Socialist politics came late to Liverpool. In the hundred years between 1850 and 1950, Liverpool's political history was controlled by Tory elite, many of whom remained independent of London and, basing their wealth on trade with the Empire, saw little need to invest in the city itself. Manchester by contrast was characterised by Liberal free traders such as Cobden and Bright, who also invested in libraries and other institutions aimed at the betterment of the lives of the working classes who had helped to create the city's wealth (Hunt 2005). Liverpool's wealth was made elsewhere, and while the gateway to the city around Lime Street Station and on the water-front boasted a suite of world-class buildings, one mile away the slums of north Liverpool were ignored. While elsewhere the Labour Party emerged to champion the working class, in Liverpool a clear sectarian divide saw the Tories securing the Protestant vote, while Irish republicans secured the Catholic vote. Liverpool Scotland was represented by Thomas Power O'Connor, an Irish Nationalist MP, up to his death in 1929. The city would have to wait until 1923 before the first Labour MP was elected for Edge Hill, and longer still before Labour secured a majority of MPs in 1964, including the MP for Huyton, Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson (Kilfoyle 2000: 2).

This is not to say that working people did not organise in Liverpool. In 1911 the city was paralysed by a transport strike. Elites sent word to London that the crimson flag of anarchy held sway over the city, and the cruiser Antrim was moored in the Mersey (O'Brien 2011). The docks and life in the slums bred a city of fighters. While socialists began to organise in the city from the 1930s onwards, it was not until 1955, after nearly a decade of Tory dominance in local elections, that the Tory stranglehold was finally broken. Liverpool's political landscape now began to change as Labour took power for the first time. Between the mid-1950s and the early 1970s, control of the city was shared between Catholic focused Labour (in the shape the Braddock machine) and the Protestant orientated Conservatives (Parkinson 1985, Kilfoyle 2000).