Introduction

The 1964 election brought Harold Wilson’s Labour Party to power, while tarring the constituency of Smethwick with notoriety. According to the accepted narrative, voters in a ‘safe’ Labour seat in the West Midlands not only voted Conservative, but ensured their town became a metonym for politicised anti-migrant sentiment and racial politics. This narrative has defined Labour’s 1964 defeat at Smethwick, which afterwards shaped the political (and historiographical) zeitgeist . As with a Liberal Revival at Orpington (1962), nationalist ascendancies at Carmarthen and Hamilton (1966 and 1967), and ‘Europe’ at Lincoln (1973), Smethwick was interpreted as a single-issue contest: a race election. However, in contrast to those other contests, Smethwick was not a standalone by-election, but one of 630 seats contested in a general election. This observation appears to be a pedantic point, but the consistent, repeated mislabelling of the contest as a by-election, within the press, some academic commentary, and popular memory, demonstrates just one of several misconceptions about its nature and the assumptions that have underpinned subsequent historical interpretations. 1