy aristocracy were not happy with having to pay for all that
free stuff.
Luckily for them, they had a trick up their sleeve.
While the Liberals held the House of Commons, it was the Conservatives who held the majority
in the House of Lords.
Remember those guys?
Yeah the Tories from earlier are called the Conservatives now, get used to it.
The Liberal Party were proposing this budget in the Commons, which means it had to pass
through the Conservatives in the Lords.
So every time the People’s Budget passed the Commons, the Lords would simply reject
it.
So the Liberals drew up another law; The Parliament Act.
This act would put limits on how often the House of Lords could reject legislation; three
times and then the Commons can bypass them, going straight to the King for approval.
Predictably, the Lords said No.
This set off a crisis in government – who should hold the power?
The people who own the country, or the people who live in it?
To prove they had popular backing, the Liberals called not one but two elections in 1910,
which they narrowly won both.
But the Lords refused to budge.
Eventually, King George V had to step in: “If you do not pass this law, I will appoint
tons of new Liberal Lords who will overpower you and never allow you to veto any laws ever
again”.
This was the first time that the monarch played an active roll in politics in over two hundred
years, and we all know what happened the previous two times.
So you know it was serious.
This was enough to scare the Lords into submission, and they approved both the Parliament Act
and the People’s Budget.
From now on, the elected Commons, the house to represent the ordinary people, are more
powerful than the unelected Lords.
Today, the Lords cannot veto any proposed laws more than three times, and can’t oppose
anything that the government promised in the last election.
Most of their work focuses on scrutinising the work of the government and recommending
improvements to the law – which of course, the Commons are free to ignore.
But it’s incredibly boring, which is why you hardly ever see footage from the Lords
chamber on the news.
There is one exception; they can reject any proposed law that delays or cancels an upcoming
election of the Commons.
That way, if a fascist political party ever gets in power and tries to ban democracy,
it is, ironically, the undemocratic house of Lords who can stop them in their tracks.
Speaking of elections, at the time of this whole Parliament kerfuffle, only men who owned
property were allowed to vote.
Wouldn’t it be nice if some of their property were allowed to vote too?
For example...their wives.
One common argument against Women being allowed to vote was that their vote could only ever
double or negate her husband’s vote, so it was either giving a man a second vote or
making it worthless.
Another argument was that women would eventually demand multiple votes in case they wanted
to change their votes multiple times on polling day because they can’t make up their mind.
Which is totally wrong but I can get why they would think that would happen.
However, the main argument was simple enough; there is the public sphere and the private
sphere.
If you cross the two, the whole of society will collapse.
At the time, there were two main groups campaigning for women’s suffrage in the UK.
The Suffragists was the name given to members of the National Union of Women's Suffrage
Societies, led by Millicent Fawcett.
These were just regular campaigners for women’s suffrage, and were the larger group.
Membership was open to women and men, and their activities mostly revolved around petitions
and lobbying and peaceful marches and so on.
But the Suffragettes, which you’re probably more aware of, was a derogatory term for members
of the Women’s Social and Political Union.
This isn’t some People’s Front of Judea type situation, the two groups were really
quite different.
The WSPU was for women only and led by Emmeline Pankhurst and her three daughters, who were
all pretty much complete lunatics.
Instead of lame marches and boring posters, the Suffragettes were a bit more...hands on
than their Suffragist counterparts.
They did things like setting fire to post boxes
smashing up shop windows throwing rocks at politicians
vandalising priceless paintings with knives defacing currency
chaining themselves to the gates of parliament
and many more things.
At one point they even blew up the house of Chancellor David Lloyd-George, even though
he supported women’s suffrage.
So I don’t know what they were thinking there.
This woman threw herself under a horse and died.
Woah.
When they were inevitably arrested for their militant tactics, many of the suffragettes
went on hunger strike in protest.
And that wasn’t going to last long because scores of dead women in prison makes the government
look...bad.
Many prison governors instituted a policy of force feeding by tying down the prisoner
and inserting a tube into their nose and down their throat, then cracking an egg down that
tube so that they wouldn’t starve.
Mmm-mm! yummy
And would you believe, this was even worse PR for the government.
Wow, what a shocker.
So next, the government devised the so-called “Cat and Mouse Act”; a new law where being
a hunger striker got you released from prison, and then when you get home and have a meal,
the police will come to your house and re-arrest you and take you back to prison to serve the
rest of your sentence.
And if you went on hunger strike again, they’d just keep doing it.
Again, and again, and again- “someone just shot Franz Ferdinand”.
[war sounds]
In the first eight weeks of the war, 750,000 men had signed up to join the army and were
promptly shipped out to France, leaving a massive hole in the workforce.
To prove themselves just as capable as men, the Suffragettes suspended all violent activity
to focus on winning the war – the Pankhursts may have been lunatics, but they were patriotic
lunatics.
They took up factory work while the men were away fighting on the front lines – which
completely shattered the argument that the two societal spheres should stay separate.
But despite this, the Suffragettes didn’t give up their rebellious streak; the Women’s
Social and Political Union attempted to drive up recruitment to the army by harassing non-uniformed
men in the street and handing out white feathers; a symbol for cowardice.
At the end of the war, the men in government realised that women were indeed just as capable
as men, and granted all women the right to vote...provided they were over the age of
30.
It was later lowered to 21, the same as men, in 1928.
The first group of women who exercised this new right to vote was actually on the tiny
Scottish island of St Kilda, who, the day after the act was passed, participated in
the daily meetings held by the village elders for the first time.
Cute.
As you no doubt will have noticed, many of the rights guaranteed by these previous documents
are quite...patchy and come with many asterisks.
Freedom of speech – for Members of Parliament The right to own a gun – for Protestants
Votes for Women...over 30.
But this next document will try and fix all that, as the most comprehensive list of liberties
in all of our thousand year history.
Before 1998, UK citizens who thought their rights were being trampled on had to go all
the way to the European Court of Human Rights if they wanted to challenge the government.
Before the UK signed the European Convention in 1950, if a right wasn’t on the rule books,
it wasn’t safe from abuse.
After their landslide victory in 1997, the Labour party introduced the Human Rights Act,
finally putting into law all the rights and liberties of the common man.
Anyone who thinks their freedom is being stamped on can use this document in court for a powerful,
one stop guide to their ancient liberties.
It is essentially just a copy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as written by
the United Nations, but this time with full legal force instead of just being an advisory.
We’re talking dignity, liberty, equality, free movement, free association, free speech,
property laws, citizenship laws, religious liberty, healthcare, privacy, fair trials,
democracy, and education.
It’s all in there.
800 years of struggle for human rights neatly culminated in one single buttery document
covering the whole slice of toast.
Oh yeah.
That’s the stuff.
Now disputes can be heard in a UK courtroom instead of going to the costly and bureaucratic
European court.
Although you can still appeal to them if you think the UK courts made the wrong decision.
Of course, this act and all the other acts aren’t untouchable or immune from abuse.
Parliament has the power to do whatever it wants because legally it gets its power from
the Monarch who gets it from God.
Declaring the Right to Free Speech is fine, but in one afternoon parliament can pass an
act watering that down or striking it out of existence entirely.
Which, by the way, the Conservative party are planning to do right now.
So maybe this section won’t apply in the near future.
Maybe it’s time to make this constitution official.
One that is above parliament and cannot be changed without popular approval.
It doesn’t have to be an all-powerful untouchable document like the Yanks have but it should
be a merged PDF of all our key legislation into one document.
Then adopted with a nationwide referendum, approval by all devolved governments, and
a strong majority in Parliament.
I think that’s fair.
We should probably get on this now rather than later because we’re entering a period
of big uncertainty that could determine that direction of human history, and while the
UK ranks highly on the list of Countries Most Likely to Survive the Apocalypse, that doesn’t
mean your civil liberties are going to come out the other side intact.
So fight for your ancient rights, fight back against tyranny, and ensure that, as former
Justice Secretary Jack Straw said, "The constitution of the United Kingdom exists in hearts and
minds and habits as much as it does in law”.