Radicals

The Radicals were a loose parliamentary political grouping in Great Britain and Ireland in the early to mid-19th century who drew on earlier ideas of radicalism and helped to transform the Whigs into the Liberal Party. History Early Radicals The Radical movement arose in the late 18th century to support parliamentary reform, with additional aims including lower taxes and the abolition of sinecures. John Wilkes's reformist efforts in the 1760s as editor of The North Briton and MP were seen as radical at the time, but support dropped away after the Massacre of St George's Fields in 1768. Working class and middle class "Popular Radicals" agitated to demand the right to vote and assert other rights including freedom of the press and relief from economic distress, while "Philosophic Radicals" strongly supported parliamentary reform, but were generally hostile to the arguments and tactics of the Popular Radicals. However, the term "Radical" itself, as opposed to "reformer" or "Radical Reformer", only emerged in 1819 during the upsurge of protest following the successful conclusion of the Napoleonic War. Henry "Orator" Hunt was the main speaker at the Manchester meeting in 1819 that ended in the Peterloo Massacre; Hunt was elected MP for the Preston division in 1830–1832. The "root and branch" of the reforms which the adjective radical suggests, and at the time still strongly in concept denoted by reference to all its previous main uses, is the British constitution, which is not codified or restricted to particular customs, laws or documents. Radicals and the Great Reform Act Radicals inside and outside Parliament were divided over the merits of the Whig Reform Act 1832. Some continued to press for the ballot and universal suffrage, but the majority (as mobilised in unions like the Birmingham Political Union) saw abolition of the rotten boroughs as a major step towards the destruction of what they called "Old Corruption" or "The Thing": "In consequence of the boroughs, all our institutions are partial, oppressive, and aristocratic. We have an aristocratic church, an aristocratic bar, an aristocratic game-code, aristocratic taxation....all is privilege".