People's Republic of South Yorkshire

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

South Yorkshire following the 2017 general election. For the first time, every seat in the county was held by Labour (red) after this election.[a]

"People's Republic of South Yorkshire" or "Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire" were nicknames often given to South Yorkshire under the left-wing local governments of the 1980s, especially the municipal socialist administration of Sheffield City Council led by David Blunkett, used by both detractors and supporters of the councils.[1] The councils pursued a social policy radically different from that of Margaret Thatcher's national government, following more closely along the lines of Militant tendency-dominated Liverpool City Council and the Greater London Council led by Ken Livingstone.[2]

The expression was coined by Max Williams, a leader writer at the

socialist even as Thatcherism
became the dominant political ideology in the country at large.

Sheffield City Council constructed large

1984–85 miners' strike, and the area subsequently became one of the main centres of the strike.[9]

Legacy

Although it lost some of its relevance following the Labour Party's shift towards

Majorism and Blairism, the name remains in use for the area, which is still dominated by the political left. Up until and including the 2015 general election, the only seat in South Yorkshire not held by Labour was Sheffield Hallam, which was held at the time of the election by the-then Leader of the Liberal Democrats and Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Nick Clegg. However, despite Labour not winning, the party did increase its vote by a net of 11,634 relative to 2010 and the Labour Party candidate Oliver Coppard significantly reduced then-Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg's majority from 15,284 votes to just 2,353 votes.[10][11]

Labour, supported by the left-wing group Momentum, gained Sheffield Hallam at the 2017 snap general election for the first time ever, while also retaining all the South Yorkshire seats it previously represented, meaning that Labour represented every seat in South Yorkshire for the first time. The Labour candidate Jared O'Mara won a majority of 2,125 votes over Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg, and Clegg's loss was one of the major high-profile losses on the night of 8 June 2017. O'Mara was suspended from the Labour Party on 25 October 2017 after it emerged that he had made derogatory comments online about women and homosexuals, years prior to his election.[12][a]

As of 2017, all four

Sheffield South East
and Sheffield Hallam, although their support remained strong in the other Sheffield constituencies.

At the 2021 local council elections, the Conservative Party gained one seat on Sheffield City Council (its first in over 15 years) and 20 seats on Rotherham Council. They also held the one seat they were defending in Barnsley and increased their representation on Doncaster Council by four seats. In the Police and Crime Commissioner election held the same day, the party increased its share of the vote by 21.5% compared with the 2016 by-election.

The Labour Party again won every seat in South Yorkshire at the 2024 election, at which they recorded a landslide victory nationally. In South Yorkshire, Labour regained the three seats which they had lost to the Conservatives in 2019; the party recorded generally comfortable victories in most seats in the county. However, the Green Party made considerable inroads in Sheffield, coming second in the Brightside & Hillsborough, Central and Heeley constituencies for the first time; while Reform UK performed well in both Barnsley seats.

General election results

See also

  • List of city nicknames in the United Kingdom

Footnotes

  1. ^ a b Jared O'Mara, who won Sheffield Hallam as the Labour candidate in 2017, was suspended from the party that same year.

References

  1. ISBN 978-1444355598
    . ... local politics in Sheffield were dominated by a particular form of radical municipal socialism, gaining the city a brief but prestigious reputation as the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire.
  2. ISSN 0955-2359
    .
  3. ^ Lazenby, Peter (31 August 2012). "Generations Unite". Morning Star. Archived from the original on 3 September 2012. Retrieved 13 September 2012. The steel city – much of its steel industry wrecked under Thatcher – was at the heart of what used to be proudly called the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire.
  4. ISBN 978-0709936091
    . The Conservatives can win only one seat in the so-called 'Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire'.
  5. ISBN 978-1845455514
    .
  6. ISBN 978-0803986428
    . In contrast Labour did have effective control of public transport in the metropolitan counties following the 1981 elections, and their aim, indeed the achievement of the 'Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire', was to run a cheap, efficient and extensive public transport service.
  7. ^ a b Justice of the Peace Ltd (1983). Local Government Review. 147: 99. Councillor Irvine Patnick, the leader of the minority Tory group on the South Yorkshire Metropolitan County Council, apparently makes regular reports to the national chairman of his party and other Conservative high-ups on the situation in that beleaguered county which he refers to either as the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire or (since the authority declared South Yorks to be a demilitarised and nuclear-free zone) Peace County. {{cite journal}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  8. ^ "Radio 4 – Factual — Children of the Red Flag". BBC. 16 October 2006. Archived from the original on 6 November 2012. Retrieved 11 October 2009.
  9. ISBN 978-1844675081
    . Sheffield, at the centre of the country's largest coalfield and renowned at the time as the capital of the 'socialist republic of South Yorkshire', offered by far the best deal and it was there that the NUM set up shop in the spring of 1983.
  10. ISBN 978-0415268332
    . The 'Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire' has not always been as solidly Labour as it is now, with just one Liberal Democrat seat in the shape of Sheffield Hallam breaking the monopoly.
  11. Yorkshire Post
    . Retrieved 11 June 2015.
  12. ^ Cooke, Rachel (18 June 2017). "Jared O'Mara, the pub-owning first-time MP who won Nick Clegg's seat". The Observer. Retrieved 27 October 2017.
  13. Yorkshire Post
    . Retrieved 11 June 2015.
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