Could Michael Heseltine have saved the Mersey for the Tories?

[Kimkatya]

Currently reading Michael Crick's Michael Heseltine, a lovely biography of the man, and he had a chapter on Heseltine's trips to Liverpool and his various struggles with the Metropolitan Councils and his looks into the racism and poverty affecting the region in the 1980's. But the specific question I have is whether if Heseltine's reforms from his document, It Took A Riot, if enacted, could have possibly changed the electoral prospects for the Tories even marginally in the region.

tl;dr if margaret thatcher removed the stick up her ass and actually put through heseltine's suggested reforms for the region beyond "let's abolish the metropolitan councils", could the tories have had more of a shot up there?

Here's It Took A Riot, thanks to the Margaret Thatcher Foundation: https://c59574e9047e61130f13-3f71d0...kcdn.com/810813 Heseltine to MT (578-278).pdf

 

[RobinCarmody]

One thing that strikes me about the disappearance of the Tories in Liverpool is that you can define the change from post-war One Nation politics to 1980s Two Nations politics in terms of the two biggest bands of the 1960s.

When those two bands were growing up, there were multiple Conservative MPs in Liverpool (one of whom was a particularly strong supporter, I think, of the whole Franco-British Union / French membership of the Commonwealth thing in 1956, which I would have *liked* to have worked but fear that it would simply have been the combination and continuation of two forms of late-imperial brutality, Cyprus and Algeria, and not much better than what we actually had), but Dartford (where I grew up, but more importantly in this context so did Mick Jagger & Keith Richards) remained Labour throughout 13 years of Conservative rule. By the 1980s the Tories were utterly despised in Liverpool but had a five-figure majority in Dartford, now such a famous bellwether (indeed, Labour's victory there in 1959 was I think the last time they held a Kent seat while out of power until the freakish and largely anti-Brexit success in the atypical seat of Canterbury very recently).

 

[RobinCarmody]

Heseltine's verdict being buried because it was too One Nation / "aristocratic social conscience" for Thatcher's liking is redolent of the interim Taylor report on Hillsborough being buried because it so unequivocally blamed the police - Douglas Hurd wanted her to support it but she wouldn't budge.

But there are so many other factors here: Hillsborough obviously, the resultant boycott of the Sun (although even before that I can't imagine it had taken as much of the Merseyside working-class readership from the Mirror as in places like Dartford - Thames Estuary working-class abandonment of Labour was the big narrative in the 1980s in the same way that "former coalfield" abandonment of Labour, especially in the East Midlands and County Durham, has been recently), the massive Irish influence, the related sense of not being 100% English which influenced, probably along with the working class not reading the Sun, Merseyside's Remain vote. I think you probably need pro-European One Nation Conservatism to survive, most likely with an earlier February 1974 election and resultant victory. Ironically, Merseyside's strong ties to American pop culture *might* have fitted better with latterday Toryism than with the One Nation variety, but everything else on both sides was bigger and more important politically.

 

[Elektronaut]

There was barely anything to save in Liverpool proper when Thatcher took over. The Conservative constituencies on the Wirral OTOH would be absolutely fine for the Tories throughout Thatcher's tenure and Wirral West has a fairly high Tory bedrock to this day. The old Crosby seat would also be held quite comfortably until 1997.

Heseltine's strong interest in Liverpool, cities generally and regionalism makes for an interesting potential policy divergence but would it work electoral miracles, no.

 

[Kimkatya]

That’s all very helpful, thank you all!

 

[iainbhx]

A gentle reminder that the Tories only lost their last parliamentary seat in Liverpool in 1983 because of the boundary changes, there were possible configurations which would have kept a Conservative seat in Liverpool right up to 1992, but the Boundary Commission and David Alton did for that.