Merseyside’ is a recent conception, a product of 1970s local government reorganisation. At the start of the nineteenth century the area covered by today's county boundaries belonged to south-west Lancashire and northwest Cheshire, two counties separated by the River Mersey. Yet a definite sense of ‘Merseyside’ is discernible in the 1890s, and the term itself was in common use after the First World War. A sense of corporate identity emerged among the inhabitants of the Lancashire and Cheshire banks of the Mersey, helped by demographic relocations of the later nineteenth century, when wealthy individuals left the urban centre for the villages that became Merseyside's suburbs. For those who moved west across the river, Liverpool remained ‘the city’ just as it did for those who migrated north, south or east. Liverpool's business centre made and controlled their fortunes. Its cultural opportunities provided their leisure. Its shops clothed them and furnished their houses and its churches and chapels remained the focus of their spiritual lives. Consequently, many of the political organisations in this book that grew out of the personal networks of early members grew as Merseyside, not Liverpool or Wirral branches. So although much of this work concerns Liverpool, the somewhat anachronistic term ‘Merseyside’ is also used, particularly when dealing with organisations such as the suffrage groups whose membership spanned the Mersey. For the political parties that aimed at the city council, local government boards and parliament, Liverpool's municipal boundaries defined their spread and form my focus here.

As Tony Lane has pointed out, ‘Liverpool is the only city in Britain… upon which other Britons have definite opinions.’ Yet while there are no end of recent newspaper articles tracing the industrial decline and urban problems of the region, academic histories of Liverpool are scarce. Compared with the self-conscious chronicles of municipal greatness that proliferated in later nineteenth-century Liverpool, the twentieth century rests largely unresearched, although there are works dealing with specific aspects of local history. One exception is the substantial work of P. J. Waller which provides ‘a history of over a century of recent political life’.