In August last year, a library was burned down in Liverpool. Just days earlier, three children had been murdered in a frenzied knife attack by a second-generation teenaged migrant a few miles up the road in Southport, sparking violent protests in many of the deindustrialised, depressed towns of northern England.
In Rotherham, a Holiday Inn housing asylum seekers was attacked by a mob. In Burnley, Muslim graves were desecrated. In Middlesbrough, young men were filmed on the rampage, throwing bricks through the windows of terraced houses. The events more resembled a 19th-century pogrom than the fledgling beginnings of “national renewal” promised by a new Prime Minister outside 10 Downing Street just days previously. It was a torrid start for any new leader.
But for many observers the extent of violence and destruction in Liverpool was particularly disturbing. Liverpool was not part of the popular conception of Brexit-land, a place of hard English nationalism and the zero-sum politics of plebeian racial ressentiment. Liverpool likes to think of itself as the obverse of all that.
In contrast to the old mill towns and coalfields, it markets itself as “the world in one city”, and makes the most of its status as England’s only-ever winner of European Capital of Culture (an honour previously bestowed on Paris, Florence and Madrid).
How, then, did we get here, watching young men set fire to libraries within walking distance of the waterfront’s “People’s Republic of Liverpool” gallery, which embodies the city’s rebellious, counter-cultural exceptionalism so vividly. Scouse Republic: An Alternative History of Liverpool, goes some way to explaining why.
The author, David Swift (a Scouser-in-exile in London), argues that Liverpool has been beset by visible economic decline just as obviously as any other English region. It is still associated, however unfairly, with unemployment, poverty and crime. Indeed, Spellow Library Hub – now restored from the riots after a surge in donations from the public – is located in one of the poorest 1 per cent of wards in the country.
But despite stubbornly high levels of deprivation, particularly in the ungentrified North End, Scouse Republic shows how the city nevertheless asserts itself as cosmopolitan, and, crucially, as left wing. Its citizens willingly play bit-parts in a broad performance of the place as a slightly wayward heartland, a rebel outpost, but one entirely comfortable with contemporary progressive mores. Young cage-fighters with names like “Paddy the Baddy” and “Meatball Molly” are liable to lead crowds in chants against the Conservative Party. A Scouse centre-forward playing for nearby Wrexham FC recently landed himself in trouble for wearing boots with bespoke “F**k the Tories” stitching.
Liverpool is perhaps the only place that could produce a figure like Derek Hatton, who once led the city council in the 1980s as a telegenic, sharp-suited young Trotskyist, and effective machine politician to boot, with a chip on his shoulder and the gift of the gab. Years later, Hatton has enjoyed a stint as a successful property developer, and is currently facing bribery charges alongside the larger-than-life former mayor Joe Anderson. “Degsy”, as he is known, drives around the city in large SUVs with personalised plates, paying for his name on a hospitality box at Everton’s ground. None of this has prevented him from vocally supporting the old cause of socialist labour, even from the comfort of his political retirement.
But the murky image of local elites is only part of the story. The Sun newspaper is subject to a city-wide ban, and “Tory” is genuinely spat out as a schoolyard and pub-garden insult. The percentages of votes for Labour candidates in Liverpool wouldn’t look out of place in the illiberal republics of ballot-stuffing autocrats. For their part, Liverpool’s football fans are known to boo the national anthem before FA Cup games. Away sections taunt Scouse supporters with renditions of “You’ll Never Get a Job” and “In Your Liverpool Slums”. Perhaps as a result of this antagonism, some of the city’s residents even adopt an only semi-ironic secessionism – “Scouse not English”, as the saying goes – claiming the north-west port as an Atlantic-facing, Celtic enclave, immune to the conservative parochialism of Anglo-Saxon, deep England.
All these storied contributions to labour movement history and left folklore can be found in Swift’s cultural-historical work, separated neatly into thematic rather than chronological chapters. But the civic mythologies are revealed less as ancient traditions, and more as recent phenomena emerging from the heyday of Thatcherism.
The 1980s saw several tectonic plates meet on the Scouse fault line: decades of shipping containerisation decimated dockside work opportunities; industrial automation was combining with renewed globalisation; and the relative withering of transatlantic trade had seen commercial fortunes move from Britain’s western ports to the east. What’s more, Merseyside’s footballing prominence began to run in inverse proportion to its socio-economic indicators, and mass industrial strife alongside the Toxteth riots saw the emergence of an image of the city as a hotbed of trade union firebrands and inner-city lawlessness. At the end of the decade, the seismic impact of the Hillsborough disaster and its aftermath helped shape and sustain a broad, popular, anti-establishment culture of incredulity towards the media and political classes.
