The Vote

The dramatic story of the peoples' fight for the right to vote in Britain

The culmination of a lifetime's work by the great journalist and historian Paul Foot, The Vote tells the thrilling story of the hard, long-fought struggle for the right to vote in Britain, and the slow erosion that followed.

In the tradition of "history from below," Paul Foot examines the great democratic debates that dominated the fight for electoral democracy. Taking readers from the smoke-filled church of the Putney debates, to the dramatic arguments between Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke in the aftermath of the French Revolution, to the rise of Chartism and the struggles for votes for women.

Throughout, Foot shows how vested interested first delayed and then hobbled… Keep Reading