As with any founding myth, a kernel of truth lies within the layers of hyperbole and self-aggrandizement. But it is hard to square Liverpool’s self-referential and pre-supposed Leftism with some of the results from this week’s local elections in neighboring boroughs within Liverpool City Region (the city of Liverpool proper doesn’t go to the polls until next May). In Halton, just a stone’s throw away from Liverpool John Lennon Airport and Halewood car factories that were once the sites of legendary strikes, Reform has just swept the board. To the north, Sefton council has swayed towards Nigel Farage’s barmy army, reducing Labour’s once-mammoth majority, with Reform taking five seats and missing out on many more by a whisker. Three years ago, this Merseyside enclave, the birthplace of Jamie Carragher, was home to 51 Labour councillors. Today, the streets that Carragher – a Labour donor – once played football in as a boy are represented by a Holocaust-denying Reform councillor. Then there’s Knowsley, which in 2023 experienced some of the first violent anti-migrant hotel riots in England. This week, the Labour seats that were up for grabs were decimated, with Independents and Reform benefiting from the Left’s collapse.

Liverpool, then, the quintessential “Red City”, currently stands within a soft, mushy doughnut of turquoise populism. Today’s results could well portend those of Liverpool City Council next May: Labour activists and councillors tell me that their once-solid wards in the north of the city are being dragged rightwards.

Merseyside’s political culture is clearly in a state of flux. And this is in no small part down to the emergence of a new, peculiarly Liverpudlian subculture: the Cosmic Scallies. “Scally” for their roots in Scouse working-class street culture, and “Cosmic” for their predilection for bizarre, New Age-coded, anti-systemic worldviews and lifestyles. These track-suited eccentrics don’t conform to the stereotype of the Leftist Scouser, backing Labour come what may. But they’re certainly not Tories either. Rather, the Cosmic Scallies are Liverpool’s own manifestation of the very online reactionary Right.

This is a broad church without a single, well-defined school of thought — a diffuse medley of influencers and their followers. But, generally speaking, the Cosmic Scally combines a devotion to deranged conspiracy theory, alternative medicine, gym culture, self-help, and men’s mental health discourse, with a side-helping of anti-migrant hostility and “common sense” anti-wokism. Some advocate for the use of psychedelics. Others swear by meditation. Still more are ex-addicts celebrating their sobriety on socials. And their rise, in the streets and online, is part of what’s driving a slow divorce between Liverpool and its Labour traditions.

The Cosmic Scallies were born out of the city’s distinctively proletarian customs. Think not of what tabloid Britain might have called the “chav” — an archetype that was rarely found in Liverpool — but of young(ish) lads in head-to-toe sportswear, Under Armour tracksuits and Nike Air Max trainers. In many cases, the short back-and-sides of yesteryear have been replaced by the “ketwig” — a huge mop of curly, unkempt locks, so-named because of many of its wearers’ enthusiasm for ketamine. Many of these Scouse denizens will be footsoldiers of the Cosmic Scally multiverse.

A typical Cosmic Scally is the lad in North Face with a joint behind his ear who insists on regaling you with muddled tales of Masonic control, chemtrails, corrupt police and the Great Replacement theory at a pub on North Liverpool’s Country Road. Or the taxi driver I met not long ago who turned down the TalkSport phone-in to tell me that the Labour Party was a thinly disguised front for paedophile elites intent on “importing the Third World”, before warning me not to “pump shit” into my body via vaccination.

Their dubious intellectual gurus can mostly be found on social media, where Cosmic Scally influencers push a bewildering range of insidious political messages. Rescuing children from unnamed malcontents is a common theme. After the Southport murders in 2024, it was a “Save Our Kids” protest promoted by the Cosmic Scally cyberspace network that descended into a riot that spread across the country. Other political themes include Stop the Boats, Islam, and migration.

