Normanton by-election, 1947

The Normanton by-election, 1947 was a parliamentary by-election held for the British House of Commons constituency of Normanton on 11 February 1947. The seat had become vacant when the Labour Member of Parliament Tom Smith had resigned, take up the post of Labour Director of the North-Eastern Divisional Coal Board. Smith had held the seat since the by-election in 1933. The Labour candidate, George Sylvester, held the seat for his party. The Conservative Party candidate was Enoch Powell, the first time he had stood for election, but he was heavily defeated.

Campaign
The campaigning in the last days took place in severe weather conditions as Yorkshire faced heavy snow storms which led to power cuts. Of the three candidates, Powell was the only one to take the campaigning particularly seriously.

Labour
George Sylvester did little serious campaigning. With Normanton considered a "Socialist stronghold", his core message was for a continuation of support for the Labour Party in respect of its support for the mining industry.

Conservative
Powell's campaign was based around viscously attacking the Labour government of Clement Attlee and its policies following the 1945 general election. Powell hoped that the local Conservative and Unionist Party would become the dominant party with the working class population abandoning Socialism. Among his attacks was a comparison of Labour with Germany's Nazi government, claiming that Parliamentary democracy was only a rubber stamp due to government power (rather than Labour having twice as many MPs as the Conservatives) and that workingmen all over the country were terrified of professing their political views out of fear of dismissal if it contradicted Labour's ideology. His Featherstone speech ended with the suggestion that Labour may be planning to found its own Gestapo.

Independent
Dr. Walter Hartley, a practitioner from Castleford, joined the race at the last minute as an Independent candidate. He held no meetings to gain supporters, saying that his support would come from those who knew him personally as either friends or patients. He failed to provide an election agent to verify his party funding fit guidelines and was therefore unlikely to have been allowed into Parliament even if he had on; Hartley however insisted he had paid no expenses.