The myth of Scouse exceptionalism

To visit Liverpool after some years away is to realise how seductive yet misleading are the stories we tell about Britain’s decline. The city centre is bustling. There is a branch of The Ivy brasserie on Castle Street. At the Pier Head, you hear the wails of seagulls, buskers working through the Beatles songbook, and French and German families. The parents have come to take in history; the kids are kitted out in LFC jerseys with Diogo Jota or Mohammed Salah’s name on the back. Yet for decades, commentators who were eager to explain Liverpool’s decline assumed that such prosperity could never return. It was a uniquely dysfunctional place whose failings also spoke of the British disease. “They should build a fence around it and charge admission,” said the Daily Mirror in 1982, “for sadly it has become a ‘showcase’ of everything that has gone wrong for Britain’s major cities.” 

Liverpool’s problems in the later 20th century derived from its hugely profitable bet on oceanic trade. When the city opened its first wet dock, in 1715, it was a modestly sized town, but it soon benefited greatly from the trade in enslaved people between West Africa and Britain’s Caribbean plantations. After the 1807 abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire, Liverpool’s merchants developed a booming trade in goods and emigrants with the United States. In the late 19th century, they unveiled a statue in Sefton Park to Christopher Columbus, the “discoverer of America and the founder of Liverpool’s fortunes”. Former slavers built up a lucrative trade in West African palm oil. Liverpool’s people were not just enterprising: to the disgust of early Labour activists, they were also Tories who believed fervently in the monarchical empire within which they thrived. By 1900, almost three quarter of a million people lived in the shadow of the Royal Liver Buildings, the grandiose monument to Liverpool’s shipping fortunes whose Edwardian Baroque cupolas and heraldic birds still define it today. 

Eventually, though, Liverpool went the way of Nineveh and Tyre. The Great Depression wrecked global shipping and threw many dockers out of work. After the Second World War, meanwhile, the inexorable decline of empire whittled away trading ties with British colonies. Liverpool’s commercial downfall was sealed by the rebalancing of Britain’s trade from the Atlantic to Western Europe, which its 1973 entry into the European Community rendered official. The last passenger liner from Liverpool to Montreal had sailed two years earlier. Southern and eastern ports, notably Felixstowe, now thrived at Liverpool’s expense. The last blow was technological: containerisation dramatically boosted the efficiency of shipping but decimated the workforce of ports around the world. While Liverpool’s new container terminal at Seaforth kept busy, its docks rotted. The result was what the historian Sam Wetherell has called “obsolescence” and on a huge scale. Liverpool became the Mersey’s Detroit. Among the shuttered infrastructure was the Stanley Dock, which is still the biggest brick building in the world.

The inevitability of these shocks became local wisdom. During the early Nineties, my fervently Tory grandfather would drive up the empty Dock Road, pointing out the route of the demolished Overhead Railway and telling me that “Liverpool was in the wrong place”. But could not local or national government have done more to compensate for this shift, which was as much geopolitical as economic? In 1981, the Chancellor of the Exchequer Geoffrey Howe’s memorandum on the city argued that attempting to revive Liverpool’s economy was like “trying to make water flow uphill”. Howe’s words are sometimes taken as an expression of monetarist contempt for the northwest. Yet as Wetherell shows in his fine recent book on the subject, they were apt commentary on decades of efforts by local and national government alike — which together had been futile if not counterproductive. 

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The interwar downturn of the docks had prompted the council to build up industrial enterprises on the city’s outskirts. They combined this with slum clearance, moving thousands of people from over-crowded terraces to brand new housing. The purchase of the quaint Speke estate, which had once belonged to a slave trader, was a mark of its forward thinking: fields gave way to semis, factories and an art deco airport. After the Second World War, Attlee’s government concentrated on bringing the casual labour of dockers under the control of a National Board — a noble but futile undertaking, given the contraction of the port’s trade. Yet the council pressed on with creating new estates and towns in Kirkby and Huyton. These salubrious but dull suburbs depended on single employers, many of which had been pressured into locating factories there to start with. Former dockers brought into their factories the go-slow practices customary at the quayside, which hardly improved their competitiveness.

As late as the Sixties, planners still hoped that Liverpool might defy economic gravity. New car-making plants thrived. Graeme Shankland, the director of planning, sought to make the city into a regional centre for consumption and entertainment: St John’s Precinct, the lumpen complex that is still the first thing you see on exiting Lime Street Station, is his monument. Among other things, Shankland tried to accommodate the mounting number of private cars. In 1974, the Queen opened the city’s flagship (and overbudget) project: a new road tunnel under the Mersey. The Cavern Club that gave the Beatles their start was casually wrecked for a tunnel vent. The building tourists flock to now is just a replica. 

Far from reviving Liverpool’s economy, though, Shankland’s plans were stymied, as the city continued to shed jobs and people. The factories opened under the Wilson government did not even make up for work lost elsewhere. The next bout of intervention — following the Toxteth riots of 1981 — didn’t achieve much either. Michael Heseltine certainly became famous for his distinctive brand of Scouse boosterism. In practice, however, Westminster’s solutions ranged from managerialism (a Merseyside Development Corporation to prep the docklands for outside investors) to magical thinking (the rushed organisation of the 1984 Garden Festival on the polluted remains of the Herculaneum Dock).

It is easy to write off Heseltine as a posh Tarzan whose wild swings did the city little permanent good. Though millions attended his Garden Festival, it left few tangible traces. I enjoyed its model of the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine as a child, but makers Cammell Laird found it a poor substitute for dwindling orders of ocean liners. Yet the experience of other deindustrialising cities shows that such initiatives can be successful. Vancouver, on the west coast of Canada where I now live, was a faltering port city when in 1986 it hosted an international exhibition. That kickstarted a boom and brought in Asian investors to tidy up its derelict industrial zone and fund parks and housing.