One of the most well known of the bunch is the former Olympic boxer Anthony Fowler, who has built a solid fanbase of more than 200,000 followers selling CBD oil alongside Kerry Katona and Katie Price. He extols the benefits of staring at the sun to avoid sunburn and claims he cured his infant daughter’s cancer with his own CBD oil and an organic diet. Peppering his endless face-to-camera sales pitches are nods to stories of migrants attacking children: “Dont [sic] touch my little sister she’s 12,” he posted, after footage emerged of a Scottish girl brandishing knives, apparently to protect her sister from a migrant attack. “If her parents or legal team can be contacted I am happy to help cover any legal fees,” Fowler said. He implores followers to “Protects [sic] your children”. “If your daughters in the bathroom you see who’s in there [sic],” he once posted, alongside an AI image of a sturdy MAGA man blocking a trans activist from a toilet.

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Then there’s the former crystal-meth addict, Muay Thai fighter and stuntman Billy Moore, who makes a tidy living documenting “raise the flag” street protests, talking to the residents of homeless encampments and making fun of the people on Liverpool’s Antifa demos. Last month, he posted footage of a man confronting him and calling him a “little Rightwing piece of filth, taking advantage of homeless left, right and center”. Moore said that his accuser was “a Leftwing bigot” who “voted the Green Party, loves LGBT stuff” and was “probably gay”. His videos regularly garner several hundred thousand views — the stuff of dreams for any beleaguered local Labour politician.

The unofficial King of the Cosmic Scallies is perhaps Sine Missione, an elusive, Banksy-style local graffiti artist. He played a central role in anti-lockdown protests, pushing QAnon, flat-Earth theories and “sacred geometry” psychedelia on his socials. He has since been overtaken by newer, self-styled gurus and accounts, and has deleted his socials. But his message lives on.

When the digital crosses into the real, it can take strange forms. In a Liverpool park, Cosmic Scally-coded “We Stand for Freedom” protests push every slogan and conspiracy under the sun: from “Stop the Boats” to dire warnings of man-made weather, mind-control techniques, and government planes spraying unknowing citizens from gray skies overhead.

The local poet and author PJ Smith (aka Roy) lamented the rise of the Cosmic Scallies in his hip-hop track, “Loss is not infinite”, listing, in doleful resignation, some of the core features of the subculture: “5G conspiracy scalls / Ayahuasca nuts in Mammut kecks… Meditation meatheads / Anti-vaccine stoners.”

Antonio Gramsci might have described these influencers as the “organic intellectuals” of the Cosmic Scally movement. Not intellectuals in the sense of their academic credentials, of course, but in their bottom-up articulation of a “new social type”, giving a “homogeneity”, a kind of collective consciousness and projected voice to the Cosmic Scally strata. Theirs is a diffuse and hybrid identity, combining  the solidly plebeian traditions of the modern Scouser with an incredulity towards any-and-all established authority and an unusual blend of back-to-nature hippydom, individual self-empowerment and blood-and-soil nationalism.

The Cosmic Scally influencer is what Alan Finlayson, a Professor of Political & Social Theory at the University of East Anglia and researcher into the digital Right, calls “a new kind of ideological entrepreneur”. No longer constrained by the “old institutions” that once defined the city’s politics — political parties, newspapers, broadcasters, the Church, the trade unions, working men’s clubs — these online influencers act as “independent operators producing new ways of thinking about the world”, creating novel, unconventional political thought.

Social media, the great leveler, has been the driving force behind this. No longer do the gatekeepers of traditional broadcasting keep the Overton window narrow. Where once the realms of political debate were kept focused and respectable, today all sorts of ideas and symbols compete for likes and subscribers in the infinite nexus of “content”.  The Cosmic Scallies are a product of the evolution from top-down, one-to-many media communications to a schizophrenic, many-to-many mesh of ideas, poses and products.

This isn’t a self-conscious political tribe: there is no coherent ideology, leader, or formal organization. There’s no Tommy Robinson-type at the top giving orders, nor are there ageing National Front or BNP hard men talking about white supremacy over warm beer in flat-roof pubs. Instead, the Cosmic Scallies constitute what the Marxist cultural critic Raymond Williams referred to as a “structure of feeling”: an ephemeral collective imaginary, a shared vibe or atmosphere.

But while the movement may be amorphous, it is influencing the reconstitution of the politics of Liverpool. While voting for the Conservatives is still anathema to most Scousers, the Reform brand is untainted enough to satisfy the very real anti-establishment culture of the city’s popular classes, particularly in the poorer North End.

“We’re going to get torn apart in the locals next year,” a door-knocking Labour activist tells me over text. “We’re fucked. Bricking it.” Every ward in Liverpool goes to the polls in May 2027. In traditionally solid Labour areas, where “Tory” is used as an insult spat out by contorted faces, many voters are likely to join the Faragist insurgency, just as some of their neighbors have in Knowsley, Sefton and Halton. The demographic here, the miserable Labourite tells me, includes a lot of “very young, semi-drug dealing, or make-up artist-y, Cosmic Scousery renters”. Their fuck-off Scouse animus that once found expression through the labor movement and militant trade unionism could now be set to banish Labour entirely: “The issue will be Reform, or independents,” the campaigner tells me. After several seats in nearby Knowsley fell to Reform, including the home ward of the Corbynite Labour MP Ian Byrne, the activist texts again: “I never thought it would be this bad.”

Part of the problem, they tell me, is that the contemporary Labour Party has alienated so many on Merseyside. Liverpool’s brand of Leftism was once solidly workerist, rooted in industrial struggles and class warfare. Now, the Cosmic Scallies are uniting in opposition to what the US Right have called “gay race communism” — a New Left degradation of the labor movement tradition, dominated by studenty, middle-class cohorts and rooted in politically-correct discourses and the pained language of the perma-activist class. If this is what the modern Left is, says the weary door-knocker, then it’s driving a wedge between itself and many Scousers.

Then there’s the fact that nobody in Liverpool is listening to Labour HQ’s increasingly desperate comms. Labour politicians have no idea how to adapt to a world of short-form vertical video in which the currency is outrage and eyeballs-at-all-costs extremity. They’re still giving speeches and hoping to be featured on the Today program, while the old bastions on the Mersey are being dragged towards an outfit that does understand the new times — perhaps aided by the mad, anti-systemic obsessions of the Cosmic Scally ecosystem. Finlayson’s “ideological entrepreneurs” have filled the void left by the collapse of Christianity, socialism, and syndicalism, channeling the combative spirit of the city towards paranoiac fantasy and Right-wing populists.

Further fueling Liverpool’s collective disenchantment are the usual culprits of economic decline and rapid demographic change. Merseyside has never truly recovered from the containerization of global shipping, which mechanized the loading and unloading of merchant ships, obviating the need for a city full of raucous dock-laborers. That occurred in tandem with the rapid collapse of the commercial trade routes of the British Empire, as well as with the painful move from goods-producing heavy manufacturing to a local hodgepodge of public service behemoths, hospitality, tourism and the culture industry. Add to the mix an inward flux of mainly poor migrants requiring housing, jobs and services, and you have a recipe for political convulsions.

This sense of political despair was accelerated by the pandemic, when locked-down Liverpudlians found themselves traveling deep into online rabbit holes. Rumor, half-truth, and hearsay proliferated as the city’s common culture gave way to the addictions, neuroses, and alienated hyper-individualism of the tailored feed. Liverpool emerged from the crisis with an economy defined by uncertainty and a postmodern epistemological model to mirror it: nothing works, trust no-one, anything is possible. It was the ideal breeding ground for would-be gurus, mini-Caesars and quasi-political entrepreneurs on the make — boom time for the Cosmic Scallies.

During the anti-migrant riots in Liverpool in 2024, a library was burnt down only a few miles from the gleaming city center waterfront. Minority-owned businesses were attacked. The severity of the disturbances here surprised some — though none of it shocked those who had glimpsed the new Cosmic Scally phenomenon percolating through cyberspace.

The result of all this is a city with a very different complexion to the one it had not long ago — a city that imagines itself as a Labour citadel, but in fact looks rather different. No doubt, Liverpool is still a bastion of anti-Toryism. You’ll still find MMA fighters and sportsmen here indulging in popular scorn against established conservatism. That kind of default anti-Tory politics is as much a marker of local identity as the accent — the only English dialect that is strengthening rather than being subject to slow homogenization into “estuary English”. But anti-Toryism won’t stop the populist Right. Reform seems to be emerging as the vehicle of choice for those Liverpolitans who swim in the broad waters of counter-cultural conspiracy and nativism.

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This is no aberration. Set aside the myth of Scouse exceptionalism for a minute — that familiar story of class struggle, with Scousers as the plucky subalterns and everyone else the effete bourgeois — and you’ll see that Reform’s insurgency is fully compatible with Liverpool’s history and character. For while its recent civic story is replete with political and industrial militancy, Liverpool was never really a socialist or progressive urban area; that was always a myth. Right up until the Seventies, when religious sectarianism was alive and well, a local “Protestant party” fought against Irish immigration and apparent papal influence, with an effective Tory operation keeping Labour out of power for decades while other Northern cities became Left-wing heartlands. For every famous historical Liverpool strike or uprising, there’s a local race riot or an Orange Lodge firebrand successfully mobilizing working-class Protestants against their Catholic neighbors. We may not like to admit it, but the Left-aligned “Rebel City” origin story is a recent invention.

In fact, John Belchem, a local historian and specialist in so-called “Liverpool exceptionalism”, tells me that many of the wards flirting with Reform today would have had a strong Protestant Party presence in the mid-20th century. There is, then, nothing new about Right-wing populism here. Indeed, the plague-on-all-your-houses symbolism of a populist protest vote sits well with Liverpool’s innate us-against-the-world mentality.

The Cosmic Scally is not, then, an imposter bringing alien politics into a Leftist heartland; on the contrary, he is a product of Scouse culture. He is as much an outgrowth of Liverpool’s supposed exceptionalism as the striking docker, the loud Scouse separatist, or the footballer decrying Thatcherism more than 30 years after her downfall. There’s a spirit of communitarian togetherness in Liverpool that gives the city an unusual sense of cohesion for a large urban area. But that same spirit also creates a punishing environment for those who get “too big for their boots”. Labour may have become too establishment, too arrogant, too complacent, too middle class, too metropolitan to fit in with that all-in-it-together plebeian Scouse pneuma. The Cosmic Scally is merely the strange, Scouse reification of national trends. Perhaps “the magic of Liverpool”, is that it is England, after all.

There are five female speakers at the Holiday Inn and just one man: an extension of her politics. Sultana, born in Birmingham to Muslim parents of Pakistani descent, is one of four sisters. She knows how to fight for herself.

She has toured Britain in the last six months preparing for Liverpool. She says she wants to unite the Left: Corbyn, ever an unwilling savior, tends to hide in his allotment. But he did emerge yesterday for his own pre-conference rally: for his Your Party. Rumors fly. Corbyn’s people brief the media that Sultana-allied Leftists banned from Your Party — the Revolutionary Communist Group, the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) and the Socialist Party (SP) — may try to disrupt Conference. It was counter-briefed that Corbyn attended a Marxist festival this year. Extra security guards have been hired.

If Sultana does kick Corbyn into the sea when collective leadership is passed this weekend — he prefers the single leadership model — she will assume de facto leadership of the hard Left, in the sense that they have leaders. She is, after all, Your Party’s only MP: Corbyn now sits as an independent. If she learned singularity from the querulous king of Islington North, she might surpass him now. She is the second most followed British politician on TikTok, after her enemy Nigel Farage.

Corbyn’s allies called her undiplomatic, which is funny, considering what he is. And at the rally, she is defensive: polished and hurt. “We’re not here for fiefdoms and coronations and jobs for mates, and we’re definitely not here for a toxic culture that witch hunts people on the eve of conference and treats people like absolute shit.” Scores of Socialist Workers were expelled from Your Party yesterday. Though 18% of people were interested in voting Your Party in summer, it then slid to 12%. She doesn’t mention the lost 6%.

The Holiday Inn and Your Party are an odd fit. The hotel is aspirational, made for Thatcherites, and styled to repress the world outside — we might plausibly be in John Lewis — but the revolution they yearn for, or think they yearn for, is not here yet. So, they plot, like people waiting to re-wallpaper a country. Speakers from Bristol Apartheid Free Zone, Stand up to Racism, the National Education Union and Borderlands, a refugee charity, discuss the rise of Reform, the fears of people of color and migrants, and small victories against the boss class. If the hard Left is usually energized by struggle, these are the most defeated I have met. They speak in whispers, and, in the break, strangers do not talk. It is as if they are exhausted, before the battle has even begun. Meanwhile, at Corbyn’s rally, there were squabbles and four people were evicted. Splitters.

