85 Reynolds Strange Survival Liberal Lancashire
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THE StrANGE SURVIVAL OF LIBERAL LANCAShirE The story of the decline of the Liberal Party after 1918 is well known. With the rise of class politics the Liberals were squeezed between the advance of Labour and the exodus of the middle classes to the Tories. Liberalism disintegrated in industrial and urban Britain and was pushed back to rural enclaves in the ‘Celtic fringe’, where it held on precariously until the 1960s when, reinvented by Jo Grimond as a radical alternative to Labour, the party spread back into the suburbs. he survival of the Liberals The persistence of this Pennine Jaime Reynolds as a significant local force outpost of Liberalism is conven- examines one exception Tin the Lancashire and York- tionally attributed to the strength shire textile districts throughout of Nonconformity and the Liber- to this story: the this period is a striking exception als’ collusion with the Conserva- to this general picture. The party’s tives in anti-Labour pacts. Thus resilience of the Liberal decline here was slower than in Peter Clarke has lamented that Party in the Lancashire other parts of urban Britain with after 1914 the Liberals could win the result that by the mid-1950s elections there only on the basis of cotton districts between over two-thirds of the Liberals’ ‘a sort of Nonconformist bastard remaining local government repre- Toryism’. 2 This does not do jus- the 1920s and the 1970s. sentation came from the region.1 tice to the continuing vigour of 20 Journal of Liberal History 85 Winter 2014–15 THE StrANGE SURVIVAL OF LIBERAL LANCAShirE Pennine Radicalism which, at least availability of digital sources4 on and thereafter the Liberals secured until 1945 and in some places later, local history to map the main con- only isolated victories. White held amounted to a third force in the tours and character of the Liberal his seat until 1945; Arthur Holt sat politics of the northern industrial stronghold in the Lancashire cot- for Bolton West from 1951 to 1964 heartland. It continued to play a ton districts. For reasons of space, thanks to a pact with the Tories; prominent part in the political lead- other parts of Lancashire includ- Michael Winstanley represented ership of the region and remained ing most of the Manchester conur- Cheadle from 1966 to 1970; and deeply embedded in the local social bation as well as the West Riding Cyril Smith gained Rochdale at and economic structure. It articu- of Yorkshire are not covered in a by-election in 1972. The steady lated a distinctive political outlook detail. Future articles will look at national decline to the 1950s was that influenced the development of these areas in depth. The time span mirrored in the pattern of Lib- all three major parties. examined is from the end of the eral candidatures in the region and The academic literature on Lan- First World War until the reorgani- the falling average of votes they cashire Liberalism that is so rich for sation of local government in 1974. received. the period before 1914 – notably The persis- Labour advanced in Lancashire Clarke’s seminal Lancashire and the tence of this in the same period. In 1906 it held a New Liberalism3 – is almost totally Electoral trends in Lancashire dozen seats, all of them in alliance lacking for the period after the In parliamentary general elections Pennine with the Liberals. In 1918 Labour First World War. In the dominant – apart from a couple of blips in the won fourteen seats, but only one class-based left–right interpreta- 1920s – at national level the Lib- outpost of of these was in new territory; it tion, the Liberals are dismissed as erals declined steadily from their had held all the others at some time an irrelevant and outmoded relic of landslide victory in 1906, through a Liberalism is before 1918. By 1923 – the year of the past. Far more has been written series of crashes at the general elec- the first minority Labour govern- about tiny and electorally insig- tions of 1918, 1924, 1931, 1935 and convention- ment – Labour reached twenty- nificant groups on the political 1950, down to a low point in 1957 three seats, still behind the Liberals. extremes. Even Liberal historians when they held just five seats at ally attrib- Their gains were concentrated have generally confined their inter- Westminster. in unionised working-class con- est to the intellectual influence on The parliamentary election uted to the stituencies in Manchester, Salford the national party of a few promi- figures for Lancashire paint the and the South Lancashire heavy nent northern intellectuals