People's Republic of South Yorkshire


"People's Republic of South Yorkshire" or "Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire" were nicknames often given to South Yorkshire under the left-wing local governments of the 1980s, especially the municipal socialist administration of Sheffield City Council led by David Blunkett, used by both detractors and supporters of the councils. The councils pursued a social policy radically different from that of Margaret Thatcher's national government, following more closely along the lines of Militant tendency-dominated Liverpool City Council and the Greater London Council led by Ken Livingstone.
The expression was coined by Max Williams, a leader writer at the Yorkshire Evening Post, although it was soon adopted by supporters of the council's left-wing policies. Sheffield Hallam was the only seat in South Yorkshire where the Conservative Party was a significant political force, the remaining seats being Labour safe seats or Liberal–Labour marginals. Sheffield City Council and the South Yorkshire Metropolitan Authority were solidly left wing, remaining socialist even as Thatcherism became the dominant political ideology in the country as a whole.
Sheffield City Council constructed large council estates with large numbers of communal blocks of flats based on the streets in the sky 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 councils also took more confrontational steps against the Conservative Westminster government. Sheffield refused to set a budget in the rate-capping rebellion, while South Yorkshire declared itself a nuclear-free zone and a demilitarized zone. The red flag flew on Sheffield Town Hall on May Day and the city signed a peace treaty with the city of Donetsk in the Ukrainian SSR, at that point on the other side of the Iron Curtain. 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 and the expulsion of the far-left elements of the party, along with the replacement of Thatcherism with the more moderate Majorism and Blairism, 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, Nick Clegg. However, despite not winning, the seat did experience an increase in the Labour vote 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, gained Sheffield Hallam at the 2017 snap general election for the first time in their history, while also retaining all of their existing South Yorkshire seats, meaning that Labour controlled every seat in South Yorkshire for the first time. The Labour candidate Jared O'Mara 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.
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.
As of 2017, all four metropolitan borough councils – Barnsley, Doncaster, Rotherham and Sheffield – are under Labour control, and the Conservatives do not hold a single seat in Rotherham or Sheffield.

Footnotes