The hard Left exists for its contradictions. It constantly debates and it does not debate at all; it needs systems, but it does not trust them; it calls itself progressive, but it never changes. It fights with itself, constantly. Yet it has always housed the same people, city to city. There are ancient revolutionaries, always white, seeking a shared renewal to mirror the one they want for themselves. Every few years a charismatic leader emerges, and they cling to that. Before it was Corbyn. Now it is Sultana.

So today, the revolutionaries include young women of color, energized by Sultana’s rage. Candi Williams, the Your Party organizer for Bristol, tells Sultana with tears in her eyes: “This time last year, last August, I boarded up my windows because we were scared that racists were going to break in.” Her fear is rational, of course, but I fear the hard Left response won’t be. Sultana talks about bussing people in from all over the country to combat far-Right rallies. But this will only feed the anger: all extremists meet themselves in the looking glass of battle. On making Britain safer, and more prosperous — anathema to all extremists — she has nothing beyond a call to abolish capitalism. The country — the working-class — Sultana wants to renew may as well be Plasticine.

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She recites the credo effortlessly, like a comic at the end of a tour: tax the rich; nationalize water and energy; free public transport; fight climate change; Trans rights. She will abolish the monarchy, Zionism, and leave NATO: “Every penny that we spend on tanks, missiles and bombs is money stolen from our homes, our hospitals and our schools”. No one mentions Ukraine.

The real enemy is the Labour Party. She says that Lord Mandelson, “the Dark Lord, alongside his minion, Morgan McSweeney, has created a dark government”, and she will not rest until, “Keir Starmer, David Lammy, Shabana Mahmood and the rest of them are in the docks of The Hague because [the] blood [of Palestine] is on their hands”. This all sounds absurd in the John Lewis Holiday Inn — overthrow the government from here? — and people listen with only moderate enthusiasm.

Her rally represents an incoherence, and she knows it. People ask her: “What’s the point of Your Party? You should just join the Greens.” Instead, she says, she is going to reach out to Reform voters. “One third of Reform voters actually blame the super-rich for the problems in this country,” she says. “We know that the work has to be done by listening to them, understanding their grievances and going on a journey.” Success, she claims, is about talking to those communities, speaking to the “left behind, knocking on doors and yes, some people are going to slam those doors in your face and tell you to fuck off. And that’s fine. People are really angry. But the Right does not have a monopoly on working class anger.”

These voters, she says, are “blaming the wrong people for the misery that’s been caused in their life”.  But how will she stop them? As ever with the hard Left, I think the talk of reaching out is a feint, mere vanity.  No one asks her a hard question here, as the great new Left party is being born. That would be a heresy. She does admit, though, that “often in Left-wing spaces we just say things, and not everyone is always on the same page, and we’re all in different parts of our political journey”. But she knows, she says, that the people are, “watching, they’re waiting. They’re ready to join and fight.”

The line is, then: the proletariat will save us! Perhaps Sultana has read 1984. But I can’t see how the proletariat can save us. They are barely here. This is still a bourgeois movement and, Sultana, the grammar-school educated daughter of an accountant, is no more working-class than I am. That’s the incoherence.

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The event ends when she’s asked how she navigated politics as a Muslim woman in the western world. “I really don’t want to start crying,” she says. “This is why I go to therapy”. This may be a joke, because she adds, “In all seriousness, it has been really difficult… you are just told to be grateful.” Another party member, a young woman, is grateful: “seeing you gave me so much hope that we could achieve something better”. And that’s the heartbreak: promising revolution in a constitutional monarchy will not work. Hard Leftist politics are a drug, and the comedown will be messy.

Your Party will choose its name this weekend from a shortlist: Your Party, Our Party, Popular Alliance, For the Many. Sultana’s choice — The Left — did not make the shortlist. It’s a good name, and very like her: brief, and made for TikTok.

Corbyn said yesterday, “we’re going to get through this weekend,” which is barely the rhetoric of hope. Monty Python was right.

