People's Republic of South Yorkshire

rdf:langString People's Republic of South Yorkshire

rdf:langString "People's Republic of South Yorkshire" or "Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire" were nicknames often given to South Yorkshire under the left-wing local governments of the 1980s, especially the municipal socialist administration of Sheffield City Council led by David Blunkett, used by both detractors and supporters of the councils. The councils pursued a social policy radically different from that of Margaret Thatcher's national government, following more closely along the lines of Militant tendency-dominated Liverpool City Council and the Greater London Council led by Ken Livingstone. The expression was coined by Max Williams, a leader writer at the Yorkshire Evening Post, although it was soon adopted by supporters of the council's left-wing policies. Sheffield Hallam was the only parliamentary constituency in South Yorkshire where the Conservative Party was a significant political force, the remaining seats being Labour safe seats or Liberal–Labour marginals. Sheffield City Council and the South Yorkshire Metropolitan Authority were solidly left-wing, remaining socialist even as Thatcherism became the dominant political ideology in the country at large. Sheffield City Council constructed large council estates with large numbers of communal blocks of flats based on the streets in the sky philosophy, including the Park Hill complex, and the borough councils of South Yorkshire set up an extensive network of subsidised transport under the South Yorkshire Passenger Transport Executive. The councils also took more confrontational steps against the Conservative Westminster government. Sheffield refused to set a budget in the rate-capping rebellion, while South Yorkshire declared itself a nuclear-free zone and a demilitarized zone. The red flag flew on Sheffield Town Hall on May Day and the city signed a peace treaty with the city of Donetsk in Soviet Ukraine, at that point on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Both groups of policies – the practical and the symbolic – were sometimes cited as reasons for the nickname. The National Union of Mineworkers moved to headquarters in Sheffield in 1983 in the run-up to the decisive 1984–85 miners' strike, and the area subsequently became one of the main centres of the strike.