Tory Liverpool: From Electoral Dominance to Political Irrelevance
| Published date | 01 June 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/20419058231181289 |
| Author | David Jeffery |
| Date | 01 June 2023 |
30POLITICAL INSIGHT•JUNE 2023
The year is 1969 and the Liverpool
Conservatives have just won another
local election. They might be slightly
disappointed that their seat share is
down: they won just 72 per cent of seats that
year, compared to 77 per cent the previous
year, and they now have 87 out of the 120
councillors on Liverpool City Council (plus 22
out of 40 aldermen). They have run the council
for the last 118 of the previous 128 years.
Indeed, a child born in 1895 would have to
wait until their 60th birthday to see a Labour
leader of Liverpool Council. As the dust settled
on another round of local elections, nobody in
Tory Liverpool:
From Electoral
Dominance
to Political
Irrelevance
Liverpool is often held up as the posterchild for anti-Conservatism in
British politics. A city where
The Sun
is boycotted, and no Tory MPs
have been elected for decades. But, as David Jeffery argues, the story
of Conservative decline in Liverpool is relatively recent and holds
warnings for politics well beyond Merseyside.
their right mind would think of Liverpool as an
anti-Conservative city, but in four years' time this
would all change…
Today, Liverpool is a bastion of anti-Tory
sentiment. In the 2021 local elections, the
Conservatives won just 6 per cent of the
vote. There has been no Tory councillor in
the city since 1998, and no Conservative
MP since 1983. Why have the fortunes of
Liverpool Conservatives declined so rapidly?
The popular idea is that the decline of Toryism
in Liverpool was mainly due to Margaret
Thatcher’s premiership. But, as the author
argues in his new book,
Whatever Happened
to Tory Liverpool?
, this narrative is too simplistic.
Instead, we need to understand the history of
Conservative decline in Liverpool through a
tripartite framework, compartmentalising the
era into three separate periods: success, decline
and irrelevance.
The 1973 local election: The beginning
of the end
The core reason for the Conservative Party's
massive success in Liverpool in 1969 would not
come as a surprise for psephologists. Wilson's
Labour government was massively unpopular
and, as we know, voters like to punish national
governments in local elections.
By 1973, however, the story of Conservative
decline in Liverpool had begun. That year’s
local election was the rst vote following the
Local Government Act 1972, which mandated
a whole new system of local government in
England and, as a result, necessitated an all-out
election in 1973.
In and of itself, all-out elections are not
necessarily bad things for large parties. In the
previous all-out Liverpool election, 20 years
prior in 1953, the Conservatives did very well,
winning 49 per cent of the vote against Labour’s
43 per cent (but due to an inecient spread of
votes, Labour won 65 seats to the Tories’ 53).
This time, however, things were dierent.
Instead of it being a straight-up Conservative-
Labour contest in the city, the Liberals had
made a move on to the local political scene. The
Liberals play an important role in the story of
Conservative decline in Liverpool, and their rise
within the city’s local political scene is nothing
short of astounding.
Following the very disappointing Liberal
performance in the 1970 General Election, the
Young Liberals put forward a motion at the
party’s Autumn conference, committing to
© BRIAN HARRIS / Alamy Stock Photo
Political Insight June 2023.indd 30Political Insight June 2023.indd 3018/05/2023 14:5818/05/2023 14:58
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