How important was popular protest in the passing of the reform bill? It can be said that the years 1830-1832 were some of the most troubled years in British politics. Popular riots, violence and disruption of elections characterised these years as people pushed for reform of the outdated political system and threatened the stability of the constitution. This was influenced by the economic problems and social distress that was evident in 1830, and so there was clear unrest in the urban and industrial areas, and by 1830 there was even protest in rural areas. Political unions took on a major role in this time as they organised the protests and thus posed were actually a threat to the established political system and this strength can be seen in the success of unions pushing for Catholic Emancipation. Unions such as the Birmingham Political Union (founded by Thomas Attwood) were critical in …show more content…
They also feared that if the middle class protestors joined the lower class unrest, they would pose a massively bigger threat. However it was perhaps not as dangerous as these landed classes believed as the violence was mostly handled well by the government, as there were usually not large numbers of protestors, the urban violence was not linked very strongly at all to the middle class political organisation, and few of these riots actually spread to nearby areas. The parallels to the French Revolution are perhaps not accurate as it could be said that the riots were actually closer to the popular riots in the 1700s than the French Revolution. In fact the Hamburger Thesis suggested that threat these protests and riots posed were exaggerated by pro-reform politicians in an attempt to scare those who were still undecided into supporting the reform