such as same picture. In 1906 the Liber- strength of industrial belt. In 1929 they broke Ernest Simon, Ramsay Muir and als and their allies won fifty-four into previously Liberal textile Elliot Dodds, ignoring the sig- seats in the region to the Conserva- Nonconform- areas such as Accrington, Mossley, nificance of the resilient Liberal tives’ sixteen. By December 1910 Rochdale, Rossendale and Staly- grassroots in the mill towns. But in they had thirty-nine seats to the ity and the bridge & Hyde winning forty seats. order to understand properly the Tories’ thirty-two.5 At the 1918 gen- However in the 1931 crisis elec- nature of the party in the years of eral election only nine Coalition Liberals’ col- tion Labour collapsed to just five decline it is essential to understand and one Asquithian Liberal were lusion with seats and recovered only to fifteen more about its social and economic returned. The Liberals’ high-point in 1935. These were essentially the underpinning and the story of the after the First World War was 1923 the Con- core seats they had won in 1918 and many hundreds of local activists when they won twenty-six seats in before. Labour had to wait until who sustained it in its northern the region, but by 1929 they were servatives in the 1945 landslide to repeat and go redoubt. down to six, and in 1931 only Her- beyond the point they had achieved This article is intended as a cor- bert Samuel in Darwen and Gra- anti-Labour in 1929, winning fifty-two seats, rective to this neglect. It makes ham White in Birkenhead East including a number in middle-class use particularly of the increasing remained. Darwen was lost in 1935 pacts. suburbs where the Liberals had Journal of Liberal History 85 Winter 2014–15 21 THE STRANGE SURVIVAL OF liBERAL LANCAShirE previously been strong.6 Thus, far Table 1: Percentage of Lancashire county borough and municipal borough seats held by party9 from being a relentless advance, Liberal Conservative Labour Other Labour expansion was largely con- fined to its working-class union- 1921 28.2 48.4 16.0 7.3 ised strongholds apart from the leap 1929 21.0 40.6 29.0 9.4 forward of 1929 which was soon 1938 14.1 41.0 27.7 17.2 reversed, and that of 1945 which 1947 9.0 44.2 37.7 9.1 marked a more permanent shift. The Conservatives were by far 1957 6.1 39.5 50.6 3.8 the dominant party in Lancashire 1963 11.9 31.7 52.2 4.3 parliamentary elections, apart from 1972 5.7 38.0 54.0 2.3 1906–10 and 1945. Even in bad years such as 1923 or 1929 they won more seats than either the Liberals or Table 2: Percentage of county borough and municipal borough seats held by party in cotton Labour.7 In their good years, such districts as 1924 or 1935, their lead was over- Liberal Conservative Labour Other whelming.8 It was only in the early 1950s that Labour replaced them as 1921 39.3 46.5 11.3 2.8 the leading party in Lancashire. 1929 32.4 41.8 21.8 4.1 At local government level, the 1938 27.2 45.7 23.7 3.4 trends were broadly similar. In 1947 17.2 42.6 37.3 2.9 Lancashire, as nationally, Labour’s progress fluctuated. Its advances 1957 9.4 37.5 52.6 0.5 were in 1919, in the second half of 1963 16.2 27.2 54.7 1.9 the 1920s, the mid-1930s, and espe- 1972 6.5 35.5 56.6 1.4 cially in 1945–6 and 1952–4 when Labour established majorities in many boroughs, which it main- support in the seaside resorts of or to fuse into electoral coalitions tained through to the later 1960s. In Southport and Blackpool – Lib- with the Tories. The Conservatives the intervening years it lost ground. eral strength was concentrated in were also relatively strong in this The Conservatives made sweeping the cotton-manufacturing bor- industrial area. The pattern shifted gains in 1967–9 followed by almost oughs in the east and south of the after 1945, with the Liberal relative as sharp a swing back to Labour in county. If we home in on the tradi- strength becoming less marked and 1970–2 when the last elections were tional weaving towns of Burnley, indeed negligible by the end of the held before local government reor- Darwen, Accrington, Haslingden, period, the Conservatives losing ganisation in 1974. (See Table 1.) Rawtenstall and Bacup, together their local advantage and Labour The Liberals – ignoring those with the traditional spinning performing better than elsewhere who stood as Independents – held towns of Bolton, Bury, Rochdale, in Lancashire to become the clear more than 20 per cent of seats Oldham, Stockport, Heywood, majority party in these districts through the 1920s and still held a Middleton, Ashton under Lyne, from the 1950s.10 seventh of the total at the end of Dukinfield, Hyde, Stalybridge and the 1930s.