Manchester

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Labour party returns to Manchester

This month, Labour stages its autumn conference in Manchester for the first time since 1917. Time Out asks if its absence has anything to do with the city’s proud history of dissent

Labour conference events
As Labour descends on Manchester for their most important conference in more than a decade, we trail back

Neil Kinnock Bournemouth, 1985
Kinnock, against the ropes and raging at the dying of the light as he tries to save the party from itself, produces one of the most famous conference speeches in British political history. The Militant tendency tries to answer back, but Kinnock stares them down, shaking with barely concealed rage. If it had happened in a pub, the landlord would have called the police.

Walter Wolfgang Brighton, 2005
An entire conference is overshadowed by the ejection of 82-year-old delegate Walter ‘Wolfie’ Wolfgang for shouting ‘nonsense’ during Jack Straw’s speech. He is later arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (but gets his revenge in August 2006, when he’s elected on to the party’s ruling NEC). An Orwellian nadir for New Labour.

Hugh Gaitskell Scarborough, 1960
After the leadership loses a vote on unilateral disarmament, Gaitskell, already alienated from the left of the party, gives a barnstorming speech criticising block voting. ‘There are some of us who will fight and fight and fight again to save the party we love. We will fight and fight and fight again to bring back sanity and honesty and dignity, so that our party, with its great past, may retain its glory and its greatness.’

Tony Blair Blackpool, 1994
The beginnings of New Labour, as Blair tells the conference that he intends to succeed where Gaitskell had failed and rewrite Clause 4 of Labour’s constitution. The conference accepts plans to change the party’s commitment to nationalisation. Michael White of The Guardian calls it ‘the most sensational political coup for a generation’. An understatement.

Cripps & co Edinburgh, 1936
While the party maintains a neutral line on the Spanish Civil War, Nye Bevan, Ellen Wilkinson, Charles Trevelyan and Stafford Cripps use the 1936 conference to call for arms for Spain, demanding that the Popular Front be supported against Franco and the fascists. The issue proves so controversial that Bevan, Cripps and Trevelyan are expelled in 1939 for refusing to toe the party line.

Right-wing Manchester
Manchester has traditionally been a Labour stronghold, but the city hasn’t been without its right-wing figureheads

Richard Cobden
A liberal whose beliefs would come to form a cornerstone of 20th century right-wing politics, Cobden was the leader of the Anti-Corn Law League, which did away with the protectionist tariff system upon which British economics had hitherto been based. The Manchester School of Liberalism he helped create would prove a defining political and economic force, reaching the height of its influence in the 1980s.

Hugh Birley
Proof that not all industrialists of the early 1900s were liberal pioneers in search of free trade, factory owner Birley was a captain in the Manchester & Salford Yeomanry, and led the troops into the crowd at the Peterloo Massacre. A staunch opponent of the reform movement, he would later claim, erroneously, that, ‘Not more than one death [at Peterloo] can be ascribed to a sabre wound.’

Winston Churchill
After four years as a Conservative MP for Oldham (1900-04), his first stint in the House of Commons, Churchill became so disillusioned with government policy on economic tariffs that he found himself isolated within his own party. His response was to cross the floor to the Liberals, for whom – fittingly, given his views on free trade – he won Oldham from the Tories in 1904. Two years later, he was elected as Liberal MP for Manchester North West.

Margaret Thatcher
The inheritor of the free trade tradition, Thatcher was so wedded to Cobden’s vision of the Manchester School that, in 1985, former PM Harold Macmillan said her government had ‘long ago given up Toryism and adopted the Manchester Liberalism of about 1860.’ Sorry.

James Anderton
Greater Manchester’s Chief Constable from 1975 to 1991 constantly courted controversy with his trenchant right-wing views. Having already denounced the ‘sin’ of homosexuality and led the call for the reintroduction of corporal punishment, ‘God’s Cop’ went on to note that, during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, ‘Everywhere I go I see increasing evidence of people swirling about in a human cesspit of their own making.’

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