History in action…at Splash World

Dear readers — it was 3am at Splash World in Southport (“Splashtastic fun for all the family”) when history was made. In a sports hall full of weary eyes, the Labour Party’s Merseyside dominance was finally complete.

We were at the count in Southport, on what was a historic — and long — evening. Any pretence of tension or drama was swiftly stamped out by the 10pm exit poll. At that point it was clear: the final bastion of Blue in the region had fallen.

Every Merseyside seat is now red, most by huge margins. But while most have been forgone conclusions for some time, for Southport, a town which used to lean so heavily into its idiosyncratic, against-the-grain mentality, to vote Labour is quite something.

Patrick Hurley will become the town’s new MP, replacing Tory incumbent Damien Moore, who pointed to the surge of Reform UK under Nigel Farage as having been costly for his party. He also refused to throw his name behind a new Tory leader (“I wouldn’t want to spoil anyone’s chances by it being reported that Damien Moore is backing them,” he said).

We stayed up, fuelled by custard creams and the gossip of party insiders, to bring you everything that happened at the count. We’ve also got the round-up from all the other results across the region. 

Election round-up

While a few Labour MPs in other urban constituencies lost their seats to independents, there was no close run here in Liverpool. Sam Gorst, for the Liverpool Community Independents, took 7.8% of the vote in Garston, coming third behind Labour and Reform. In Liverpool Riverside, the city centre’s constituency, anti-Labour discontent found its home in the Green Party. Over 5,000 people voted Green, taking them to second place.

The Tories did badly everywhere — but they did spectacularly badly in Liverpool. In four of the five seats in the city, they slumped to fifth, with Reform UK, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens all ahead of them. In Wirral West, a constituency we covered before the election, the Conservatives plummeted to unprecedented lows — completing its long journey away from being a safe-as-houses Tory bastion.

Vote share in Wirral West, 1945 — 2024

Nigel Farage’s Reform UK won over 80,000 votes across Merseyside, overperforming expectations. They took second place to Labour in eight seats (St Helens North, St Helens South and Whiston, Knowsley, Bootle, Garston, West Derby, Walton and Wallasey — comfortably ahead of third in the first two). The second-placed finishes in city seats like Garston and Walton are of particular note. It seems likely that there are a sizeable number of voters across the region who oppose the levels of migration the UK has seen in recent years but who could never bring themselves to vote Tory due to the party’s historic relationship with the city. The majority of these finishes were a very distant second, but nonetheless, Reform now has support across the county.

History in action…at Splash World

I was 10, on Election Day 2010, and sat in the car outside swimming practice while my mum listened to a radio news bulletin. They were talking about the soon-to-be-Prime Minister David Cameron’s possible plans to reintroduce National Service. It was scary stuff. I wasn’t keen to be sent off to war, to be honest. It was bad enough being made to go swimming. 

Now 14 years have passed. I find myself — as I clearly always do at moments of historic change — in the car park of a municipal leisure centre. This one’s in Southport, but if I squint it’s the same place. 

I wasn’t going to spend the night at the leisure centre. I’d hoped to spend it at The Southport Conservative Club. I had visions of peeling wallpaper and thousand-yard stares as the party’s final bastion in Merseyside fell. But alas, a colleague rings up and is told the club changed its name to “Central Club” eight years ago and hardly gets any Tories through the doors these days. It seems the writing has been on the wall for some time. 

And so to Splash World, with a massive slide that twists around the building's exterior like a twisty straw (technically the count is in the leisure centre adjacent, but anyway). The clash here — Hurley vs incumbent Damien Moore — is the only one in the county that carries even a modicum of tension. And even here we basically know the result before the night begins. When the exit poll arrives promptly at 10pm, with news of the Labour landslide everyone knew was coming, it’s a wrap. The Sky News forecaster, which gives you a percentage likelihood for every seat in the country, is saying 99%+ chance of a Southport win for Labour. Not exactly a nail-biter. 

And yet, it’s worth pausing to take in just what that means here. Sure, it’s unlikely a White House advisor will be creeping into the Presidential chambers in the small hours and prodding Joe Biden awake with news of the Hurley/Moore result. But it matters to Southport — electing the first Labour MP in its entire history. Doing something that would’ve been unthinkable even 15 years ago. And it matters to Merseyside too, symbolically at least. Because Merseyside has finally gone full red.

This was the final bastion of Toryism in the county (many here would argue it shouldn’t be in this county at all, but that’s an argument for another day). This is the one Merseyside seat that held out against the red tide; almost as if to make a point. It was a proud stance: we go our own way in Southport. But that has been relinquished.

In many ways, it’s the end point of a trend that’s been developing across the past five or six decades. It’s little more than an obscure piece of pub trivia now, but in the late 1960s, the make-up of Liverpool City Council was predominantly Tory. Of course, the 80s happened, poverty, Thatcher and so on and Toryism was all but wiped off the map in the city itself. Places like Southport (see also: parts of Wirral) have been swept over in the decades since — the red tentacles of Liverpool reaching out across Merseyside.