What do you think?
Rate this book
The Vote: How It Was Won and How It Was Undermined
Taking the reader from the English Civil War to 2005, Paul Foot traces the struggle for universal suffrage, and shows how concern for property first delayed and then finally hobbled the movement towards parliamentary democracy.
Hardcover
First published January 31, 2005
13 people are currently reading
205 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
January 27, 2021
Marvellous.
Informing, insightful and inspiring.
Amazingly apposite for a disillusioned member of the Labour Party today.
Informing, insightful and inspiring.
Amazingly apposite for a disillusioned member of the Labour Party today.
September 5, 2012
Overton, Lilburne, Hunt, Pankhurst are some of the many names that are inextricably linked to the battle to win universal suffrage down the centuries. Battles both physical and philosophical played out against backdrops of tyranny, revolution and tumult as British men and women earned their right to cast a vote in secret for an MP of their choosing. The concept of democracy is by its very nature revolutionary, that an ordinary person can hold the power in a pen to usher an unsuitable candidate away from the governing minority is true freedom and terrifying to the ruling class. We know it is terrifying because of all they have done to stultify and suppress this heroic art form. The easier it has become to vote, the less the vote has mattered, and the less the vote has mattered the more we wish it was otherwise.
The power of vested interest has always sought to keep the burden of control upon its own class and business interests. The partial replacement of the aristocracy with a plutocracy in the 19th century was just that, a replacement. The bourgeois element in society saw an opportunity to become the dominant class in society and they took it, all the while promising, unlike in France, to let the landed gentry keep their wealth and property and assurances that the country would be governed with the wealthy in mind. This was all very easy until the dawn of universal suffrage which meant the ruling classes had to be a little more conniving to keep their level of privilege.
The 1945 Labour government, with its collection of nationalisations and democratisation not just of politics, but economics and society too shook the very foundations of the elite to the point where they collaborated to say, “this must never happen again!” The post war consensus of social democracy and government for the good of the people must be consigned to the dustbin of history, but how to do it now that the working man and woman can have their say?
The answer lay not in the reversal of those hard won parliamentary rights but in the greyer area of accountability and the occupation of economics by an almost militaristic cabal, psychopathic in its desire to render government impotent. If the people have the power to elect then we take the power away from those elected thus making the vote irrelevant. This along with basic avarice is the reason what we now call neo-conservatism, or neo-liberalism came to the fore. The obsession with low tax, low wage, highly privatised economies comes from a desire to remove power from you and I. And it became so successful that it co-opted the Labout party, if not the labour movement.
It is only under this system that any business can become too big to fail. It is only under this system that a national government can become accountable to the faceless “markets” rather than the society that elected them, and that is the reason we have toothless MPs and bureaucrats who have grown up in politics rather than in any “real” job. They are taught from a very young age to obey the system as it is the system that can remove them from power much quicker than the electorate, as the Eurozone crisis continually proves. The revolving door between Westminster and corporations shows you only need one term as a relatively junior minister to be accepted as “one of them” – gaining the trust of industry translated in to money they pay you to lobby your old friends in government. That door works both ways as well, people from banking or other areas in the corporate sector are brought in to government as Champions and ridiculously, Tsars, or simply as policy advisors. Do we really think ex-city employees want to solve the problems in the City of London while they and their ex-colleagues are still raking it in at our expense? All political parties have wilfully gone along with this hoax of democratic accountability when in truth the CEO of Tesco has more power and influence than the Prime Minister, and we currently very much have a Tesco Value Cabinet.
They’re all Tories in truth, they are all defenders of class privilege and the status quo, that is why Labour are terrified of the unions – unions are one of the few forms of democratic body left in the country – and the ruling class don’t like it. If you stand too close to them you will burn too when the torches of class war are lit by vested interest.
Universal suffrage gave us the right to be consulted, we were charged with the responsibility to shape and change events instead of observe them, instead of acting on this we let these rights be stripped from us and fell back in to the shadows of history through our own misplaced trust and no small amount of apathy. We believed them when they told us they had our interests at heart when they sold off the coal mines, the railways and now the NHS and the post office. The only interests the ruling class has is their compound rate of interest on whatever wealth they have squirreled away and whichever country piles they own as investment opportunities. Capitalism and democracy are hopelessly incompatible; democracy is a continuing strive to make the best for all people whatever their background and to give people a say in how governance impacts on their lives, capitalism is about keeping the most for oneself and to hell with the rest of you.
Paul Foot’s final book explains all this much better than I can as he deftly manoeuvres us around the dark corridors of suffrage history and the terror it briefly instilled in the ruling class. From 2004, this book saw the ills that were coming our way and can also be utilised, certainly the final chapters, as a manifesto for resistance and cooperation. We can take democracy back to the people, and how to do that is in this book.
The power of vested interest has always sought to keep the burden of control upon its own class and business interests. The partial replacement of the aristocracy with a plutocracy in the 19th century was just that, a replacement. The bourgeois element in society saw an opportunity to become the dominant class in society and they took it, all the while promising, unlike in France, to let the landed gentry keep their wealth and property and assurances that the country would be governed with the wealthy in mind. This was all very easy until the dawn of universal suffrage which meant the ruling classes had to be a little more conniving to keep their level of privilege.
