| No. It hasn't. Liberals are just motivated to be forgetful and not to teach this part of history very well. As far as I can tell, people in the UK have the right to vote because of, variously: The Parliament setting the King straight on who would win in a fight * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Civil_War * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Charles_I The Parliament gradually setting the King straight on whose support he needs to enact foreign policy, and the King's failures strengthening opposition in Parliament over the course of * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolution * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_First_Coalition * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_III An apocalyptic and thereafter omnipresent fear of the aristocracy losing their heads after the French Revolution, leading to cycles of tyrannical repression of the working class alternating with massive working class actions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Acts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterloo_Massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution Violence from radical working & middle class suffragists following this period * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Days_of_May * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_Act_1832 The threat of violence from radical working class suffragists, tinged with the prospect of religious and Irish revolutionary violence * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_League#Hyde_Park_demons... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_League#English_Civil_Wa... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_Act_1867 Numerous peaceful and less peaceful actions over many years by women's suffragists, including a protracted terrorist bombing campaign * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage_in_the_Unit... You could go on, but I'm no expert on UK history. Social change in UK democracy seems to mostly demand angry disenfranchised masses, a very few sympathetic ears in the House of Lords, and a larger body of Parliament & middle class people who want to strike some kind of nonviolent compromise and maintain order even if giving up some power offends. The US is very similar in that this is the stuff we don't like to talk about. The fact that our military fought a brief, bloody war or two against mining unions before any labor rights were recognized was a single decontextualized paragraph in my history textbook at age 15, and was never mentioned again. |