The Politics of Sectarianism

In Liverpool, sectarianism and xenophobia became useful tools to gain power. By feeding on prejudice directed towards the Irish ‘invaders’ and their offspring, fear and economic rivalry became entities that local politicians would exploit for electoral success. For the Irish, their politics was centred neither upon the conditions nor the town in which they found themselves. It was instead focused upon factors relating to their homeland. As a result, Liverpool politics became quickly ‘impregnated with religious-cum-national stereotypes’. David Kennedy paints a portrait of Liverpool's unique political landscape:

Aughton comments that, ‘politics in the city … had a very distinctive local flavour … religion played a major role. Orangeism, still a powerful force up until the Second World War, was strongly linked to Unionism and the Tory Party … the city's socialists were seen to be linked to Catholicism’.

MacRaild states that, ‘from the 1830s politics [in Liverpool] was coloured by an Orange and Green palette’, yet much of the political outworking of religious antipathy began with the formation of the WMCA in the late 1860s. This organisation was interconnected with both the Orange Institution and Conservative and Unionist Party. As many of its members were also Orangemen, it acted as a link between the two organisations and helped provide ‘an influential working man's voice within the Tory apparatus’. The WMCA ‘took as its emblem the maintenance of Protestantism’, and was an important component in the local Conservative leadership's ‘long-term strategy of courting the working man's vote as a defence against Liberal (and later Labour) advances’.