Edwardian Britain, in the pre-war years, had witnessed spectacular struggles over votes for women and some murmurings about a further extension of the working-class franchise. In 1910 not quite two-thirds of the male population was entitled to vote, with disenfranchisement in poor urban districts rising to over 60 per cent.34 After a war that had taken the lives of hundreds of thousands of men from those same districts, this was no longer a sustainable position.
