Introduction: democratising history inside and out

1832–1914

Looking to our three forces (‘top down’, ‘middle out’, ‘bottom up’) helps explain the democratising trends that emerged at the outset of the ‘Age of Reform’ in the 1820s and 1830s, at the very beginning of our story. Moved by Catholic popular protest in Ireland and agrarian riots in England, a combination of Tory and Whig interests created an unlikely coalition in favour of parliamentary reform by 1832. The Representation of the People Act passed that year broadened the male franchise and redistributed constituencies. This was not a move towards the creation of democracy by those who passed the legislation. But 1832 did precipitate a trend whereby ‘democracy’ came to sit at the heart of subsequent political debates, spoken of by most political elites as something best avoided, but, at least for a few radicals, as a positive vision of a desirable system of government.²²

The threat of social and political upheaval, or even revolution, in the 1830s and 1840s naturally attracted commentary from the Tory ‘middle’. As Ben Weinstein shows in his chapter on the historian Archibald Alison, much contemporary political analysis came in the guise of history writing about the recent past and connected domestic politics in the UK with the fate of the British empire.

‘Top down’ changes to the UK’s social structure were just as crucial to democratisation as reform in ‘the middle’. By the turn of the nineteenth century, Britain was becoming a preponderantly urban island and parliamentarians thought that the interests of the urban boroughs should be better represented in the House of Commons. A strong sense of the changes in patterns of men’s work is given in Figure 0.1, which maps the sharp decline in the proportion of the adult male labour force undertaking agricultural occupations in England and Wales since 1600, with particularly dramatic change occurring in the fifty or so years between 1832, 1867 and 1884, the years of the First, Second and Third Reform Acts. Here were the social bases of a mass franchise based on male heads of household.

Clearly, this story of democratisation centred on the franchise does not tell us much about citizenship, nor does it hold true for all sexes or ages, or across the whole of the UK, let alone in the British empire. Education has always been critical to the process of political and cultural democratisation from the ‘bottom up’. From private, feminist day schools to working-class reading and writing, to associational life, museum-visiting and survey-making, Britain’s relatively organic educational culture nourished the growth of its political democracy in the nineteenth-century metropole by expanding the realm of active citizenship. A patchwork of informal educational opportunities emerged, through the mutual improvement movement and Mechanics’ Institutes, although these were concentrated in urban areas and on skilled, working-age men. The economic and social changes inaugurated by industrialisation increased choices at work for women in some ways, but their intellectual opportunities remained severely limited. For children, the economy demanded most boys and girls aged ten and over to perform work suited to their nimble fingers; it did not need them in school.²³ Educational opportunities slowly expanded, nevertheless. From the 1830s state funding for elementary education was first channelled through religious societies. By the 1860s such funding came with a demand for a rise in standards and efficiency attached, and with the 1870 Elementary Education Act the state finally made provision for a national system of elementary education in England and Wales, overseen by democratically elected School Boards.²⁴

Educational reform, urbanisation and (de)industrialisation played out differently across these islands. In Ireland, the lives of the rural poor were devastated by the Great Famine of 1845–52. Long-term emigration made the country more, rather than less rural, while the enfranchised population collapsed by as much as a half.²⁵ Nor did Ireland benefit from any educational reform equivalent to England and Wales’s 1870 Education Act. All schools apart from technical schools remained owned and run by either the Protestant or the Catholic church.

The nineteenth-century picture becomes even more complex when we look beyond the UK to the British empire. The spread of democracy in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa between 1850 and 1900 reveals what the sociologist Michael Mann calls democracy’s ‘dark side’.²⁶ This is because First Nations, indigenous and aboriginal peoples were mainly excluded from representation and mass violence and ethnic cleansing marched ahead of the making of parliamentary government. For most of the unenfranchised in the empire, their lives were marred by famine, poverty, military occupation and a dearth of civil and political liberties.