All of this ensured Liverpool grew into the totemic opposite of Thatcher’s throwback Whiggish politics in the nation’s collective subconscious. No 10’s hyper-capitalist monetarism was met by Marxist “Mersey militant” councillors. Thatcher’s aspirational, entrepreneurial, individualist, petit-bourgeois parsimony stood in sharp contrast to the bolshie, brash, supposedly collectivist energies of the city.
Scouse Republic captures all of these narratives brilliantly. It deftly blends a sweeping, multi-century history of the city’s rising and fading fortunes with the cultural vignettes of Beatlemania and Merseybeat, the figure of the “scally” and Liverpool’s “birds”, and the emergence of football casual culture which began on Anfield and Goodison Park’s terraces. Imaginatively named hooligan firms like the “County Road Cutters” share pages with tub-thumping, paranoid pastors, one of whom, George Wise, was so violently incensed by supposed papal influence that he started his own Protestant Party, which held a seat on the council until 1974. Swift’s personal anecdotes complement a far lighter, more accessible tone than some of the weightier academic histories of a place that was once known as a fabulously wealthy “Second City of Empire”. The author tells us that his Israeli wife, during one of their first meetings, asked him if he knew what it was like to be from a place roundly despised by outsiders “where the greater the opprobrium… the more people were convinced of their own righteousness”. He could only answer in the affirmative.
As recently as the 1970s, Liverpool was a Tory town, seen as a die-hard bastion of working-class conservatism even as its northern neighbours had become impenetrable Labour citadels. There was a prosperous middle class, second only in wealth and prestige to London’s, and one that made its fortunes via the slave trade. But for ordinary people, the volatile, unpredictable cycles of dockside day-labouring and seafaring dominated the local economy.
The mercantile, commercial metropolis was sensitive to the ebbs and flows of international trade, in stark contrast to the sturdier industrial systems that benefited a more organised and steady manufacturing proletariat in Manchester or Sheffield. And yet many of Liverpool’s dockside workers valued their independence from the factory clock, however precarious it made their existence. Local Conservative politicians wasted no time in exploiting anti-Catholic sectarianism among poor Protestants desperate to protect their marginal privilege against waves of Irish migrants.
The large majority of Liverpolitans can trace some Irish Catholic ancestry over the Irish Sea. This has come to define the contemporary ethos and character of Liverpool much more prominently than the former dominance of loyalist Orange Lodges over municipal politics and traditional working-class culture (an awkward fact that most modern Scousers would no doubt prefer to forget).
Swift cites polling that reveals the city’s politics as more Blue Labour than stereotypically Corbynista: even in Liverpool Riverside (apparently the most republican constituency in England), retaining the monarchy would still win a hypothetical referendum. Widespread left-wing views on economic policy are accompanied by more traditionalist cultural stances, not unlike the country at large. While the messaging of the organised, ideological right wing can fester in Liverpool as miserably as anywhere else, much of the recent rage was driven by a strange, diffuse network of online influencers. Along with other anti-vaxxers and Scouse conspiracy theorists, they are sometimes referred to as the “cosmic scally” crowd. The successors to Wise’s sectarianism a century ago are a local hippy-ish graffiti artist, a former Muay Thai fighter-turned-YouTuber, and a boxing champion-turned-CBD-oil salesman. All have as much reach locally as any Tommy Robinson-linked account.
In terms of its demographics and levels of economic need, most of Liverpool outside the trendy, hipster-heavy parts of the South End and city centre more resemble the Red Wall’s Bolton or Burnley than other progressive bastions like well-to-do Brighton or Bristol. An intense, vitriolic hatred of Toryism is widespread, alongside an instinctual, innate anti-elitism, and an us-against-the-world mentality that feeds an intense suspicion of authority and a sometimes-stultifying aversion to anything deemed too “posh”, too effete, too different, or “too clever by half” (all of which is liable to be categorised as “wool behaviour” by locals).
Roughly 80 per cent of votes went to Corbyn’s Labour here in 2017 and 2019, and huge Corbynite rallies were witnessed on St George’s plateau. But that by no means implies a city-wide immunity to the same anxieties that nurture today’s national populisms across Europe: high migration, the palpable deterioration of economic opportunity and the public realm, rising crime, or ultra-liberal culture war over-reach. Scouse Republic notes that after a strike by Liverpool’s transport workers in 1911 led the UK “as near to a revolution as anything… seen in England”, less than a decade later the same streets saw a week of violent anti-black race riots. The old adage applies as much on the banks of the Mersey as it does elsewhere: the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Scouse Republic: An Alternative History of Liverpool
David Swift
Constable, 320pp, £25
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[See also: The making of a political mind]
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