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E-book Whatever Happened to Tory Liverpool? : Success, Decline and Irrelevance since 1945
In the municipal election of 1968, the Liverpool Conservatives won 62 per cent of the vote and 78 per cent of the seats on Liverpool City Council. Moreover, they had run Liverpool’s municipal government for 86 of the previous 100 years. In 1972 they lost control of the council. In 1983 they lost their last two MPs, and in 1998 they lost their final councillor. They have not won an electoral contest in the city since.Today, Liverpool is a by-word for anti-Tory sentiment. So implausible is the idea that the Conservatives could be electorally successful in Liverpool that, following the city’s 2012 mayoral election, BBC Radio 5 Live reported that the Conservative candidate had been defeated by a rival dressed as a polar bear (Morse 2012). W hilst incorrect — there was no candidate dressed as a polar bear — the Conservative candidate still finished a humiliating seventh on 4.5 per cent of the vote to Labour’s 59.3 per cent (ITV News2012). The Conservatives have not topped that performance in the city’s two subsequent mayoral elections. Conservative decline in Liverpool is chronically understudied. As will be shown below, explanations for Conservative decline in Liverpool tend to take one of two paths. The first is that the decline of religious sectarianism eroded the Conservatives’ electoral base, leading to their decline. The second is that Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher is solely to blame. Both explanations have elements of truth to them, but are by no means the whole stor y.If sectarianism was the only reason for Conservative support in Liverpool, then why did the party do so well in general elections until 1964 in terms of seat share) or 1970 (vote share), and still manage to win over 30 per cent of the vote in local elections until 1980? The beneficial effects of sectarianism should have been dulled before this, especially as class began to eclipse religion as a key determinant of voting behaviour in the early twentieth century.
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