Radicals (UK)
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Radicals
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| Founded | 1750s |
| Dissolved | 1859 |
| Split from | Whigs |
| Merged into | Liberal Party |
| Ideology | Radicalism (British) |
| International affiliation | None |
| Colours | Red |
The Radicals were a loose parliamentary political grouping in Great Britain and Ireland in the early to mid-19th century, who drew on earlier ideas of radicalism and helped to transform the Whigs into the Liberal Party.
The Radical movement arose in the late 18th century to support parliamentary reform, with additional aims including lower taxes and the abolition of sinecures. Working class and middle class "Popular radicals" agitated to demand the right to vote and assert other rights including freedom of the press and relief from economic distress, while "Philosophic radicals" strongly supported parliamentary reform, but were generally hostile to the arguments and tactics of the "popular radicals". The term “Radical” itself, however, as opposed to “reformer” or “radical reformer”, only emerged in 1819, during the upsurge of protest following the successful conclusion of the Napoleonic War.
Radicals inside and outside Parliament were divided over the merits of the Whig Reform Act 1832. Some continued to press for the ballot and universal suffrage, but the majority (as mobilised in unions like the Birmingham Political Union) saw abolition of the rotten boroughs as a major step towards the destruction of what they called "Old Corruption" or "The Thing": "In consequence of the boroughs, all our institutions are partial, oppressive, and aristocratic. We have an aristocratic church, an aristocratic bar, an aristocratic game-code, aristocratic taxation....all is privilege".
The 1832 parliament elected on the new franchise – which raised the percentage of the adult population eligible to vote from some 3% to 6% – contained some fifty or sixty Radicals, a number shortly doubled in the 1835 election, leading many to envisage a House of Commons eventually divided between Radicals on the one side and Conservatives (Tories and Whigs) on the other.
But in fact the Radicals failed either to take over an existing party, or to create a new, third force. There were three main reasons. The first was the continuing strength of Whig electoral power in the half-century following the 1832 Act. The latter had expressly been designed to preserve Whig landlord influence in the counties and the remaining small borough – one reason a radical like Henry Hetherington condemned the bill as "an invitation to the shopocrats of the enfranchised towns to join the Whiggocrats of the country". Whigs were also able to profit in two-member constituencies from electoral pacts made with a more reforming candidate.
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Wikipedia