Neither did British colonial administrators impose coherent, national school systems in Britain’s colonies. Instead, education in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial empire was characterised by a patchwork of missionary and philanthropic schools, elite English education for the offspring of the imperial bureaucracy, and indigenous schools in all their diversity (which had to be monitored). In the particularly complex multi-lingual case of British Malaya, for instance, Chinese schools became a major focus of anxiety for the imperial state because the British were themselves so poor at acquiring expertise in Chinese languages and culture.²⁷ The broader imperial project, notably in India, conflated English language education with modernisation and ‘civilisation’, latterly providing government funds to foster this ideology. But this did not always have straightforward effects. By the early twentieth century, democratic impulses in India arising from the bottom up for ‘modern’, knowledge-based education led his own supporters to reject Gandhi’s educational initiatives, which were narrowly vocational and ultimately class-bound.²⁸

Such differences in educational provision between Britain, Ireland, Malaya and India reflected the unequal development of citizenship across the British empire. During the nineteenth century voices from the ‘middle’ often tried to explain such inequalities by evoking nature and history and God’s providence. Ideas about ‘civilisational’ difference intersected with arguments about different populations’ fitness for ‘responsible government’. Such mid-Victorian writing about the supremacy of British ‘civilisation’ ranged from relatively popular forms of evangelical providentialism to a relatively marginal avowal of scientific racism.²⁹ In almost all of these different varieties of cultural hagiography, Britain was purported to be an ‘advanced’ society while most others were described by comparison as ‘backward’, ‘stagnant’, or even ‘regressive’. In his chapter on the Anglo-Chinese Wars of the mid-nineteenth century, Philip Harling foregrounds the primacy of this British stadial thinking in relation to China, a Victorian imperial logic so strong that it could unite pro- and anti-opiumists in the metropole.

For those colonised populations seeking peaceful means of political change in this era of imperialism, the best that the unenfranchised could do was to collect a petition and appeal to the Crown, the Colonial Office or the Houses of Parliament.³⁰ Meetings, speeches, demonstrations, and the rise of mass circulation newspapers all seem to have had a more democratising impact on political culture in Britain.³¹ Mass movements and bottom-up mobilisation flourished in the period leading up to and after 1832. Chartism was the most famous of these movements in Britain, dissipating after 1848 as political liberalism rose to prominence. Social and economic reforms in the mid-nineteenth century around trade, the working day, and conditions in factories and mines by the Victorian state coincided with the tenor of much ‘bottom up’ contention, which centred on removing the arbitrary power of employers, state and church from peoples’ lives.³²

None of these popular agitations or state responses to them would have been possible without changes in educational culture. In Britain there was a widespread working-class appetite for the democratisation of knowledge and culture throughout the nineteenth century. Education was also a focus of middle-class feminists long before they turned to the vote, buoyed by the 1864–8 Taunton Commission’s questioning of entrenched ideas about the difference in mental capacities of girls and boys.³³ In 1871 the Girls Public Day School Company was founded, inaugurating a network of fee-paying schools that would teach intellectual rather than purely moral and practical lessons to middle-class girls. Thus the history of suffrage in Britain allows us to trace one line between the democratisation of culture, in the form of liberal education, and the democratisation of politics.³⁴ As a middle-class story of white women’s development, however, it is also a stark reminder of the classed and racialised history of democratisation in modern Britain. Arguments about extending the vote to women in the metropole could comfortably co-exist with arguments for maintaining anti-democratic hierarchies in other parts of the British empire well into the twentieth century.³⁵

If we can detect a growing appetite for knowledge as a route to self-determination and self-knowledge (spiritual and secular) among the working classes in Britain, bourgeois identities and tastes, male and female, were being shaped and expanded by the marketplace. By the 1870s, urban commerce and new forms of consumption were enabling the ‘middle’ to engage more fully with elite culture. Sally Woodcock’s chapter explores this democratising trend for the middle classes in relation to the art world, exploiting the business archives of a Victorian colourist to nuance our understanding of the position of the ‘amateur’ artist in this period. Woodcock’s story might start with the paint, but it eventually shows how much the people mattered.

The burgeoning of a commercial society in Victorian Britain was a major concern for liberal elites looking from the ‘middle out’. Many writers and politicians thought that the market economy must be stimulated, children needed educating and the bourgeois family had to be defended and stabilised in order to gradually extend reasonable opinion and reasonable mores among the ‘masses’.³⁶ On this model, citizenship was most often associated with educability and opposed to ‘dependence’. In this way, education united ‘bottom up’ appetites with much ‘middle out’ equivocation about how necessary it was to educate ‘the masses’ before they should be included within the parliamentary franchise and so achieve greater political rights. These ideas grew up in the wake of notions of a ‘natural order’ which combined Christian morality and new ideas in political economy.³⁷ This ideology prized the dignity of labour and the sanctity of property whose flipside was a widespread stigmatising of the poorest and most disadvantaged members of society, some of whose fate was to be thrown into the post-1834 New Poor Law workhouses. From the 1830s onwards, citizenship most often combined gendered inequality with the having and holding of property: receipt of poor relief meant automatic disenfranchisement for men from the parliamentary electorate until 1918.

