The Wallasey by-election, 1942 was a parliamentary by-election for the British House of Commons constituency of Wallasey on 29 April 1942.
A by-election, also spelled bye-election, is an election used to fill an office that has become vacant between general elections.
Wallasey is a constituency created in 1918 represented in the House of Commons of the UK Parliament since 1992 by Angela Eagle, a member of the Labour Party.
The by-election was caused by the resignation of the sitting Unionist MP, and Government Minister, John Moore-Brabazon in April 1942. He was forced to resign for expressing the hope that Germany and the Soviet Union, then engaged in the Battle of Stalingrad, would destroy each other. Since the Soviet Union was fighting the war on the same side as Britain, the hope that it should be destroyed, though common in the Conservative Party, was unacceptable to the war effort. He had been MP here since winning the seat in 1931.
Lieutenant-Colonel John Theodore Cuthbert Moore-Brabazon, 1st Baron Brabazon of Tara,, HonFRPS was an English aviation pioneer and Conservative politician. He was the first Englishman to pilot a heavier-than-air machine under power in England, and he served as Minister of Transport and Minister of Aircraft Production during World War II.
Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central and Western Europe, lying between the Baltic and North Seas to the north and the Alps, Lake Constance and the High Rhine to the south. It borders Denmark to the north, Poland and the Czech Republic to the east, Austria and Switzerland to the south, France to the southwest, and Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands to the west.
The Soviet Union, officially known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), was a federal sovereign state in northern Eurasia that existed from 1922 to 1991. Nominally a union of multiple national Soviet republics, in practice its government and economy were highly centralized. The country was a one-party state, governed by the Communist Party with Moscow as its capital in its largest republic, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Other major urban centers were Leningrad, Kiev, Minsk, Tashkent, Alma-Ata, and Novosibirsk. It spanned over 10,000 kilometers (6,200 mi) east to west across 11 time zones, and over 7,200 kilometers (4,500 mi) north to south. Its territory included much of Eastern Europe, as well as part of Northern Europe and all of Northern and Central Asia. It had five climate zones: tundra, taiga, steppes, desert and mountains.
Wallasey had been Conservative since it was created in 1918. The result at the last general election was:
| Party | Candidate | Votes | % | ± | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Conservative | John Moore-Brabazon | 27,949 | 67.4 | ||
| Labour | John Airey | 13,491 | 32.6 | ||
| Majority | 14,458 | ||||
| Turnout | 66.1 | ||||
| Conservative hold | Swing | ||||
Local Conservatives were keen to have a local candidate and feared that the Wallasey Conservative Association would have an outsider foisted on them. They persuaded local Councillor and former Mayor, George Reakes to put his name forward, which he did, as an Independent. Reakes had been a member of the Labour Party but had left it when the mainstream parliamentary Labour party failed to call for rearmament, to face Nazi Germany. Though not an appeaser, he had publicly backed Neville Chamberlain's Munich Agreement. [1] However some backing from local Conservatives may have benefited the eventual Conservative candidate, local alderman, J Pennington.
Nazi Germany is the common English name for Germany between 1933 and 1945, when Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party (NSDAP) controlled the country through a dictatorship. Under Hitler's rule, Germany was transformed into a totalitarian state where nearly all aspects of life were controlled by the government. The official name of the state was Deutsches Reich until 1943 and Großdeutsches Reich from 1943 to 1945. Nazi Germany is also known as the Third Reich, meaning "Third Realm" or "Third Empire", the first two being the Holy Roman Empire (800–1806) and the German Empire (1871–1918). The Nazi regime ended after the Allies defeated Germany in May 1945, ending World War II in Europe.
The Munich Agreement or Munich Betrayal was an agreement concluded at Munich on 30 September 1938, by Nazi Germany, the United Kingdom, the French Third Republic, and the Kingdom of Italy. It provided "cession to Germany of the Sudeten German territory" of Czechoslovakia. Most of Europe celebrated the agreement, because it prevented the war threatened by Adolf Hitler by allowing Nazi Germany's annexation of the Sudetenland, a region of western Czechoslovakia inhabited by more than 3 million people, mainly German speakers. Hitler announced it was his last territorial claim in Europe, and the choice seemed to be between war and appeasement.
On the eve of war, with an election expect to follow no later than May 1940, the Liberal Party had already selected a candidate, Robert Forster, however the Labour Party had not decided upon one at that stage. In the event both parties were officially bound by the wartime electoral truce to publicly support the Conservative candidate (see Churchill war ministry) and did so.
The Labour Party is a centre-left political party in the United Kingdom that has been described as an alliance of social democrats, democratic socialists and trade unionists. The party's platform emphasises greater state intervention, social justice and strengthening workers' rights.
The Churchill war ministry was the United Kingdom's coalition government for most of the Second World War from 10 May 1940 to 23 May 1945. It was led by Winston Churchill, who was appointed Prime Minister by King George VI following the resignation of Neville Chamberlain in the aftermath of the Norway Debate.
A third candidate entered the field, in the form of the Independent, Major Leonard Cripps. Cripps was the younger brother of Sir Stafford Cripps, a well-known Labour frontbencher. Cripps had retired from military service and owned a shipbuilders in Liverpool, however, he did not have the support of his brother nor any of the activists in the local parties.
Sir Richard Stafford Cripps, was a British Labour politician of the twentieth century.
In many parliaments and other similar assemblies, seating is typically arranged in banks or rows, with each political party or caucus grouped together. The spokespeople for each group will often sit at the front of their group, and are then known as being on the frontbench and are described as frontbenchers. Those sitting behind them are known as backbenchers. Independent and minority parties sit to the side or on benches between the two sides, and are referred to as crossbenchers.
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| Party | Candidate | Votes | % | ± | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Independent | George Reakes | 12,596 | 60.6 | n/a | |
| Conservative | John Pennington | 6,584 | 31.7 | - | |
| Independent | Leonard Harrison Cripps | 1,597 | 7.7 | n/a | |
| Majority | 6,012 | 28.9 | |||
| Turnout | 34.2 | ||||
| Independent gain from Conservative | Swing | ||||
The result at the following General election;
| Party | Candidate | Votes | % | ± | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Conservative | Ernest Marples | 18,448 | 42.9 | ||
| Independent | George Reakes | 14,638 | |||
| Labour | Thomas Findley | 9,879 | |||
| Majority | |||||
| Turnout | |||||
| Conservative gain from Independent | Swing | ||||
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This is an annotated list of notable records from Parliamentary by-elections in the United Kingdom. A by-election occurs when a Member of Parliament (MP) vacates a House of Commons seat during the course of a parliament.