Elijah Sandham

Elijah Sandham (1875 – 7 May 1944) was an English Independent Labour Party (ILP) politician from Lancashire. He sat in the House of Commons from 1929 to 1931 as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Kirkdale division of Liverpool, and in 1934 he led the breakaway Independent Socialist Party.

Sandham was elected in 1906 to Chorley Town Council, and remained active in the ILP, which at the time was affiliated to the Labour Party.

At the 1918 general election he unsuccessfully contested the Chorley division of Lancashire, and in 1924 he stood in Liverpool Kirkdale, where he lost by a wide margin to the sitting Conservative Party MP Sir John Pennefather, Bt. However, Pennefather retired from the Commons at the 1929 general election, when Sandham defeated the Conservative candidate Robert Rankin with a slim majority of 793 votes (2.6% of the total).

In Parliament, he took a radical socialist viewpoint. In April 1930, the Commons debated on the Unemployment Insurance Bill, in which the Minister of Labour Margaret Bondfield proposed to raise the borrowing limit of the Insurance Fund to cope with high unemployment. The Liberal MP Milner Gray had suggested that a permanent solution to the funding problem lay in tackling the unequal share of wealth going to the rentier class. Sandham replied that his only interest in the rentier class was to abolish them.

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