The guillotine came down on the other thread just as it fell on my neck - and this post. It's a response to Timbo and Viva Bobby Graham really. It doesn't really attempt to answer the question in this thread (I do, myself), but is part of what I thought was an interesting conversation in the old one. (Apologies to anyone who thought the corpse was better buried!)
I'm not sure you're quite getting the issue here Paul lad. It's not about recrimination for those supporting England. We understand entirely why many do. Rather, it's about feeling dismayed and slighted by a clear lack of empathy and understanding amongst our fellow Liverpudlians who think England is the fucking bizz as to why so many of their "fellow" local Liverpudlians have come over time to feel alienated from their country and their national team. It's actually bloody sad when you think about it that so many born and bred in a country feel so little if anything for it and its national sports teams but it's what has happened in the case of so many native Liverpudlians.
I've enjoyed this thread because there has been some genuine debate conducted with honesty and occasional grace between people with different perspectives. Posters have actually marshalled arguments rather than abused each other which is how it should be. But, I've got to say Timbo mate, that I think you and Viva Bobby are opening up a breach between us that doesn't really exist. I don't mean on whether or not we should support England on Sunday (that breach is massive and entertainingly so!) I mean a breach between those who 'get' the city of Liverpool and those who don't. It's possible after all to want England to win tomorrow and still fully understand why many scousers - though clearly not all - don't. This is especially so since both your and VBG's posts have been chock-full of lucid explanation.
Let me say again I 'get' it.
Earlier in the thread when I was exchanging thoughts with the Doc (Beaker) I actually gave your side of the argument some more power to its elbow by pointing out that in Arthur Hopcraft's brilliant
Football Man , published in 1968, he makes a specific point of how many Liverpool football fans might have been supporting West Germany in the 1966 final had they been able to get tickets for Wembley. Hopcraft sort of applauds this. I mentioned this because it seems to me that the Thatcher argument gets wheeled out too much to explain scouser feelings of "alienation" from the nation, and all its pomp and ceremony (including England's footy team). You and Viva may disagree with what I'm about to say, but I offer it in a spirit of solidarity and assure you I'm not taking a dig at Liverpool - a place I love and defend, even though it's never been my home.
Thatcher first. Practically everyone who is sentient knows what the Tory government did to Merseyside. Years afterwards after Liverpool had begun an economic and cultural recovery (with some help from Whitehall it must be said) it was still a shock to learn from unclassified cabinet records how Geoffrey Howe had suggested a "managed decline" for the city in the 1980s. Think about that. The Chancellor of the Exchequer wanted to slowly strangulate one of the greatest cities in the country. Indeed one of the great world cities. That is contempt. Vicious contempt. So, absolutely, I can see why many on Merseyside think the policies and the plans of the Thatcher years warrant their own sense of 'fuck you' when it comes to supporting anything associated with the flag.
But here's the thing. Some towns and regions didn't suffer 'managed decline' under Thatcher, or the prospect of 'managed decline' which was what Howe was talking about. They suffered total destruction. I'm thinking primarily of the coal districts. Their industries weren't just run down, they were taken away. And with it any reason for existence that the villages and towns around those pits might have had. Go to areas of County Durham and Northumberland or south Yorkshire and Derbyshire (plus Wales and Scotland obviously) and you will see total desolation. Mass unemployment, an ageing population (where are the young?), and a drugs problem that beggars belief. Liverpool looks like Monte Carlo by comparison.
I don't say this in a spirit of competition ('look who bled worse'), but as a reminder that Thatcher had an appalling effect on large swathes of industrial England, especially in the North. Liverpool wasn't alone. You're gonna hate this next bit and I've toyed with whether I should say it. But here goes.
I was very active in the political struggle to save the pits. Two of my cousins worked in the industry, one as a collier, one as a trainee mining engineer. Like many thousands of others I helped picket power stations, collected food, and shook tins for the miners. It could be a happy experience doing this, it could be a demoralising one - a lot depended where you were. University towns were great. But the worst experience I had - by some measure - was shaking tins outside Wembley stadium for the Liverpool v Everton Charity shield game in the summer of 1984. Everyone knew it might be hard to raise a lot of money there. This was the period of the 'Giro Cup Finals' after all. Most folk were broke themselves. But it was the abuse that was so demoralising. I can still see one bloke, obviously tanked up, and in red I'm afraid, yelling in my girlfriend's face "Support the Miners? Yeah, I support them. On the end of a fucking rope." Behind him were his jeering mates. It was a minority of course, and no more representative of the city of Liverpool than the Football Lads Alliance are of England fans this weekend. But it's not something you forget in a hurry. There didn't seem to be much solidarity present that afternoon.
Why do I mention this? I suppose it's because I dislike the false impression that's sometimes left that only Liverpool suffered in the 1980s and only Merseyside has a folk memory of what was done to English/British communities in the name of monetarism.
The difference today between the political scene in Liverpool and that existing in the former coal-mining areas is amazing of course. Liverpool stands proudly red - as solid a Labour area as you could wish to see - whereas the old coalfields, like the former textile districts, have become part of a crumbling 'Red Wall'. I'm not in my home town this weekend, but I can also bet that St George's flags are everywhere - although flown as much by folk with Punjabi backgrounds as by those with long and ancient Yorkshire ancestries. Again, this is NOT the Football Lads Alliance we're seeing writ large. My own town, Huddersfield, is still Labour and has been continuously since 1945 but it makes me sick, of course, to see how many other towns in the area are now flirting with Johnson. The contrast with Liverpool, which will NOT forget the 1980s, is amazing. And obviously this reflects creditably on your city.
But this is why I mentioned Arthur Hopcraft's great book. He suggests, and I think he's right, that Liverpool's alienation from the national culture is a very old thing. You have to look way beyond Thatcher to find its sources. My own view, and both you and VBG will probably disagree with this, is that the alienation isn't even political. Liverpool, after all, wasn't even Labour until the mid-1950s and the city made little contribution to the labour and socialist movement as it emerged in Britain in the 1880s up to 1914. The cradle of the Labour party and the TUC lies elsewhere - in the West Riding, East Lancs, the North East, South Wales, Clydeside and London. These were the areas, not Liverpool, that nurtured and developed socialism in Britain. Even between the wars, and during the great depression, I think I'm right in saying that the city only ever returned one Labour MP to Westminster. Bradford, Durham, Sheffield, east and south London etc were red, red, red.
Great strikes happened on Merseyside of course, like the 1911 Transport Strike, but little permanent organisation was left in the Liverpool docks. It was a constant complaint of union organisers that Merseyside dockers were the quickest in the land to strike, but the slowest to pay their union dues. Hence trade union organisation was so fragmentary in Liverpool for many years. (VBG's NUR/ASLEF family ties are something different, but even there Liverpool was not a 'railway town' in the way that Crewe, York, Derby, Swindon were railway towns and the railway unions didn't dominate and colour the local political scene).
So if I'm right and Liverpool's alienation isn't primarily political, what then is it? You guys have already supplied the answer I think. It must be the fact that the city was exceptional, for so long, in being a migrant town. Most seafaring ports are, but Liverpool was especially so. In particular there is Ireland. (Remember the Republic of Ireland played its first international matches after 1945 at....Goodison Park). The gravitational pull westwards to Ireland (and through that to America) meant Liverpool was always semi-detached from the rest of the country. It was poorly integrated into the economics, the politics (including the labour movement) and the culture of Great Britain. It always did its own thing and preferred to look outwards to the world. That hasn't changed, and I wouldn't expect it to change - at least for another 200 years. That gravitational pull is clearly enormous - and as pervasive and 'unnoticeable' as gravity always is.
But why the fuck you'll be supporting Italy, fuck only knows.
Especially you Timbo with your granddaughter's hands wrapped round an England sweepstake ticket!
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