"People's Republic of South Yorkshire" or "Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire" were nicknames often given to
South Yorkshire
South Yorkshire is a ceremonial and metropolitan county in the Yorkshire and Humber Region of England. The county has four council areas which are the cities of Doncaster and Sheffield as well as the boroughs of Barnsley and Rotherham.
...
under the left-wing local governments of the 1980s, especially the
municipal socialist administration of
Sheffield City Council
Sheffield City Council is the city council for the metropolitan borough of Sheffield in South Yorkshire, England. It consists of 84 councillors, elected to represent 28 wards, each with three councillors. It is currently under No Overall Con ...
led by
David Blunkett
David Blunkett, Baron Blunkett, (born 6 June 1947) is a British Labour Party politician who has been a Member of the House of Lords since 2015, and previously served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Sheffield Brightside and Hillsborough ...
, used by both detractors and supporters of the councils.
The councils pursued a social policy radically different from that of
Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher (; 13 October 19258 April 2013) was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990. She was the first female British prime ...
's national government, following more closely along the lines of
Militant tendency
, native_name_lang = cy
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, colorcode =
, leader = collective leadership(''Militant'' editorial board)
, leader1_name = Ted Grant
, leader1_title = Political Secretary
, leader2_name = Pet ...
-dominated
Liverpool City Council
Liverpool City Council is the governing body for the city of Liverpool in Merseyside, England. It consists of 90 councillors, three for each of the city's 30 wards.
The council is currently controlled by the Labour Party and is led by Mayor J ...
and the
Greater London Council
The Greater London Council (GLC) was the top-tier local government administrative body for Greater London from 1965 to 1986. It replaced the earlier London County Council (LCC) which had covered a much smaller area. The GLC was dissolved in 198 ...
led by
Ken Livingstone
Kenneth Robert Livingstone (born 17 June 1945) is an English politician who served as the Leader of the Greater London Council (GLC) from 1981 until the council was abolished in 1986, and as Mayor of London from the creation of the office ...
.
The expression was coined by Max Williams, a leader writer at the ''
Yorkshire Evening Post
The ''Yorkshire Evening Post'' is a daily evening publication (delivered to newsagents every morning) published by Yorkshire Post Newspapers in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England. The paper provides a regional slant on the day's news, and traditi ...
'', although it was soon adopted by supporters of the council's left-wing policies.
Sheffield Hallam was the only parliamentary constituency in South Yorkshire where the
Conservative Party
The Conservative Party is a name used by many political parties around the world. These political parties are generally right-wing though their exact ideologies can range from center-right to far-right.
Political parties called The Conservative P ...
was a significant political force, the remaining seats being
Labour safe seat
A safe seat is an electoral district (constituency) in a legislative body (e.g. Congress, Parliament, City Council) which is regarded as fully secure, for either a certain political party, or the incumbent representative personally or a combina ...
s or
Liberal–Labour
marginals.
Sheffield City Council and the South Yorkshire Metropolitan Authority were solidly left-wing, remaining
socialist
Socialism is a left-wing economic philosophy and movement encompassing a range of economic systems characterized by the dominance of social ownership of the means of production as opposed to private ownership. As a term, it describes the ...
even as
Thatcherism
Thatcherism is a form of British conservative ideology named after Conservative Party leader Margaret Thatcher that relates to not just her political platform and particular policies but also her personal character and general style of manag ...
became the dominant political ideology in the country at large.
Sheffield City Council constructed large
council estates
Public housing in the United Kingdom, also known as council estates, council housing, or social housing, provided the majority of rented accommodation until 2011 when the number of households in private rental housing surpassed the number in so ...
with large numbers of communal blocks of flats based on the
streets in the sky
A tower block, high-rise, apartment tower, residential tower, apartment block, block of flats, or office tower is a tall building, as opposed to a low-rise building and is defined differently in terms of height depending on the jurisdictio ...
philosophy, including the
Park Hill complex,
and the borough councils of South Yorkshire set up an extensive network of subsidised transport under the
South Yorkshire Passenger Transport Executive
The South Yorkshire Passenger Transport Executive is the passenger transport executive for South Yorkshire in England. It is supervised by the South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority, which consists of representatives from the metropolitan b ...
.
The councils also took more confrontational steps against the Conservative Westminster government.
Sheffield refused to set a budget in the
rate-capping rebellion
The rate-capping rebellion was a campaign within English local councils in 1985 which aimed to force the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher to withdraw powers to restrict the spending of councils. The affected councils were almost all r ...
, while South Yorkshire declared itself a
nuclear-free zone
A nuclear-free zone is an area in which nuclear weapons (see nuclear-weapon-free zone) and nuclear power plants are banned. The specific ramifications of these depend on the locale in question.
Nuclear-free zones usually neither address nor pro ...
and a
demilitarized zone
A demilitarized zone (DMZ or DZ) is an area in which treaties or agreements between nations, military powers or contending groups forbid military installations, activities, or personnel. A DZ often lies along an established frontier or bounda ...
.
