The Reform Act becomes law in the United Kingdom on June 7, 1832.

Robert Peel, eager to regain Tory support lost when he sponsored Catholic Emancipation, had opposed the Whig parliamentary reform bills of 1831—32.

Lord Melbourne, having spent the past two years as Home Secretary forcibly repressing trade unionists and agrarian rebels, had reluctantly supported the Reform Act of 1832, which Parliament passes after the 2nd Earl Grey’s Whig government threatens to create enough Whig peers to ensure its passage through the House of Lords.

The Reform Act, one of the era’s most important pieces of British legislation, transfers the votes from many of the depopulated consistencies known as “rotten boroughs” and the constituencies, controlled by the crown and other landlords, called “pocket boroughs,” to more populous counties and to such previously unrepresented cities as Manchester and Birmingham.

The bill brings the middle class into politics through the extension of the franchise to males who occupy premises valued at ten pounds annually, thereby increasing the voting rolls by fifty percent but leaving twenty-nine out of thirty persons unable to vote; the act has negligible effect on the overwhelming dominance of the landowning class.