Charles Patrick Wall was an English Trotskyist political activist who was the Labour Party Member of Parliament for Bradford North from 1987 until his death.
13 Facts About Pat Wall
1.
2.
Pat Wall played a role in moving the Liverpool Labour Party to the left in the late 1950s as a member of the joint Liverpool Trades Council and Labour Party Executive.
3.
Pat Wall was one of the youngest Liverpool councillors in the 1950s.
4.
Pat Wall was associated with a series of journals aimed at leading and widening the influence of Trotskyism, and popularising it without compromising or diluting it.
5.
Pat Wall was then on the editorial board of Socialist Fight, and played a leading role in launching and editing the newspaper Militant.
6.
Pat Wall was a delegate from Shipley constituency to the Labour Party's annual conference in 1972.
7.
Pat Wall stood for the Labour Party National Executive seven years in a row, from 1977 to 1983, achieving 103,000 votes in 1982, his highest vote and the highest vote for someone who was neither an MP nor a former MP.
8.
Pat Wall became President of Bradford Trades Council in 1973, and in 1981 he won a reselection battle against the sitting MP for Bradford North, Ben Ford, by 35 votes to 28.
9.
Ford alleged irregularities in the selection procedure and it was re-run, but Pat Wall won again, this time by 49 votes to 12, and replaced Ford as the Labour candidate.
10.
Pat Wall was explaining that if there was any threat to a peaceful transformation of society, that threat would come from the capitalist class itself.
11.
Pat Wall lost the 1983 election, coming in second place with 14,492 votes, less than 2,000 votes behind the winning Conservative candidate Geoffrey Lawler, and ahead of the former Labour agent, Peter Birkby, standing for the SDP, and Ben Ford, the deselected incumbent Labour MP, standing as "Independent Labour".
12.
Pat Wall stood again in the same constituency in 1987 and was featured in the Conservative election broadcast of 27 May 1987, which attacked his candidacy because he was a Marxist.
13.
Pat Wall held public meetings and 17 workplace meetings in the constituency and won the seat, recording a 9.9 per cent swing from the SDP.