Immigrants or the Old Folks: The assumption of nationalized politics, the ‘Smethwick effect’, and the reality of demographic and local concerns during the Leyton by-election of 1965

In January 1965, Labour Foreign Secretary Patrick Gordon Walker was defeated in his attempt to secure election at the Leyton constituency in London. The media assumed his defeat, only weeks after that in the Smethwick constituency, was due to what Saggar has called an ‘electoral penalty’ brought on by racialized politics. In a report written for Harold Wilson in the aftermath of Patrick’s defeat, the former MP Reginal Sorensen suggested that Gordon Walker had ‘dragged it (the race issue) in on his boots’. Yet the demography of the constituency, and the issues present in the election have never been fully explored. Among other factors, twenty-five percent of the population of Leyton were pensioners in 1965. The impact of other government policies, including a freeze on
pensions, may therefore have had a larger impact on the election than previously
assumed.
Utilizing a variety of underused archival sources related to the by-election, this
paper will explore how local issues, and more importantly the demography of a
constituency, can help explain why Labour lost the seat. It will examine how local
issues, specific to this suburb of London, and not supposed ‘national’ problems imported from a different constituency, were to blame for the election result. Finally, this paper will argue that simplifying an understanding of such a result to ‘national’ issues, leads to false assumptions on which the analysis of electoral politics are based.