Welcome back. I'm so glad you're joining us for
today's deep dive. Yeah, it's a great one today.
It really is. And if you could see the video
feed across from me right now, you would see
we are setting a very specific, incredibly atmospheric
mood today. I went all out for this. You really
did. You've got this fantastic backdrop. It's
these vintage, early 20th century maps of Liverpool.
And they're heavily overlaid with these sepia
-toned images of old shipping docks. look like
intensely crowded political rallies exactly it
perfectly sets the stage for our mission today
we are looking at a very specific time a very
specific place and an atmosphere that was essentially
well it was a powder keg waiting for a match
yeah today we are pulling from a fascinating
stack of historical sources to examine a highly
specific and honestly an often entirely overlooked
piece of british political history right We are
tracing the 70 year rise and fall of the Liverpool
Protestant Party. Which is a story that genuinely
has a little bit of everything. I mean, you have
religious tension. You have bureaucratic spite.
Lots of spite. So much spite. You have prison
sentences and you have some incredibly savvy
political marketing. It's a phenomenal narrative.
And for you listening, here is why this matters.
This is an absolute masterclass in how hyper
local grievances, massive demographic shifts
and, you know, deep seated community tensions
can accidentally birth a formidable political
machine. A completely unintended machine. Right.
A machine that not only reshapes a major city,
but completely outlasts its own founders. OK.
Let's unpack this. Where exactly does our story
begin? Because to understand the Liverpool Protestant
Party, we really have to understand the ground
they were standing on. Yeah. To really understand
the boiling point, we have to look at the big
picture context of Liverpool in the late 19th
and early 20th centuries. Right. The landscape
of the city was experiencing an absolute earthquake
in terms of demographic shifts. Huge changes.
Massive. Specifically, there's a massive surge
in Irish migration into Liverpool. And predominantly,
this was an influx of Irish Catholics. This fundamentally
changed the cultural and political makeup of
the city. And as that Roman Catholic population
in Liverpool greatly increased, the militant
Protestants and the Orange Lodge members who
had traditionally wielded a lot of influence
there started getting incredibly anxious. Yeah,
they were terrified of losing their grip on the
city's culture. They felt their influence slipping
away. Traditionally, the organized Protestant
voting bloc which is often referred to as the
orange vote, was staunchly loyal to the conservative
and unionist party. That was their standard alignment.
That was the natural home for their political
alignment. Exactly. But that loyalty was really
beginning to fracture under the weight of these
demographic changes. The militant Protestants
were getting deeply frustrated with the dominant
conservatives. Yep. And our sources show that
this frustration boiled down to three incredibly
specific. Highly localized grievances. Let's
look at those because these weren't broad, sweeping
philosophical differences at first. No, not at
all. They were highly targeted legislative complaints.
Very targeted. So the first major grievance was
about convent laundries. Right. The conservative
party had actually used their parliamentary whip.
which is essentially enforcing strict party discipline
to ensure their members vote a certain way to
oppose the extension of standard factory inspections
to laundries run by Catholic convents. And you
can see why that struck a nerve. Oh, absolutely.
The militant Protestants viewed this as the conservatives
giving blatant preferential treatment to Catholic
institutions. In their eyes, the conservatives
were exempting these convents from the rigorous
labor and safety laws that every other business.
in the city had to follow. It felt like a two
-tiered system of justice. A total double standard.
And that sense of unequal treatment bleeds perfectly
into their second grievance, which was the Education
Act of 1902. Oh, this is a big one. Huge. This
act essentially made local public money available
to Catholic schools. And the Protestant opposition
gave this grievance a brilliantly catchy, if
incredibly divisive, piece of political branding.
Yeah, they called it Rome on the rates. Rome
on the rates. It's a phenomenal piece of political
messaging. Rates being the local property taxes
that citizens paid to the municipal government.
Right. So by calling it Rome on the rates, the
rallying cry was essentially telling the Protestant
working class that their hard earned tax money
was directly funding the Vatican's interests.
Wow. It's a very visceral way to weaponize local
tax policy. It really is. Now, the third grievance
is a bit of a pivot because it was entirely internal
to the Church of England itself. Yes. The militant
Protestants were furious over the failure of
the conservative government to either enact a
new church discipline act or amend the old one.
They wanted a crackdown. They did. They wanted
a much more effective, legally binding counter
to what they called extreme ritualism creeping
into the Church of England. Right. They felt
their own church was becoming too Catholic in
its aesthetics and practices, and they blamed
the conservatives for not legislating a stop
to it. What's fascinating here is that we have
to remember this wasn't just an isolated incident
happening in a vacuum in Liverpool. Good point.
This localized tension was part of a much larger
ideological fracture happening across the region.
If you look at the broader timeline, just a few
years earlier in 1898, John Kensett. Oh, right.