Such new ideologies about work and property and citizenship emerged amidst industrialisation, urbanisation and the growth of working-class politics, all of which precipitated some fear in the ‘middle’ about the stability of the social order. In this context the broadening of the electoral franchise was not always pursued to foment more political democracy. After all, the franchise reforms of 1832, 1867 and 1884 were not intended by most parliamentarians to create a ‘democracy’ based on an equal and broad citizenship for all adults; electoral reform was most often conceived by politicians as a way to forestall such a system arising by tying male owners of property and heads of household into a mixed constitution of Commons, Lords and Crown.³⁸ Yet whatever the intent of parliamentarians, after the Third Reform Act of 1884 something like a very limited form of ‘democracy’ had been established among adult men in the UK because more than half of them could vote by the time of the 1885 election. This greater enfranchisement of men precipitated the rise of working-class electoral politics and had a knock-on effect on arguments in favour of the enfranchisement of women, bringing female suffrage to the fore of British politics by the 1890s.³⁹

The other issue dominating at this time was Irish Home Rule. Female suffrage and Home Rule were practically and ideologically interlinked; both demanded a drastic reimagining of the category of citizenship and this new kind of politics was driven by cultural change, in relation to gender and in relation to Catholicism.⁴⁰ Working-class politics was also changing, as the social and political power of the miners’, dockers’ and railwaymen’s unions grew with the economy’s reliance on coal as an energy source.⁴¹ And militant forms of feminism developed, incubating more meaningful appeals to working women, with the founding of the Women’s Social and Political Union in 1903. The fin de siècle was thus a time of widespread debate about the future of democracy in Britain, and widespread contests over which sections of the population might be included in a broader and more equal citizenship.

Clearly, Tilly’s warning that sites of democracy must display the sign ‘Under Construction’ is especially apposite in the case of nineteenth-century Britain. The parliamentary franchise was narrow and limited to (not all) men in the UK, while despotism reigned across much of the British empire. Despite the educational impulses and initiatives arriving all around, the equal development of democratic citizenship was severely circumscribed, especially in the empire and for women and the working classes in the metropole. Democratisation could appear to be deeply embedded, shallow or even absent depending on one’s vantage point. To many upper-class English men in ‘the middle’, the prospect of democracy may have seemed less fearful in 1914 than it might have seemed to their forebears in the 1830s, because male working-class enfranchisement had led (on the whole) to ‘bottom up’ incorporation into Westminster politics. To the very different constituencies of Indian nationalists, Irish republicans and militant feminists, however, the British state seemed bent on upholding tyranny. Whatever contemporaries’ views of the extent and reach of democratic reform, almost all those who lived through the First World War agreed that it changed the British state and its democratic culture beyond recognition.

1914–39

The First World War saw the old political certainties of minimal government, balanced budgets and fidelity to the gold standard jettisoned in fits of social and economic mobilisation.⁴² A political order that had excluded women from the parliamentary franchise struggled to survive public displays of male pacifism and the female war effort.⁴³ With the passing of the Representation of the People Act in 1918 almost all men over twenty-one were enfranchised and so too were those over nineteen if they had served in the armed forces. Women over thirty were also eligible to vote on the basis of a property qualification or marriage to a male householder. An anticipated Education Act for England and Wales passed in the summer of 1918. While most of its key provisions were subsequently cut in postwar economy drives, it spurred a conversation around the democratisation of secondary education in the labour movement, and in circles of government, that responded to the growth of ‘bottom up’ demand and could not be quelled long term.⁴⁴

The war wrought even more dramatic changes in Ireland. A new generation of voters, often unattached by sentiment and loyalty to the politics of the Irish Parliamentary Party, elected Sinn Féin to a sweeping victory across the south and west in 1918 and the party subsequently called for the establishment of the Dáil in Dublin. The War of Independence then broke out, and peace talks and a treaty followed in 1921 which fomented, in turn, a civil war. Partition created the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland, with its own assembly at Stormont. Yet while elections would be contested in the North, unionist grandees reassured themselves that they could never lose because gerrymandering assured their party’s supremacy.⁴⁵

