The Northern Movement for Factory Reform and against the new Poor Law emerged in the early 1830s and had a lot of involvement in Chartism, the UK movement to gain universal suffrage for men. In May 1837, a crowd of between 100,000 and 250,000 met on Hartshead Moor near Huddersfield in protest at the new Poor Law. They were led by Feargus O’Connor, a former Irish MP and controller of the radical Leeds weekly newspaper The Northern Star, and James “Bronterre” O’Brien, an Irish lawyer. The meeting is thought of as one of the first of the embryonic stages of the Chartist movement.

By the autumn of 1838, the northern movements in favour of factory reform and against the new Poor Law had developed close links with the LWMA and the BPU. Northerners were persuaded that sympathetic social reform would not be achieved until a parliament had been elected by universal suffrage.