The Protestant Truth Society guy. Exactly. The
leader of the Protestant Truth Society. He actually
stood for election to the House of Commons all
the way down in Brighton. specifically to secure
independent Protestant representation. So the
appetite for a breakaway Protestant political
identity was already simmering across the country.
Precisely. And we see it across the Irish Sea,
too. By 1902, this exact same unease manifested
in the creation of the independent Orange Order
in Belfast, over in Ulster. Wow. So Liverpool
is sitting right in the middle of this broader
cultural and political fault line. The National
Conservative Party was trying to hold together
a very broad coalition, and these hyper -local,
single -issue factions were starting to break
off. Which brings us to the actual spark that
lights the powder keg in Liverpool. We've got
the tension, but now we need the catalyst. And
that catalyst is a man named George Wise. George
Wise is a prominent local Protestant leader,
and he serves as the pastor of the Protestant
Reformers Church. He was a firebrand. Total firebrand.
And he had quite the dedicated, mobilized following.
His adherents included large numbers of members
from the Orange Order, as well as his own massive
congregation. But Wise runs into a major logistical
problem with the conservative -controlled Liverpool
Corporation. Yeah, the local government. Right.
The corporation outright refuses to allocate
any public open space specifically for outdoor
meetings. I want to pause on that because it
might seem minor today. It sounds like a zoning
issue. Right, but if you don't have a public
square in the early 1900s, you don't have a voice.
The public park was the internet of 1903. It
was where you rallied your base, shared your
message, and organized your political power.
That makes total sense. Denying that space was
an existential threat to Wise's movement. So
without authorized space, disturbances naturally
start breaking out at impromptu meetings held
in public squares and gardens across the city.
It gets chaotic. Very. And George Wise is right
in the middle of these clashes. The authorities
demand he be bound over to keep the peace, which
is essentially a legal promise to stop causing
trouble or face the consequences. Right. Wise
flat out refuses. A very calculated, very theatrical
political move. Oh, totally. He knew exactly
what the consequence of refusing would be. He
practically invited it. For refusing to be bound
over, he gets thrown into Walton Jail, the local
prison. It's a dramatic escalation. You now have
a prominent religious and community leader locked
up by the state over public park access. Here's
where it gets really interesting. George Wise
is released from Walton jail on June 6, 1903.
And he is not deterred. Not at all. Instead of
being cowed, instead of backing down or falling
back in line with the conservatives, he decides
to completely hijack the traditional orange vote.
He goes up rogue. He formally creates the Liverpool
Protestant Party, the LPP, as a distinct independent
political party to fight for seats on the city
council. And the immediate impact is staggering.
You have to imagine being a conservative leader
in Liverpool at that time, expecting these Protestant
votes to just roll in automatically as they always
had. Taking them completely for granted. Exactly.
Instead, in the 1903 municipal elections, this
newly formed LPP contests four seats and they
win three of them, including a major, highly
symbolic victory in the Kirkdale Ward. They didn't
just stop at the city council either. No. They
also secured representation on the West Derby
Board of Guardians. And tell us about those boards
because they were a big deal. They were incredibly
powerful local bodies back then. They weren't
just advisory boards. The West Derby Board actively
supervised health care. workhouses, and poor
relief for the entire north and east of the city.
So the LPP wasn't just winning symbolic moral
victories. They were immediately taking control
of the actual levers of public health, welfare,
and local resources. I have to ask, how did the
conservative leadership react to this? Because
this had to be incredibly complicating for the
conservative leader in the city, Alderman Archibald
Salvage. Oh, he was not happy. He must have absolutely
hated the idea of an independent Protestant party
cutting into his guaranteed power base. Salvage
detested it. But early 1900s politics made for
strange bedfellows. Because even though Salvage
actively opposed them in local elections, the
conservatives and the LPP actually had to form
a brief rapprochement. A truce. A working, pragmatic
cooperation right before World War I. The threat
of the Irish Home Rule Bill at the national level
was so severe to both of their interests that
they had to... temporarily team up to fight it.
It's incredible. It just shows how pragmatic
and sometimes deeply hypocritical local politics
had to be to survive. That fragile, pragmatic
truth did not last, though. By the time we hit
the 1920s, the alliance completely shatters.
The breaking point is monumental. The Conservative
Party at the national level makes a geopolitical
decision. They decide to support the establishment
of the Irish Free State. And for the Liverpool
Protestant Party, this is the ultimate unforgivable
betrayal absolutely unforgivable they view the
irish free state not as a permanent peaceful
settlement but merely as a strategic stepping
stone to a full irish republic right the outrage
on the ground in liverpool is so severe that
it causes a mass exodus of members walking right
out of the conservative working men's association
The LPP realizes they can't just rely on outrage
anymore. They need to get highly organized. Right.