As democratisation faltered in Northern Ireland and political incumbents forestalled and rolled back what Charles Tilly termed the ‘binding consultation of citizens in regard to state personnel and policies’⁴⁶ via gerrymandering, culture in interwar Britain was decidedly oriented around the idea of democracy, even if that idea carried multiple meanings. Politically, electoral contests became less agitated and dramatic as the three main parties – Conservative, Labour and Liberal – sought to steady the polity and adapt themselves to a new mass electorate.⁴⁷ Under Stanley Baldwin, the Conservatives were particularly successful in appealing to a ‘bottom up’ groundswell of anti-socialism as democratic, and astutely targeted newly enfranchised middle-class female voters, particularly after the equalisation of the franchise between men and women in 1928.⁴⁸ Meanwhile, a plethora of voluntary associations acted as a stabilising force, making links between state and society and drawing legitimacy from the expanding provision of social welfare policies enacted by local and central government.⁴⁹ These decades also saw the spread of new media and more opportunities for leisure and consumption that nourished democratic ideals.⁵⁰ There is no doubt that British culture was becoming democratised at a pace after the First World War. And this democratic culture rested upon a spreading consensus around mass education, even if the democratisation of access to formal education was slow. Youth activities, from the socialist-eugenicist ‘Woodcraft Folk’, to BBC discussion groups, to the League of Nations Union, played at modelling forms of democracy for the next generation.⁵¹

Into the fray entered a cohort of individuals from the ‘middle’, pushing for democracy at full throttle, but with their feet hovering over the brakes just in case democratisation started going too far, too fast. The 1920s and 1930s are often seen as the golden age of such democratising reformers, whose goal was to harness the attention of an education-hungry public to change institutions, whilst still retaining their ideological power to shape political change. Many of these men and women found their home at the new-born BBC, where, from 1927, Sir John Reith presided over a project of cultural democratisation at the cutting edge of technological change.⁵² Beyond the wireless, another such figure is found in Heidi Egginton’s chapter in the form of Sir Robert Witt, chairman and co-founder of the National Art Collections Fund. Witt’s attempts to open the elite art world up to a broader, art-loving public are typical of the interwar project to democratise culture by equalising access to previously elite arenas of consumption, which was happening parallel to the completion of franchise reform.

But there were others, especially intellectuals, who fretted that democracy was in crisis even as it began to take root in the culture.⁵³ How could mass participation in politics, they asked, be squared with the power of the capitalist press and amidst widespread ignorance about current affairs? The Russian Revolution, the end of parliamentary systems of government across Europe, the rise of fascism and Nazism and the Great Depression all made parliamentary democracy, and reciprocal relations between state and citizen in Britain, seem ever fragile.

If these debates about Britain’s political democracy between the wars are relatively well studied, Chika Tonooka’s chapter takes us into lesser-known territory during the same period. Through a case study of two interwar anthropologists studying China and Japan, she examines what their reluctance to claim and share their expertise on non-Western cultures tells us about the ‘(im)possibility for the democratisation of academic knowledge’ before the Second World War. Unlike other democratising reformers occupying the ‘middle’ space dotted throughout this book, the Seligmans lacked both the personality and the educational channels to diffuse their expertise. For all the mounting demand from ‘below’, the democratisation of knowledge in Britain needed accessible educational infrastructure, be that schools, public museums or radio waves. This much was clear to political parties and civil society organisations who realised that as international crises peaked during the 1930s, they must reach out to try to educate their voters and their members via new media, as well as at book clubs, public talks and rallies.

1939–99

Between 1939 and 1945 war acted, as it had after 1914, as a profound catalyst for cultural and social change. The Second World War transformed Britain’s self-image as a democratic nation. The visible participation of women in the war effort and a cross-class consensus around upholding democratic freedoms in the face of Nazism contributed to a widespread sense that citizenship needed to be broadened and equalised beyond its political aspects in order to encompass social rights, too. War also reset expectations of the state and consolidated a negative view of the high unemployment of the 1920s and 1930s. By mid-war, the cabinet was made up of a coalition of Labour and Conservative ministers, and a cross-party consensus had emerged that pre-war economic and social policies had failed. So, when the relatively obscure academic and administrator William Beveridge published a report on social service reform in November 1942, his recommendations met an audience in the ‘middle’ and ‘the bottom’ that was receptive to the idea of change. For the American GI Robert Jackson Alexander, with whom we tour Britain in Lawrence Black’s chapter, his wartime observations of Britain’s landscape, heritage and people indeed left an impression of an ‘old’ country in need of renewal and bursting with discussion about what form this might take.

