The Political Parties in Power
The political parties that shared power in parliament during the time of the women’s suffrage movement were the Conservatives, who had majority in the House of Lords, the Liberals and Labour.
The Conservatives had been quite against women’s suffrage. This seems odd since in reality the women who would have been granted the vote would have been middle and higher class women. This would have almost certainly meant an increase in support for the Conservatives. This was in fact later seen after women gained the vote in 1918.
The Liberal party was not completely against women suffrage, however it feared that if it did support the female franchise, then they would lose support as propertied women from, the middle and higher class, would probable gain the vote first. Also, the Liberal Party was very preoccupied with setting up the 'Welfare State'.
The Labour party formed in 1893 felt that it was more important to achieve votes for all working men first, then it would deal with the franchise for women. Unfortunately, the Labour party was fairly small, and its support for the franchise for women would not have made a great deal of difference unless another political party also supported it.
In 1910, the
NUWSS accompanied by many politicians from various political parties joined together to write a Conciliation Bill. It was at this time you could really see the support for women’s suffrage. Over 300 members of parliament pledged their support to the suffrage movement. All was going well and the Conciliation Bill passed its first and its second reading in the House of Commons, however it failed to pass the third reading. There are many different reasons why this may have happened.At this time, there was a very complicated power struggle being fought by the members of the House of Commons and members of the House of Lords came into conflict of interests. The Prime Minister at the time was Herbert Asquith, the leader of the Liberal Party. An act was proposed in aid of the people, it proposed giving pensions to workers, and giving them health provisions. This was later called the ‘National Insurance Act’ and was an important first step towards the Welfare State. However to create the funding to allow this act to be achieved, taxes needed to be raised. This would have created more taxes for the wealthy Lords. The majority of the Lords in the House of Lords were Conservative and because this was not in their favour, they did not approve this. The Liberals were in uproar. They protested to the newly crowned king, that the Lords should not be able the refuse Acts or Bills that the House of Commons had approved, since they were the House elected by the people. The Liberals then requested that the Lords shouldn’t have a Conservative majority, the King in support of the Liberals agreed that he would allocate Liberal lords so that they would have the majority and they would then be able to pass any laws they wished. With this declaration the lords backed down and agreed to pass the original National Insurance Act, 1911. After this incident, the Lords and the MP’s agreed to decrease the power of the House of Lords, this was called the Parliament Act, 1911.
Due to the complications caused by this power struggle, the Liberal party needed to stay together. It was believed that due to these Party Political Considerations, the MP’s could not be split over the issue of female franchise while this conflict was ongoing. The MP’s who had previously pledged their support to the women could no longer back them up. It is also believed that another important reason for the failure of the Conciliation Bill was the total absence of the support of the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith.