As Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour gathers for its annual conference in Liverpool, one might be forgiven for seeing the city as a symbol of his party’s greatest strengths. After all, Liverpool’s five seats remained solidly Labour in 2019 while the “red wall” elsewhere crumbled. The party controls two-thirds of city council seats. Starmer has praised Steve Rotheram, city region mayor, for doing a “fantastic job”.
Alas, Liverpool’s past and present defies such simple analysis. The most mercurial of British cities is going through a renewed bout of self-doubt amid a sudden upsurge in gun crime, a takeover of the city council by government commissioners, and concern that the city is losing out on inward investment to its historic rival Manchester.
Liverpool has a long history of political turbulence. Despite Labour’s current supremacy, the party’s control of the city came late: for more than 100 years, until the second half of the 20th century, the Conservatives were dominant. Since then, Labour’s grip has been intermittent and often marked by conflict and controversy.
A hundred and fifty years ago, the Mersey Estuary was powered by what would now be seen as a gig economy. Employment on the docks and in factories tended to be casual, meaning there was less of the craft-based industrial organisation seen in other places, which spurred the labour movement’s foundation in the late 19th century. The party’s hold on the city in fact owes much to Liverpool’s history of Irish immigration, which gave the city a complex and distinctive political culture — and is now a source of pride. Three-quarters of the population are estimated to have Irish roots, and Liverpool is often referred to as the “second capital of Ireland”. In the last century, the Irish have contributed to Liverpool’s success in football, culture and music and to a recovery — frustratingly incomplete — in self-confidence since its economic nadir in the Eighties.
Irish integration, however, was not easy. The city’s diaspora swelled as a result of Ireland’s Great Famine of 1845-9. But for those who survived the crossing in overloaded “coffin ships”, Liverpool offered little except damp cellars, hunger and disease. By 1851, the Irish-born accounted for 22% of Liverpool’s population (compared with 13% in Manchester and almost 5% in London). The influx swamped the city’s authorities and fed a groundswell of anti-Irish feeling. During the “Black ‘47”, William Henry Duncan, medical officer of health, described Liverpool as the “city of plague”, including cholera, typhoid and dysentery. He blamed the Irish, who “inhabit the filthiest and worst-ventilated courts and cellars, who congregate most numerously in dirty lodging-houses, who are the least cleanly in their habits, and the most apathetic about everything that befalls them”.
Competition for scarce work fuelled anti-Catholicism; indeed, it was the desire to keep Catholics away from power that allowed the Conservatives — and their partners in the Protestant Party — to dominate Liverpool’s politics for the century following 1841. The local party exercised a working-class form of Toryism, focused on helping those struggling with poverty. About a quarter of immigrants from Ireland were Protestant, and the Orange Order, through its lodges, provided a drinking club that helped to align working-class Protestants with Tory Unionism. Liverpool had 50 lodges by the early 20th century.
Sectarian violence started with the first Orange Order procession in 1819. Orangemen generally came off worst in the early years, but grew stronger. There were serious riots in 1851 and 1909, but as slums were cleared and religious observance dwindled, tension declined. Liverpudlians began to unite over the success of their football clubs — whose support is less sectarian than that of their Glasgow equivalents — and the global success of Merseybeat in pop music. (The Beatles all had Irish roots.)
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