Tag Archives: philip salmon

Mark Pack

Forgotten Liberal heroes: Earl Grey

By Mark Pack | Fri 29th April 2011 - 9:24 am

Nick Robinson has returned to the radio for a second series of his short portraits of British Prime Ministers and in the list this time is Earl (Charles) Grey, one of the figures I’ve previously highlighted as a forgotten Liberal hero.

Robinson’s piece is history as light entertainment – so it starts off with the connection between Grey and the tea that we now know as Earl Grey and then moves on to his high profile affair before getting stuck into the more serious aspects of his record. But as a quick canter through his life in a style that …

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged , , , and | 5 Comments
Alex Foster

PODCAST: How do the government’s political reforms measure up to the Great Reform Act?

By Alex Foster | Sun 3rd April 2011 - 5:15 pm

Soon after becoming Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg promised “the most significant programmes of reform by a British government since the 19th century…. the biggest shake-up of our democracy since 1832.” But how do the Coalition government’s constitutional changes actually compare to the changes brought in by the Great Reform Bill of 1832?

That question was addressed by a meeting organised by the Liberal Democrat History Group earlier this year, with speakers our own Dr Mark Pack (who studied nineteenth century elections and electoral reform for his PhD) and the History of Parliament Trust’s Dr Philip Salmon. Here now for those …

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Posted in Podcasts | Also tagged , , and | 1 Comment
Mark Pack

The technical details of electoral reform matter: Philip Salmon on electoral reform

By Mark Pack | Thu 3rd February 2011 - 9:55 am

The central thesis of Philip Salmon’s Electoral Reform at Work: Local Politics and National Parties 1832-1841 is that the details of the 1832 Great Reform Act matter because they had large and significant effects on the development of national politics and the embryonic modern party system.

Salmon investigates and illustrates how usually over-looked provisions, such as the introduction of electoral registers, encouraged the formation of semi-permanent political organisations at a local level with resulting frequent party conflict over electoral registration as people tried to get their supporters on the register and their opponents knocked off it.

Though in the Houses of …

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Posted in Books | Also tagged , , and | 2 Comments
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Recent Comments

  • cim
    @David Allen I think the key - for electoral communications, at least - is to skip the description of the process entirely and go straight to the outcome. Yo...
  • David Warren
    The last sentence sums up it for me. We are getting squeezed out in the majority of constituencies and the beneficiaries of the progressive protest vote are the...
  • Alex Macfie
    "those on the left don’t tend to see individuals but see people as members of identity groups," so do many on the Right, using "identity groups" to divide peo...
  • Jana
    My son-in-law is a police officer. He tells me that there is no point arresting shop-lifters as they always get bailed and will be shop-lifting again within the...
  • Jason Connor
    Well done for putting in the effort in an inner London constituency, and showing how it can be done. There have been similar issues in Greenwich where the rulin...