The Past Speaks

Historian Stephen Thompson has published an interesting paper that manages to connect two apparently unrelated developments in recent UK politics. One is the current debate over electoral reform (a referendum on moving from First Past the Post to AV is planned for May. Thompson suggests how the two issues are linked by placing them in their long-term historical context. The second is the anti-census rhetoric that has been heard from some members of the governing coalition in the UK. The anti-census rhetoric has been heard both from right-wing Tories (who object to the costs of the census) and from Liberal Democrats, whose objection to the intrusive census is a reflection of a broader concern about civil liberties, the rights of terrorist suspects, opposition to national ID cards, etc.

I thought that this might interest Canadian readers in light of the recent controversy over the long-form census in Canada. One of the ministers most opposed to the long-form census was Tony Clement, who is an immigrant from the UK and who still follows British politics closely.

This is from the executive summary of Thompson’s paper.

The 2011 Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act is only superficially similar to the 1832 Reform Act. The present government’s commitment to equal-sized constituencies would, in fact, have been an anathema to Whigs and Tories alike in 1832. Today’s anti-state surveillance sentiments and, most particularly, the Coalition’s anti-census rhetoric implies a fundamental misunderstanding of how early nineteenth-century reformers achieved their aims.

Read more here.

Stephen Thompson is a Fellow of St John’s College, and a Visiting Research Associate at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, University of Cambridge. This paper is a revised version of comments made at the launch of the British Library’s ‘Census and society: why everyone counts’ exhibition on 14 March 2011. A fuller discussion of the 1832 Reform Act may be found in his article in a new collection of essays, Statistics and the Public Sphere: Numbers and the People in Modern Britain, c. 1800-2000, edited by Tom Crook and Glen O’Hara (London: Routledge, 2011).