People's Republic of South Yorkshire

South Yorkshire following the 2017 general election. For the first time, every seat in the county was held by Labour (red) after this election.[a]

"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.[1] 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.[2]

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.[3] Sheffield Hallam was the only parliamentary constituency in South Yorkshire where the Conservative Party was a significant political force, the remaining seats being Labour safe seats or Liberal–Labour marginals.[4] 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 at large.

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,[5] and the borough councils of South Yorkshire set up an extensive network of subsidised transport under the South Yorkshire Passenger Transport Executive.[6] 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.[7] The red flag flew on Sheffield Town Hall on May Day[8] and the city signed a peace treaty with the city of Donetsk in Soviet Ukraine, at that point on the other side of the Iron Curtain.[7] 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.[9]


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  1. ^ McDowell, Linda (2011). Redundant Masculinities? Employment Change and White Working Class Youth. ISBN 978-1444355598. ... local politics in Sheffield were dominated by a particular form of radical municipal socialism, gaining the city a brief but prestigious reputation as the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire.
  2. ^ Payling, Daisy (1 December 2014). "'Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire': Grassroots Activism and Left-Wing Solidarity in 1980s Sheffield". Twentieth Century British History. 25 (4): 602–627. doi:10.1093/tcbh/hwu001. ISSN 0955-2359.
  3. ^ Lazenby, Peter (31 August 2012). "Generations Unite". Morning Star. Archived from the original on 3 September 2012. Retrieved 13 September 2012. The steel city – much of its steel industry wrecked under Thatcher – was at the heart of what used to be proudly called the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire.
  4. ^ Waller, Robert (1985). The Atlas of British Politics. p. 135. ISBN 978-0709936091. The Conservatives can win only one seat in the so-called 'Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire'.
  5. ^ Mollona, Massimiliano (2009). Made in Sheffield: An Ethnography of Industrial Work and Politics. p. 65. ISBN 978-1845455514.
  6. ^ Loney, Martin & Bocock, Robert (1991). The State or the market: politics and welfare in contemporary Britain. p. 281. ISBN 978-0803986428. In contrast Labour did have effective control of public transport in the metropolitan counties following the 1981 elections, and their aim, indeed the achievement of the 'Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire', was to run a cheap, efficient and extensive public transport service.
  7. ^ a b Justice of the Peace Ltd (1983). Local Government Review. 147: 99. Councillor Irvine Patnick, the leader of the minority Tory group on the South Yorkshire Metropolitan County Council, apparently makes regular reports to the national chairman of his party and other Conservative high-ups on the situation in that beleaguered county which he refers to either as the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire or (since the authority declared South Yorks to be a demilitarised and nuclear-free zone) Peace County. {{cite journal}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  8. ^ "Radio 4 - Factual — Children of the Red Flag". BBC. 16 October 2006. Archived from the original on 6 November 2012. Retrieved 11 October 2009.
  9. ^ Milne, Seumas (2004). The Enemy Within. p. 170. ISBN 978-1844675081. Sheffield, at the centre of the country's largest coalfield and renowned at the time as the capital of the 'socialist republic of South Yorkshire', offered by far the best deal and it was there that the NUM set up shop in the spring of 1983.