The 1945 Labour government, with its collection of nationalisations and democratisation not just of politics, but economics and society too shook the very foundations of the elite to the point where they collaborated to say, “this must never happen again!” The post war consensus of social democracy and government for the good of the people must be consigned to the dustbin of history, but how to do it now that the working man and woman can have their say?
The answer lay not in the reversal of those hard won parliamentary rights but in the greyer area of accountability and the occupation of economics by an almost militaristic cabal, psychopathic in its desire to render government impotent. If the people have the power to elect then we take the power away from those elected thus making the vote irrelevant. This along with basic avarice is the reason what we now call neo-conservatism, or neo-liberalism came to the fore. The obsession with low tax, low wage, highly privatised economies comes from a desire to remove power from you and I. And it became so successful that it co-opted the Labout party, if not the labour movement.
It is only under this system that any business can become too big to fail. It is only under this system that a national government can become accountable to the faceless “markets” rather than the society that elected them, and that is the reason we have toothless MPs and bureaucrats who have grown up in politics rather than in any “real” job. They are taught from a very young age to obey the system as it is the system that can remove them from power much quicker than the electorate, as the Eurozone crisis continually proves. The revolving door between Westminster and corporations shows you only need one term as a relatively junior minister to be accepted as “one of them” – gaining the trust of industry translated in to money they pay you to lobby your old friends in government. That door works both ways as well, people from banking or other areas in the corporate sector are brought in to government as Champions and ridiculously, Tsars, or simply as policy advisors. Do we really think ex-city employees want to solve the problems in the City of London while they and their ex-colleagues are still raking it in at our expense? All political parties have wilfully gone along with this hoax of democratic accountability when in truth the CEO of Tesco has more power and influence than the Prime Minister, and we currently very much have a Tesco Value Cabinet.
They’re all Tories in truth, they are all defenders of class privilege and the status quo, that is why Labour are terrified of the unions – unions are one of the few forms of democratic body left in the country – and the ruling class don’t like it. If you stand too close to them you will burn too when the torches of class war are lit by vested interest.
Universal suffrage gave us the right to be consulted, we were charged with the responsibility to shape and change events instead of observe them, instead of acting on this we let these rights be stripped from us and fell back in to the shadows of history through our own misplaced trust and no small amount of apathy. We believed them when they told us they had our interests at heart when they sold off the coal mines, the railways and now the NHS and the post office. The only interests the ruling class has is their compound rate of interest on whatever wealth they have squirreled away and whichever country piles they own as investment opportunities. Capitalism and democracy are hopelessly incompatible; democracy is a continuing strive to make the best for all people whatever their background and to give people a say in how governance impacts on their lives, capitalism is about keeping the most for oneself and to hell with the rest of you.
Paul Foot’s final book explains all this much better than I can as he deftly manoeuvres us around the dark corridors of suffrage history and the terror it briefly instilled in the ruling class. From 2004, this book saw the ills that were coming our way and can also be utilised, certainly the final chapters, as a manifesto for resistance and cooperation. We can take democracy back to the people, and how to do that is in this book.
August 6, 2011
An impassioned and very well told history of both heroism and tragedy, confidence and passivity, promises and betrayals, with as many lessons for now as ever.
August 11, 2016
A great book from the much missed Paul Foot, and with the present debates about the future of the Labour Party, an important book to read.
July 30, 2024
Excellent, convincing, very well written. One critique: too long. Read conclusion first and then dive into whatever chapters you want to explore.
December 11, 2020
The first half of this book is an interesting and lively history of the various struggles for suffrage in British history, beginning with the Putney debates, ending with the suffragettes and taking in Chartism and the various Reform acts. The second half is a socialist history of the Labour party, reflecting on how political democracy can only be fatally undermined under capitalism.
January 12, 2020
Apparently the vote is a very good thing as long as you vote how you have been told. Once you start voting the way you want you make Democracy cry. For Foot (a prophetic hint?) Freedom is doing only what the Big Brother wants.
June 21, 2019
very well written, while presenting a well-constructed narrative. It is quite a bit insular though. And then, there's the matter of Paul Foot's ideological preferences too
October 16, 2020
Not an easy read (very small print). Erudite and rather dull, useful for factual research.
December 27, 2025
A brilliant book that chronicles the long and hard-fought fight for freedom of the British working class. Foot's critical coverage of the history, where the failings of the movement and its leadership to get behind women's rights and on race in time, was necessary. We need not whitewash our history and the problems our movements had. Nevertheless, the movement has a long and nuanced history. It is very anger inducing to see time and time again where victories could have been had sooner, yet the tenacity lacking to bring those victories to fruition. The same could be said for our present moment in 2025... We must learn from this history if we are to fight for socialism, and see how easily social democratic victories are dismantled by the capitalists and those adjacent to them.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews