ABSTRACT
As we observed in Chapter 4, there was considerable interaction between the executive, Parliament and the public in the period before 1760. Public pressure was therefore applied through a number of well-established channels: parliamentary elections, particularly in the form of ‘instructions’ from electors to MPs on how they should vote on key issues; pressure groups of various kinds, some of which organised sophisticated campaigns based on petitions to Parliament for the ‘redress of grievances’; and the print media, particularly in the form of a growing number of periodicals and newspapers. In the 1730s the term ‘public opinion’ was coined to describe what was seen as a new and powerful element in politics and historians have argued that when the various channels of public pressure are grouped together and considered in the context of a growing number of clubs and societies in London and elsewhere, that element had acquired a definite structure by the time of George III’s accession. However, it was not an element that offered any significant threat to elite power. Public pressure was applied to elicit concessions from government or from Parliament but not to overturn them. Moreover, public opinion tended to be shaped by metropolitan periodicals and newspapers obsessed with the parliamentary agenda and focussed on a relatively narrow range of topics. Some parliamentary politicians, such as the Elder Pitt, may have concluded that it was now necessary to court public opinion but there is little evidence to suggest that it had much of an impact on decision-making at the ministerial level. Parliamentary affairs were therefore central to the more formal aspects of what we might loosely call non-elite or popular politics but were never seriously threatened by them.
