Cultural Materialism On Raymond Williams - Monoskop

288 David Lloyd and Paul Thomas
side that of the Swing Riots, melodramatically ringing London with
flames, 28 to negotiate a line of retreat acceptable to all but the most
diehard defenders of "Old Corruption." By admitting to the franchise
only the unambiguously, solidly middle class, by drawing the line
between them and the lower orders with scrupulous care, and by
superimposing the parliamentary representation of the newly enfranchised
onto an established system of "virtual representation,"
without seriously dislodging this system, 29 middle-class reformers
proffered to a reluctant Parliament the very compromise that would
strengthen all parties concerned—except, of course, the workers
movement, which was left high and dry. "They had united all property
against all poverty," said James Bronterre O'Brien. 30 Only such
an accommodation on favorable terms of the manufacturers with
the landed elite would enable yet another line to be drawn, in short
order, in 1834: the Less Eligibility Principle as enshrined in the Poor
Law Amendment Act, the New Poor Law.
The workers movement's fervent opposition to this Draconian
measure suggests that workers understood full well what later historians
proved able to ignore that the 1832 Reform Bill could be considered
an advance in democracy (as opposed to liberalism) only in
the light of subsequent developments that 1832 was designed not to
encourage or promote but expressly to forestall. 31 The newly augmented
ruling-class coalition, however divided on issues of principle
(most dramatically, the Corn Laws) it may have been, could at a
pinch always close ranks against the (rarely insurrectionary) threat
of universal suffrage from below. This is why there was no solid
phalanx of aristocratic opposition to the rise of industry and of political
economy, its intellectual counterpart. The landed classes duly
survived the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. The landed gentry
continued to populate the cabinet, to monopolize the representation
of rural areas in Parliament, and often to represent urban areas too.
It never needed to fight a rearguard action against capitalism. The
manufacturers, for their part, gained virtually unlimited freedom of
maneuver from the 1832 settlement. George Loveless described the
Whig governments of the 1830s as a "tyrant faction," and there is no
reason to regard this view of them as exaggerated. We need only
look to the measures it enacted. The Tithe Commutation Act of 1836
and repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 were hits at the aristocracy, to
be sure, but the hits at the workers were much more serious, con-