The
red flag flew on
Sheffield Town Hall on
May Day
May Day is a European festival of ancient origins marking the beginning of summer, usually celebrated on 1 May, around halfway between the spring equinox and summer solstice. Festivities may also be held the night before, known as May Eve. Tr ...
and the city signed a
peace treaty
A peace treaty is an agreement between two or more hostile parties, usually countries or governments, which formally ends a state of war between the parties. It is different from an armistice, which is an agreement to stop hostilities; a surre ...
with the city of
Donetsk
Donetsk ( , ; uk, Донецьк, translit=Donets'k ; russian: Донецк ), formerly known as Aleksandrovka, Yuzivka (or Hughesovka), Stalin and Stalino (see also: cities' alternative names), is an industrial city in eastern Ukraine loc ...
in
Soviet Ukraine
The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic ( uk, Украї́нська Радя́нська Соціалісти́чна Респу́бліка, ; russian: Украи́нская Сове́тская Социалисти́ческая Респ ...
, at that point on the other side of the
Iron Curtain
The Iron Curtain was the political boundary dividing Europe into two separate areas from the end of World War II in 1945 until the end of the Cold War in 1991. The term symbolizes the efforts by the Soviet Union (USSR) to block itself and its ...
.
Both groups of policies – the practical and the symbolic – were sometimes cited as reasons for the nickname. The
National Union of Mineworkers moved to
headquarters in Sheffield in 1983 in the run-up to the decisive
1984–85 miners' strike, and the area subsequently became one of the main centres of the strike.
Legacy
Although it lost some of its relevance following the Labour Party's shift towards
New Labour
New Labour was a period in the history of the British Labour Party from the mid to late 1990s until 2010 under the leadership of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. The name dates from a conference slogan first used by the party in 1994, later seen ...
and the expulsion of the left-wing elements of the party, along with the replacement of Thatcherism with the more superficially moderate
Majorism and
Blairism
In British politics, Blairism is the political ideology of Tony Blair, the former leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister between 1997 and 2007, and those that support him, known as Blairites. It entered the '' New Penguin English Dicti ...
, 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
The deputy prime minister of the United Kingdom is a minister of the Crown and a member of the British Cabinet. The office is not always in use, and prime ministers may use other offices, such as First Secretary of State, to indicate the se ...
,
Nick Clegg
Sir Nicholas William Peter Clegg (born 7 January 1967) is a British media executive and former Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom who has been president for global affairs at Meta Platforms since 2022, having previously been vicep ...
. However, despite Labour not winning, the party did increase its vote by a net of 11,634 relative to
2010
File:2010 Events Collage New.png, From top left, clockwise: The 2010 Chile earthquake was one of the strongest recorded in history; The Eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland disrupts air travel in Europe; A scene from the opening ceremony of ...
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.
Labour, supported by the left-wing group
Momentum
In Newtonian mechanics, momentum (more specifically linear momentum or translational momentum) is the product of the mass and velocity of an object. It is a vector quantity, possessing a magnitude and a direction. If is an object's mass ...
, 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 controlled every seat in South Yorkshire for the first time. The Labour candidate
Jared O'Mara
Jared Cain O'Mara (born 15 November 1981) is a British former politician who was Member of Parliament (MP) for Sheffield Hallam from 2017 to 2019. Elected as a Labour Party candidate, he left the party in October 2017 after allegations of sexu ...
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.
As of 2017, all four
metropolitan borough
A metropolitan borough (or metropolitan district) is a type of districts of England, local government district in England. Created in 1974 by the Local Government Act 1972, metropolitan boroughs are defined in English law as metropolitan distric ...
councils (
Barnsley
Barnsley () is a market town in South Yorkshire, England. As the main settlement of the Metropolitan Borough of Barnsley and the fourth largest settlement in South Yorkshire. In Barnsley, the population was 96,888 while the wider Borough ha ...
,
Doncaster
Doncaster (, ) is a city in South Yorkshire, England. Named after the River Don, it is the administrative centre of the larger City of Doncaster. It is the second largest settlement in South Yorkshire after Sheffield. Doncaster is situated in ...
,
Rotherham
Rotherham () is a large minster and market town in South Yorkshire, England. The town takes its name from the River Rother which then merges with the River Don. The River Don then flows through the town centre. It is the main settlement of ...
and
Sheffield
Sheffield is a city in South Yorkshire, England, whose name derives from the River Sheaf which runs through it. The city serves as the administrative centre of the City of Sheffield. It is historically part of the West Riding of Yorkshire ...
) were under Labour control, and the Conservatives did not hold a single seat in Rotherham or Sheffield.
However, in the
2019 general election, the Conservative Party won three seats in South Yorkshire for the first time:
Don Valley,
Rother Valley and
Penistone & Stocksbridge. Labour had considerably reduced majorities in the remaining seats in Barnsley, Rotherham and Doncaster and in
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.
See also
*
List of city nicknames in the United Kingdom
A ''list'' is any set of items in a row. List or lists may also refer to:
People
* List (surname)
Organizations
* List College, an undergraduate division of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America
* SC Germania List, German rugby union ...
Footnotes
References
{{Reflist, 2
Politics of Sheffield
History of Sheffield
History of the Labour Party (UK)
Political terms in the United Kingdom
Democratic socialism
20th century in South Yorkshire
1980s in South Yorkshire