For a time, consensus in the ‘middle’ led the wartime and postwar governments to publish a string of significant reports and pass landmark legislation that led to talk of the arrival of a ‘welfare state’. The Butler Act of 1944 made provisions for universal secondary education in England and Wales. The Family Allowances Act of 1945 inaugurated a system of child benefits. Further reforms followed when a Labour government created a National Health Service and nationalised the coal industry, as well as gas, electricity, railways and the Bank of England. A spirit of reform certainly marked the domestic politics of 1943–51, although much of the postwar government’s focus was on productivist economic policy and fell short of Beveridge’s hopes. Overall, the result was a new relationship between state and society and a new sense in ‘the middle’ (profoundly different from ideas among governing elites in the nineteenth century) that social change could itself be ‘moulded and modified, made and un-made by acts of political will’.⁵⁴ The effects of such a change on democratic politics were complex, especially when we combine it with an account of Britain’s domestic and imperial state.

Democracy entered imperial policy, but often in a roundabout way and most often at the moment of decolonisation with the writing of new constitutions for the new nations. A new idea arose at this time that imperialism meant tutelage in democratic self-government and the spread of the ‘Westminster model’ of representation to the empire as a whole, not just to the Dominions of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa. This was, in part, though, a self-serving idea that belied the plurality of debates about democracy taking place in the decolonising empire and allowed many among the British political elite to argue that the decolonisation of the British empire was an inevitable part of the broader democratisation of the postwar world, rather than a crisis for Britain as a great power.⁵⁵

Back in the metropole, the huge expansion of state spending after 1945 as a proportion of GDP and increased welfare provision augmented the realm of social citizenship. New housing, new estates and new towns were one of the clearest illustrations of the greater role of central and local government in peoples’ lives. Architects and planners sought to embody the spirit of this postwar democratic age in the built environment and an assortment of ‘experts’ tried to mediate between the expanded state and the people it governed. Otto Saumarez Smith’s chapter reassesses the relationship between sociology and architecture within this growing melange of experts by looking at the work of architect Oliver Cox and his axiom to ‘design as if the people mattered’.

Even if social class remained the guiding framework of Britain’s political culture until at least the 1970s, historians are increasingly finding points of dialogue between democratic expectations ‘from below’ and interested experts in the ‘middle’.⁵⁶ For as the state took up more and more social space, so the potential for contestation grew as citizens debated the way social services were distributed, and experts pushed themselves into ‘the middle’.⁵⁷ One example can be found in educational provision. Democratic expectations were putting pressure on the welfare state’s new system of secondary education as soon as it began bedding into community and family life in the 1950s. The 1944 Act might have made secondary education free in England and Wales, but it also kept it selective. Working-class parents with no experience of schooling beyond age fourteen rapidly applied their ‘democratic expectations’ to their kids’ education, which ultimately meant grammar schools for everyone.⁵⁸ In Scotland, where secondary schools distinguished between three- and five-year courses by selection, a combination of a different examination system and a longstanding commitment to a broad liberal curriculum yielded a system more in line with the Scottish ideal of the ‘democratic intellect’.⁵⁹ The same cannot be said for Northern Ireland, whose 1947 Education Act instituted a messy and complicated financial compromise between state, Protestant and Catholic interests. Secondary education was universal in Northern Ireland, but grammar schools continued to charge fees.⁶⁰

With this shaky new educational infrastructure across the UK came new actors willing to assume the role of expert. Expertise and democracy were now linked at almost every point of contact between state and society, but everyday, experiential expertise in particular was also becoming increasingly important after 1945.⁶¹ Schoolteachers were at the chalkface of these interactions. As such, Rosie Germain’s chapter shows how teacher expertise in Liverpool secondary modern schools was marshalled to uphold traditional gender identities, extending beyond their pupils and into the expectations placed on postwar mothers and fathers.

