http://www.allthatsleft.co.uk/2011/04/labour-lose-seat-on-the-wirral/

I’m not sure this applies to all parties in the C18 – to the Rockingham and Foxite Whigs, it does – but I certainly agree with you as far as the C20 is concerned. Class identity was much stronger than ideology was in building a coalition of both parties. That’s posibly why talented working-class people who rose through the unions or the Labour movement, like Richard Marsh, Alf Robens or Frank Chapple, moved to the right in later years. They were tied to Labour and the unions by class and the possibility of self-advancement, not ideology. On the other side, you had Conservatives who were liberal, even progressive, but who felt themselves unable to join Labour because the party only welcomed upper and middle class converts who were firm socialist converts.

His share of the vote only fell 1.6% in 2010, an extremely good performance.”

Helped of course by this being the only seat where no minor parties or independents stood, which in many similar seats took 10-15% from the Labour total.

His share of the vote only fell 1.6% in 2010, an extremely good performance.

In those days, it was common for people to call themselves Whigs or Tories and then vote with the other side 99% of the time. They weren’t a Whig because they supported the party, but because that was the label their family were from. And the same is now true of Field.

Birkenhead CLP seems to like that sort of thing. In the preface to Edmund Dell’s able but bitter posthumous history of democratic socialism (or, more accurately, his history of the higher echelons of Labour post-1931), Dell says he had ceased to be socialist by the time he entered Parliament in 1964. Reading the book, one wonders how he managed to stick being in the party until the SDP split.