They need a new playbook to consolidate their
power. Exactly. This leads to the formation of
the National Protestant Electoral Federation,
or the NPEF. And our sources outline four very
strict, very uncompromising aims for this new
federation. These are fascinating to look at.
Let's walk through them. First, the promotion
of the study of Protestantism. Second, the maintenance
of the Protestant succession to the throne, which
specifically The act of settlement from 1701.
That second aim is wild when you think about
it. Right. They are reaching back over two centuries
to a historic royal succession law to justify
their modern local political stance in the 1920s.
It grounds their modern movement in deep historical
constitutional legitimacy. Brilliant move. Third,
they aim to assist the return of robust Protestants
as representatives on public bodies, irrespective
of their actual party affiliation. Keep an eye
on that one. Yes. And fourth, to protect the
interests of Protestant workers in trade unions.
Let's look closely at that third aim, getting
robust Protestants elected irrespective of party,
because that led to an absolute stroke of tactical
genius in the 1922 elections for the boards of
guardians. What did they do? The MPF didn't just
run their own LPP candidates. They simply endorsed
any candidate who was willing to add the word
Protestant to their party name on the actual
ballot. It's essentially an early 20th century
branding hack. Exactly what it is. It's like
search engine optimization before the Internet
existed. You add the keyword to your brand and
you capture all the organic traffic from that
voting bloc. It is pure political marketing and
it worked flawlessly. By just adding that branding,
two Protestant Party candidates and two Protestant
and Unionist candidates were elected to the boards
of guardians. Just from a word change? Yeah,
bringing in a combined 25 ,787 votes. They figured
out how to consolidate an entire fragmented demographic
through a single word on a ballot. That newfound
consolidated power was about to be tested in
a massive way, though, because of a massive bureaucratic
shakeup. Right. In 1929. In 1929, the Local Government
Act abolishes those powerful boards of guardians
entirely, handing all their sweeping responsibilities
directly over to the local city authorities.
Big shift in power. Huge. The Liverpool Corporation
suddenly takes over three distinct boards. West
Derby for the north and east. Liverpool for the
city center. and Toxteth Park for the South.
Which means all of a sudden the city council
is sitting on a lot of redundant property that
used to belong to these boards. Including a massive
nine -acre facility at Brownlow Hill. Yeah. We
are talking about 36 ,000 square meters of prime
real estate. The city council looks at this redundant
land and decides they're going to sell it. The
buyer, the Archdiocese of Liverpool, who wants
to use the space to build a brand new Catholic
cathedral. Now, remember the history here. The
LPP... fiercely opposed the construction of a
catholic cathedral in the city very fiercely
for years their protestant representatives on
the boards of guardians had successfully blocked
any sales of redundant land to catholic interests
they held the line but now The boards are gone.
The safety net is gone. Yep. The city council
is in charge. And with conservative approval,
the sale of the nine -acre Brownlow Hill site
goes ahead. And the LPP is absolutely furious.
This is their worst nightmare realized, facilitated
by their former conservative allies. So they
decide to retaliate where it hurts the most,
the ballot box. Yep. In the November 1930 City
Council elections, the Protestant Party goes
on a massive offensive. Now, their leader at
the time, Harry Dixon Longbottom, is the only
one who outright wins his seat in the St. Domingo
Ward. But his single victory is not the real
story of that election. No. The real damage is
what the LPP does to the conservative voting
bloc. In several other wards, the LPP purposely
runs candidates not to win, but just to siphon
votes away from the conservatives. A spite. They
split the ticket so badly that they accidentally,
but willingly, hand several municipal victories
straight over to the Labor Party. They were willing
to let their ideological opposites win just to
punish the conservatives. Which is incredible
when you look at the LPP's actual political platform
during this era. And we really need to pause
here for a second just to be completely clear
with you listening. Yeah, absolutely. Because...
Looking at their platform in the 1930s, we have
to step back and just view this objectively as
historians. Our goal here isn't to validate or
condemn their politics, whether left or right,
but to decode how they operated and what they
actually stood for so we can understand the historical
context. Exactly. We are just neutrally reporting
what the historical sources say. Right. And objectively
speaking, the LPP's playbook was fiercely right
wing. They were vehemently opposed to the emerging
socialist politics of the labor movement, which
is why handing them. seats in 1930 was such a
drastic, spiteful, retaliatory move. It was a
massive compromise of their own values. Totally.
Furthermore, the LPP explicitly blamed Irish
immigrants for unemployment, core housing conditions
and high local tax rates. They also actively
demanded legislative curbs on immigration into
Great Britain from Roman Catholic areas of Ireland.
They were taking very real economic anxieties
of the 1930s, fears about housing shortages,
job scarcity. rising taxes and directing all
of that frustration squarely at a specific religious
and ethnic immigrant group. Classic scapegoating.