Another particularly important arena of democratic contestation, expertise and the state concerned migration, nationality and citizenship. Many men, women and children arrived in Britain from the Empire-Commonwealth after 1945 to reside and work in the UK. Yet despite the notional political equality of most of these arrivals with prior residents of the UK as British subjects and, after 1948, as Citizens of the UK and Commonwealth, they experienced profoundly unequal abilities to enjoy the fullness of social citizenship via access to the welfare state, housing and the labour market. In response, Black British and British Asian activists, many of them female and working at the grassroots, mobilised against injustice at the hands of the police, landlords, employers, xenophobes and racists, and argued that the labour market and provision of social services were riddled with inequality.⁶² In schools, the community-led Black Education Movement rallied against local government plans to ‘band’ pupils in secondary schools according to academic performance in the late 1960s, knowing how this practice compounded racist, linguistic and cultural judgements against African-Caribbean children.⁶³

While Black British understandings and reformulations of ‘race’ in postwar Britain have been central to recent historiography, the chapter by Christopher Hilliard in this book refocuses our attention onto the ‘relations’ part of ‘race relations’ research. He argues that when it comes to studying expert views about race and immigration, not enough focus has been placed on the quantitative work of geographers and the stylistic devices of journalists. Experts in the ‘middle’ seeking to explain and manage Britain’s transition to a multi-racial democracy in the 1950s and 1960s were, according to Hilliard, as attentive to the granular and local norms of white working-class neighbourhoods as they were to universalist assumptions about ‘black’ and ‘white’.

It was not only in relation to ‘race’ that affinity with the democratic state was fast becoming less about the vote and more about a recognition of individual identities. Women, children, old people, disabled people, the mentally ill, gay people and trans people all experienced different kinds of inequality that raised barriers to the fullest expression of social citizenship. During the 1960s, some reforms began to tackle gendered inequalities and the rights of sexual minorities. Homosexual law reform (1967), the Abortion Act (1967) and ‘no fault’ divorce (1969) all redrew the boundaries between public and private morality and between state and citizen in England and Wales (although not in Scotland or Northern Ireland). These changes were understood then, and ever since, as diffusely connected to a supposed fracturing of the postwar political ‘consensus’.⁶⁴ In 1982, Stuart Hall characterised these legislative changes as ‘increased regulation coupled with selective privatization through contract or consent’.⁶⁵ Hall’s argument captures how state regulation carved out a new ‘private’ realm that was individualist and broadly liberal. Meanwhile, in ‘public’ spaces like secondary school classrooms, the UK government never offered any centrally directed policy on even heterosexual sex education, with schools left to avoid, fumble over or outsource the subject to external agents right up to the 2000s.⁶⁶

‘Bottom up’ forces filled the void. Youth cultures were transformed amidst changing norms about contraception and pre-marital sex. Sex and sexual knowledge soon became a new route to social respectability within and between peer groups.⁶⁷ And individual agency and responsibility can be understood as part of a broader cultural shift towards ‘popular individualism’ taking hold during the 1970s.⁶⁸ Radical, activist-led projects such as Women’s Liberation, Gay Liberation and Black Power all mobilised alongside more ‘ordinary’ sites of social change such as the working-class kitchen or the local comprehensive school. For example, pupil protests in the 1970s and 1980s against corporal punishment and school uniforms (notably girls’ demands to wear trousers) indicate that young people understood comprehensive education in democratic terms because it was a place where they had the right to be themselves and so embodied a more equal citizenship.⁶⁹

But for the ‘middle’ peering in, Britain’s comprehensive schools between the 1970s and 1990s were either the apotheosis of the postwar dream of democratic education or the living, breathing, rebellious proof of its fallacy. Established on a 1960s ideal that social-class mixing would create a new generation of more equal social-democratic citizens, pupils and teachers actually came to measure their lived experience in comprehensives through a much denser range of intersecting social identity markers: race, gender, sexuality and age. But no educational institution could sustain a democratic culture with respect to these multiple and multiplying criteria, and schools often fell back on internal mechanisms that sorted pupils into binary categories predicated on ‘ability’. The comprehensive school is therefore something of an object lesson for historians on the limits of democratisation in practice. The challenge instead is to account for the diversity of meanings being made in the process, their impact and their ‘throw’.⁷⁰

