The 1952

Southport Southport is a seaside town in the Metropolitan Borough of Sefton in Merseyside, England. At the 2001 census, it had a population of 90,336, making it the eleventh most populous settlement in North West England. Southport lies on the Iris ...

by-election A by-election, also known as a special election in the United States and the Philippines, a bye-election in Ireland, a bypoll in India, or a Zimni election (Urdu: ضمنی انتخاب, supplementary election) in Pakistan, is an election used to f ...

was held on 6 February 1952 after the incumbent

Conservative Conservatism is a cultural, social, and political philosophy that seeks to promote and to preserve traditional institutions, practices, and values. The central tenets of conservatism may vary in relation to the culture and civilization in ...

MP Robert Hudson was elevated to a

hereditary peerage The hereditary peers form part of the peerage in the United Kingdom. As of September 2022, there are 807 hereditary peers: 29 dukes (including five royal dukes), 34 marquesses, 190 earls, 111 viscounts, and 443 barons (disregarding subsidi ...

. The Conservative candidate was

Roger Fleetwood-Hesketh Lieutenant-Colonel Roger Fleetwood Hesketh (28 July 1902 – 14 November 1987), born Roger Bibby-Hesketh, was a Conservative Party politician in the United Kingdom. He was Member of Parliament (MP) for Southport from 1952 to 1959. Early lif ...

, a former mayor of Southport. The Labour party selected 32-year old Alan Tillotson, an executive of the Bolton Evening News. Hubert Bentliff, who had been the Liberal party's candidate at the previous year's general election, ran again for the party. The campaign focused mainly on issues arising from the general election, which had brought the Conservatives to power after six years of Labour government. For the Conservatives the focus was on the cost of living: "we are applying the brakes to arrest the disastrous fall in the buying power of the pound ... we are determined to put a stop to the creeping inflation which is not only eating into our social services, pensions and savings, but destroying our capacity to import the food and raw materials by which we live". Labour insisted that the Conservatives had won the general election by blaming the party for all the difficulties of the post war period: "They now admit ... that they were caused by circumstances outside the control of any Government" and warned that cuts in social services "might foreshadow more serious attacks on the welfare State in the Budget". With turnout down around 10,000 votes from the general election, the Labour vote declined slightly, Liberal support fell by nearly 4,000 and Conservative votes by nearly 6,000.. The result was a comfortable majority for the Conservatives in a constituency that they had only twice failed to win since the beginning of the century."Conservatives Hold Southport." Times ondon, England7 Feb. 1952

Previous Election

References

{{By-elections to the 40th UK Parliament Politics of the Metropolitan Borough of Sefton Southport by-election Southport by-election Southport by-election, 1952 Southport, 1952 Southport, 1952 Southport Southport by-election