Elizabeth Margaret Braddock (née Bamber; 24 September 1899 – 13 November 1970) was a British Labour Party politician who served as Member of Parliament (MP) for the Liverpool Exchange division from 1945 to 1970.

Before the Second World War, alongside her husband Jack Braddock she established a reputation as a crusading left-wing councillor, frequently at odds with her party while pursuing an agenda of social reform.

Mother and daughter were both present at St George's Plateau on 13 August 1911, when a baton charge by police and troops broke up a rally in support of Liverpool's striking transport workers.

[2][11] Meanwhile, she attended classes run by the Workers' Educational Association and the Plebs' League: "They told me how the capitalists controlled money, business and the land, and ... hung on to them".

Bessie played a leading role in a TUC "Hands Off Russia" rally in Liverpool's Sheil Park, where she and others resisted the efforts of the British Empire Union to capture the ILP's red flag.

[22] In the joint autobiography written with Jack, The Braddocks (1963), Bessie cites the formative experience of police violence on "Bloody Sunday" in 1911 as a motivating factor for her CPGB activities.

[25] Bessie combined her party roles—she was treasurer of the Liverpool branch—with her full-time union post; Jack, meanwhile, was only intermittently in work, as his incendiary reputation meant that employers were reluctant to give him a job.

They objected to the lack of autonomy afforded to local branches by the party's central "Political Bureau", and to what they perceived as the leadership's unquestioning subservience to the Soviet Union.

[26] In 1924, increasingly convinced that communist rule would lead to the enslavement rather than the liberation of workers, the entire leadership of the Liverpool CPGB branch, including both Braddocks, resigned from the party.

[30] St Anne's, one of the most deprived areas of the city, contained a closed workhouse at Brownlow Hill, which the Conservative-controlled council had decided to sell to the Roman Catholic Church as the potential site for a cathedral.

[48][n 2] Despite some opinion polls indicating a Labour lead,[50] most commentators expected that Winston Churchill's prestige would ensure a comfortable Conservative victory in the July 1945 general election.

[50] The expectations of a Labour victory in Liverpool Exchange were not high, but Bessie's chances were boosted by the poor local record of the sitting member, Colonel Shute, and she herself was confident.

[54] Physically imposing—she admitted to weighing 15 stone (210 pounds, 95 kg)[2]—she made an impact with her maiden speech on 17 October 1945, during a debate on the national housing shortage.

She ended her speech with a promise that she and other Labour back-benchers would continue to agitate until the conditions in which many were forced to live, "as a result of having been represented for so long by the Conservative Party", were removed.

[56] On 1 May 1947 The Manchester Guardian, reporting the chaotic Commons scenes during the divisions following a debate on the nationalisation of the railways, recorded that "Mrs E.M. Braddock ... danced a jig as she moved over to the Opposition benches where she occupied the seat usually used by Mr Churchill.

[2] At the time she was generally identified with the left wing of the party, and was associated with a grouping known as the "Socialist Fellowship", which espoused a programme of colonial freedom, workers' control and reduced arms expenditure.

[61] She continued her wholehearted campaigning on behalf of the poorest in the country, pleading with parliament to "remember the queues outside the Poor Relief offices",[62] and castigating the "New Look" fashion of 1948 as wasteful, "the ridiculous whim of idle people".

[63] Bessie's fiery reputation did not harm her electorally; in the February 1950 general election, with the Exchange constituency greatly increased by boundary changes, her majority rose to 5,344.

[65] Attlee's second government was short-lived; in the October 1951 general election Bessie increased her personal majority again, to 6,834,[53] but nationally Labour was defeated by the Conservatives and went into opposition.

[1] She was frequently at odds with her parliamentary colleague Edith Summerskill, a physician who wrote the anti-boxing tract The Ignoble Art,[67] and campaigned for the sport's abolition.

[68] After leaving Socialist Fellowship, Bessie moved steadily towards the centre and right of her party, distancing herself from colleagues with whom she had earlier found common cause.

[73] Also in 1952, Bessie's volatile temperament caused her to become the first woman member to be suspended from the House of Commons, after she repeatedly protested to the Deputy Speaker for failing to call her during a debate on the textile industry, a matter of great concern to her constituents.

[83] In July that year, during a home affairs debate, Bessie demanded tougher regulations on the supply and licensing of air pistols, which under the existing law were readily available to juveniles.

When rebuked by the Deputy Speaker, she replied that she had deliberately used shock tactics, reprising her earlier council chamber argument that "no one takes any notice unless someone does something which is out of order, or is unusual".

[87] In July 1957, when the enabling legislation reached its second House of Commons reading, Bessie described the scheme as regional rather than local, and claimed that some parts of Wales would benefit from it.

The year 1963 saw the publication of The Braddocks, in which Bessie made a sustained attack on communism and Trotskyism: "The purpose of this book is to bring home to the rank and file how wide that influence is ... unless positive steps are taken by the workers themselves ... democracy will be dead".

[94][19] The October 1964 general election brought Labour a narrow victory under Harold Wilson,[95] while in Liverpool Exchange, Bessie achieved her best personal majority to date, 9,746.

She frequently used inflammatory, colourful language, once describing an opposing councillor as a "blasted rat", and another time telling the Tory majority that she was willing "to take a machine gun to the lot of you".

[111] Bessie Braddock is commemorated in Liverpool by the statue in Lime Street Station,[30] and by a blue plaque erected at her modest home in ZigZag Road.

[112] In a 2014 Fabian Society essay the Labour MP Lisa Nandy wrote that Bessie "brought her experiences of life in the slums of Liverpool right into the heart of Westminster.