Comprehensivisation of schools and ‘permissive legislation’ may have led some in the ‘middle’ to worry about a breaking of political consensus in Britain during the 1960s, but that decade saw a completely different pattern of politics emerge in Northern Ireland. For one thing, ‘permissive’ legislation did not touch the province: neither abortion nor homosexuality nor divorce law were reformed there. The welfare state and the UK government’s commitment to full employment did, however, change Northern Irish politics and revealed stark inequalities. Catholics faced discriminatory employment practices in the private and public sectors and council housing allocations were the subject of great controversy.⁷¹ In exchange for the Church retaining control over its schools, Catholic secondary schools (voluntary schools) received much less direct funding from the Protestant state, meaning fewer resources and opportunities for Catholic pupils. Unionists were strictly vigilant about what they saw as the slightest state subsidies for Catholic education in the 1950s and 1960s, embedding inequalities and compromising the democratisation of the education system in Northern Ireland.⁷² Electoral politics provided little opportunity to challenge this state of affairs because constituencies were so gerrymandered as to effectively negate party competition at Stormont, handing power seemingly in perpetuity to the Ulster Unionist Party.⁷³

‘Bottom up’ and ‘middle out’ mobilisation contested this situation. By the summer of 1969 violent confrontations erupted in the streets, which the Royal Ulster Constabulary proved unwilling to police effectively and equitably. The subsequent deployment of the British army in Northern Ireland fed, in turn, a cycle of violent escalation. During the ‘Troubles’ the people of Northern Ireland experienced a catastrophe that touched almost every family. In March 1972 the Stormont Parliament was suspended and Northern Ireland was directly ruled from London, ushering in the end of what some political scientists call the ‘ethnic democracy’ of Unionist rule.⁷⁴

Meanwhile, British politics was entering a new age of constitutional and democratic debate. By the 1970s, ‘decline’ became more resonant amidst decolonisation, precipitating a sense of cultural unease among the UK’s governing elites in ‘the middle’.⁷⁵ New nationalisms in Scotland and Wales gained increasing popularity. For some, ‘Europe’ seemed like a possible solution to the malaise, and the UK’s constitution was transformed by accession to the EEC in 1973. Meanwhile, militant confrontations between unions and government escalated following the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, and in the 1980s and 1990s deindustrialisation rapidly remade cities and regions.

Surveying the scene during the 1990s and 2000s, some academics and other experts in the ‘middle’ began proposing that a new ideology – ‘neoliberalism’ – had emerged, and that it was rolling back the frontiers of social citizenship across the UK. The character and extent of the UK’s ‘Neoliberal Age’ remains contested.⁷⁶ Arriving at this unresolved debate brings us back to the moment in time where this introduction started, to the ‘outside’ and to UK higher education in the 1990s, when free-market conditions posed challenges and delivered opportunities at century’s end. Today, the professional historian lives and works with the consequences in their everyday life.

In this introduction we have suggested that 200 years of political reforms, cultural changes and bottom-up demands for inclusion have led to a more democratised United Kingdom. Rather than narrate that story as an inevitable tale of political progress, we have tried to tell this history with the sign ‘Under Construction’ displayed prominently throughout and using education as our uniting theme – for there are deep ironies to the history of democratisation in the UK. As the franchise expanded, citizenship broadened and the government grew to take up a larger area of social and economic life, so the democratic state became the target of more and more debate and disquiet and disappointment. And when we study democratisation over time and across the UK’s multi-national political geography, its inherent frangibility comes to the fore. Democratisation arguably broke apart the UK, first with the partition of Ireland, and then broke up the British empire with decolonisation. The equalisation and broadening of citizenship was not spread evenly across these islands. In Northern Ireland, gerrymandering, a lack of party competition at Stormont, militant sectarianism and entrenched social inequalities set back democratisation in ways that profoundly diverged from Great Britain and which were only partially resolved with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

So rather than offer a ‘Whig’ history of inevitable democratic advancement, what we hope to have shown instead is that democratisation advances (and falls back) by crooked paths and not via clearly demarcated economic and political highways. At least as important as elite opinion in the ‘middle’ is an appetite for knowledge and inclusion coming from ‘the bottom’, expressed through the consistent demand for education. Alongside the politics and the economics, cultural and social forces are of prime importance to the ‘inside’ history of democratisation in the UK, and to the ‘outside’ democratisation of the subject of history in the UK. The chapters and interludes now take forward this spirit.