Exactly. And while they primarily fought for
local government seats, this platform resonated
enough with a segment of the population to push
them onto the national stage. Reverend H .D.
Longbottom actually stood for the Liverpool -Kirkdale
seat in Westminster parliamentary elections from
1931 all the way until 1945. Wow. At his peak
influence in 1931, Longbottom captured a massive
25 % of the votes cast for that national parliamentary
seat. A hyper -local, single -issue party born
out of a dispute over public park space taking
a quarter of the vote for a national parliamentary
seat. It's wild. But as we move past those peak
years and into the post -World War II era...
The LPP enters a very strange, very quiet new
phase of institutionalization. The statistics
from this post -war period are astonishing. Between
1945 and 1970, with the single exception of the
year 1963, the Liverpool Protestant Party was
the third largest party on the entire city council
in terms of seat share. That is incredible longevity.
For a quarter of a century, this hyper -niche
localized party held immense structural power
within the city's government. So what does this
all mean? How does a radical fringe party maintain
that kind of stability for 25 years without continuing
to burn the city down politically? They made
a deal. They did. The answer is they got comfortable.
They formed a geographical truce, a classic backroom
deal. The LPP essentially agreed to stay in their
lane. They tended to stand only in the northern
St. Domingo and Netherfield wards. Right. In
exchange, the conservatives agreed not to oppose
them in those specific strongholds. It's a textbook
non -aggression pact. You keep your territory,
we keep ours, and we stop splitting the vote
to labor's advantage. And the second part of
the deal was that the LPP representatives would
then vote alongside the conservatives on most
issues inside the council chamber. They traded
their firebrand rebellion for a guaranteed seat
at the table. They even managed to hold on to
an aldermanic seat, giving them a guaranteed,
unelected senior voice on the council for over
a decade, from 1945 to 1957. But as any historian
will tell you, you cannot outrun demographic
changes forever. As we get into the 1960s and
70s, under later leaders like Ronald F. Henderson
in 1962 and Roy Hughes around 1970, the energy
is just fading. The traditional orange vote in
Liverpool is subsiding in influence as newer
generations integrate and older sectarian divides
soften. The LPP is finding it harder and harder
to justify its existence to a changing electorate.
They managed to win their very last municipal
seat in 1973. But the final nail in the coffin
wasn't just a loss of voters. It was a fundamental
change in the rules of the game. Yeah, the map
changed. The Local Government Act of 1972 forced
a massive ward redistribution across the Liverpool
City Council. The literal map was redrawn out
from under them. The subisicic borders that protected
their geographical truths were erased. With their
carefully protected wards reconfigured, the party
had nowhere left to hide. In 1974, 71 years after
George Wise defiantly walked out of Walton Jail
to start a political revolution, the Liverpool
Protestant Party officially disbanded. End of
an era. The vast majority of their remaining
members simply folded their tents and merged
back into the Conservative Party. Though it is
worth noting that specific threat of political
identity didn't completely vanish into thin air.
Yeah. The legacy of that mobilized orange vote
lingered in the political memory of the region.
Years later, the Democratic Unionist Party, the
DUP, actually looked into the possibility of
establishing a brand new branch right there in
Liverpool, potentially even standing local government
candidates. Really? Yeah. And according to our
source, former members of the LPP were directly
involved with that attempt to resurrect that
specific political alignment. It is incredible
to synthesize this whole 70 -year timeline. When
you zoom out, you have a situation in 1903 where
a local government simply refuses to grant public
park space to a fiery pastor. Right. And that
one bureaucratic refusal accidentally creates
a political movement that shapes city infrastructure,
influences national elections and completely
alters the balance of power in one of Britain's
most important port cities for generations. If
we connect this to the bigger picture, it is
a brilliant case study in how local government.
Logistics can, things that seem totally mundane,
like the bureaucratic sale of a redundant nine
acre plot of land on Brownlow Hill, can drastically
and permanently alter national party loyalties.
Definitely. People in Liverpool didn't abandon
the conservatives over abstract political theory.
They abandoned them over a plot of land, a cathedral,
and a sense of localized betrayal. Which is such
a powerful takeaway for anyone studying political
history. It is. And this raises an important
question for you to mull over as we wrap up today's
deep dive. When we look at our own modern political
loyalties, how many of them are actually rooted
in forgotten, hyper -local disputes? Oh, that's
a great question. If you trace your own political
or community alignments back far enough, what
nine -acre plot or public park grievance might
be sitting at the very foundation of what you
believe today? That is a phenomenal thought to
leave on. The mechanics of power are always shifting,
but the human reactions remain surprisingly consistent.
Thank you so much for joining us on this deep
dive into the Liverpool Protestant Party. We
hope you discovered a few aha moments along the
way and gained a new lens on how local politics
can shade history. Until next time, keep questioning
the map and keep diving deep. Take care, everyone.