The local Left got no closer to solving Liverpool’s problems than the self-appointed “minister for Merseyside” — though, again, not necessarily in the way received wisdom tells it. Though Derek Hatton’s Militant faction has since become a byword for radical excess, it actually criticised the voguish preoccupation of the metropolitan “Looney Left” with race and gender. As for Hatton himself, he was an unlikely devotee of Thatcher’s housing guru Alice Coleman, who argued that the best way to eradicate crime and build community was to tear down tower blocks and move people to small houses of their own with fenced gardens.

This anti-urban sensibility spawned the cul-de-sacs of Barratt homes that cluster around the disused canals and docks of inner Liverpool, giving them a strangely suburban feel. Indeed, the straight edge ethos of Militant members made them uncomprehending of the new social problems that were the fruit of obsolescence. The hostility of the Liverpool underworld to illegal drugs, which they saw as an ethnic vice, had at first kept them out of the city. Yet when addiction to heroin took hold here, as in many other depressed towns and cities, Militant opposed the pioneering work of clean needle exchanges, which sought to prevent the spread of HIV. The city’s AIDS activists faced the same kind of disdainful obstruction.

Outsiders have often invoked the popular culture of Liverpool to explain what went wrong with the city. But it would perhaps be truer to say that it was a response to than a cause of economic downturn. The journalist David Swift points out in his spiky recent history of the city that deprivation prompted people to carve out a strong and idiosyncratic identity against a supposedly uncaring country. The Scouse accent thickened and its sweary vocabulary became increasingly creative and impenetrable. Football became a religion. Scousers imagined that they were not really English, playing up their Celtic roots even though Irish immigration to Liverpool had peaked in the later 19th century and had anyway been no higher than in London or Birmingham. 

This defensive turn allowed media outsiders to parade their hostile knowledge of Liverpool as a city in thrall to its bad impulses. This was especially true of initial commentary following the Hillsborough disaster of 1989. Wrongly blaming fans for the catastrophe — in fact down to stadium flaws and mistakes by the emergency services — journalists accused them of behaving “like animals”. Even those who rightly refused to blame the disaster on supporters could not resist policing the city’s emotional response. “It would be Liverpool,” sighed Alan Bennett, “that sentimental, self-dramatising place.”

There clearly is, or was, such a thing as anti-Scouse prejudice, but much of it is out of date. Despite the jokes that I grew up with (“What do you call a Scouser in a house?”; “A burglar”), the city now has lower crime rates than its peers. That’s shadowed by the partial recovery of Liverpool’s economic vim — with year-on-year growth of 15%, it’s one of the most dynamic cities in Britain. In the end, this revival owes little to the well-meaning interventions from Whitehall, and much more to a pursuit of the commercial impulses with which the city’s rise began. 

The Liverpool One shopping centre, which has remade and reinvigorated 42 acres of the town’s centre, has had many local detractors. As Wetherell points out, one objection is that it is not a truly public space: the capital to build its bland chain stores came from the Duke of Westminster’s Grosvenor Estates. For their part, efforts to drive international tourism have a stereotyped and nostalgic focus aptly symbolised by the execrable statue of the Fab Four on the Pier Head and the transfer of the Yellow Submarine to John Lennon airport (motto: “Only the Sky Above Us”). The museums and aspirational eateries crammed into the city’s renovated Albert Dock do nothing to lift the everyday lives of the many people who still live tough lives in the city’s many deprived suburbs. 

But to say that Liverpool’s revival is a little crass is not to say that it’s failed. Shopping and eating certainly make for a tawdrier civic religion than the strenuous moralism of the Victorian bourgeoisie, which covered the city with churches and museums. Many of the monuments to that creed are mouldering away unlamented. On a recent visit, I passed the thunderously Gothic premises of the Young Men’s Christian Association. Saplings were sprouting from its roof turrets, while its ground floor was occupied by a Detroit-style pizza bar called Holy Garage. What would William Ewart Gladstone, who was born on Rodney Street, have said? But at least consumerism is ecumenical: in the city centre lately, I saw Scouse glamazons happily mingling with head-scarved shoppers in the sort of quiet coexistence that we are often told is less and less viable in Britain. 

In welcoming Liverpool’s slow return to prosperity, we need not believe all of its publicity. Its past has not made it uniquely progressive, a “Scouse republic” at proud remove from a parochial and deferential England. The city’s cosmopolitan branding has not insulated it from the uptick in angry unease at immigration. There was an ugly riot at the Pier Head after Axel Rudakubana killed children at a daycare in nearby Southport. The far-flung nature of Liverpool’s trade never made its people especially ethnically diverse either. In the decades after the First World War, authorities thinned out Chinatown with covert deportations, corralling West African sailors into a decaying quarter and labelling their children with local women “half castes”. Its football fans were vicious racists, with Everton supporters pelting John Barnes with bananas. 

As for the future, the bright lights of Pier Head belie an uncertain future, not least when it comes to politics. In recent years, after all, there were as many Liverpudlians in Tory Cabinets as Old Etonians: Nadine Dorries may now be more representative of the city than Derek Hatton. Liverpool still has the three safest Labour seats in the country, but all three voted for Brexit. In the 2024 General Election, Reform polled second in most of its seats. But this is just another way of saying that Liverpool has now become surprisingly normal: facing tensions and problems that are never insurmountable, however forbidding they might seem. 

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