Jacob Rees Mogg, leader of the Commons, was one of the MPs who went to Balmoral in late August to ask the Queen to prorogue Parliament for a record period. Protests have rightly taken place.
Rees Mogg is elected by a system of Mass Suffrage but in his book The Victorians (2019) he expresses support for the Tory leader and Prime Minister Robert Peel (who later went became an independent Liberal) who believed that the 1832 Reform Act which left most men and all nearly all women without the vote was as far as Parliamentary Democracy needed to go.
In the 1834 Tamworth Manifesto Peel wrote:
I will repeat now the declaration I made when I entered the House of Commons as a member of the Reformed Parliament- that I consider the Reform Bill a final and irrevocable settlement of a great constitutional settlement- a settlement to which no friend to the peace and welfare of this country would attempt to disturb.
Rees Mogg notes that for Peel the task was to underline that 1832 meant ‘thus far and no further’ . He goes on to comment ‘This was neither ignoble or insensible, no matter how unfashionable it has seemed since’. Above all else it was necessary for stability, a quality considered all the more necessary by Conservatives as they gazed out at a country in flux’
A disturbing vision indeed by Mr Rees Mogg one of the leaders of the August 2019 Parliamentary ‘coup’ by the Tories
“[T]he 1832 Reform Act which left most men and all nearly all women without the vote “: It’s my understanding that this Act was the first piece of legislation to bar women from having the vote. Previously, it was merely convention that restricted the franchise to men.