What few visitors ever discover, though, is that under the church’s foundation stone, laid in 1904 by King Edward VII, a trade unionist stonemason left a time capsule message in a tin. Along with a copy of two socialist papers, The Clarion and The Labour Leader, was a note: “We, the wage slaves employed on the erection of this Cathedral,” it reads, “dedicated to the worship of the unemployed Jewish carpenter, hail ye! Within a stone’s throw from here human beings are housed in slums not fit for swine…”

There, a stone’s throw from the conference, those wards remain neglected. Race riots plagued Liverpool Walton last year, with some of the most violent scenes witnessed in a nationwide summer of thuggish discontent in the aftermath of the Southport murders. This is the poorest constituency in the country, and also one of the safest Labour seats. Dockside jobs have long been replaced by low-paid service work, or long-term unemployment. With cheap, dilapidated housing stock, it’s a primary location for “migrant dispersal”. Labour is losing its grip to a Faragist insurgency here and across its former bastions, where the modern equivalents of the “wage slaves” of the cathedral time capsule reside. Polling shows Reform creeping up on even the safest stalwarts in Merseyside’s red fortresses.

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One wonders, then, how secure Keir Starmer feels here. Not in the sterile atmosphere of conference, but outside, in the city’s bars and pubs, where conference delegates have detected an unusual hostility to the Labour invasion. One “traitor”, a disgruntled Labour delegate, was told to “fuck off” back to London. So while the consensus is now that the putative “King of the North”, Andy Burnham, overplayed a weak hand, the Reform threat is hardening.

The Prime Minister’s speech was uncharacteristically defiant, as he announced a “fork in the road” moment for the country. He painted the choice facing Britain as one between the declinism of the insurgent new Right and the rosy uplands of Labour. In his telling, Britain isn’t broken, and he reeled off a list of committee-approved examples to stir patriotic feeling: all the familiar notes on our NHS, Lionesses, community volunteers, and, cringingly, “the swagger of Oasis”.

Yet on those subjects where Britain does feel broken — on migration, on growth, on infrastructure, and on industrial revival — the Prime Minister is clearly detached from reality. In conference land, the Government is going all-out on growth. But out here, in the real world, we’re looking at a stagnating economy, wondering where the boom is coming from. In conference land, globalization is over, and we are focused on national production, not cheap imports. But outside, the Government is presiding over a decimation of heavy industry. Stopping the boats will prove difficult while the Government remains confined by the judiciary’s expansive interpretations of ECHR rules. Emptying the hotels, in practice, means transferring residents to scarce social housing, or those cheap HMOs in areas like Liverpool Walton.

But this speech was designed for the Labour faithful — reassurance for attendees at the center-Left Disneyland without the thrills. Though they might have momentarily drowned it out amid a sea of warm white wine in the conference corridors, discontent is rising. A note was circulated among the backbenchers shortly after the summer recess. “Keir Starmer has no vision and the Government has no purpose,” it read. “He will never have one. The cabinet is incapable of leadership.” When I read this excerpt to Maurice Glasman at our UnHerd event, he agreed with the sentiment. But he was also quick to caveat that this is not the time for a leadership contest — if only because there’s no obvious replacement waiting in the wings.

Leadership talk is cheap. And with Burnham slinking out of the conference, moments before Starmer’s keynote speech, that leaves a telegenic Health Secretary, the Blairite Wes Streeting, in contention. But Streeting is defending a minuscule majority of 528 votes in his constituency of Ilford North, holding his seat — just — against a pro-Gaza candidate at the last election. Even the slightest of swings against a miserably unpopular Labour Party would see him leave the Commons. The Blue Labour favorite, Shabana Mahmood, according to Glasman, is a bona fide representative of a “Left-conservative” current that is fiercely patriotic. He assured me that she would combine bold economic radicalism with harder-edged policy on crime and migration. But Mahmood is a relative unknown outside the party. And both she and Streeting hold views that the Labour selectorate — an achingly middle-class and liberal-progressive bunch, on the whole — would find difficult to stomach.

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Glasman bemoans this effete “lanyard class” of graduate professionals — metropolitan urbanites who live separate lives and speak a different language from his party’s traditional, working-class base. But in the receptions and the bars around Liverpool’s ACC, there is little of the old proletarian culture in evidence. Instead, the conference is thronging with people who know what “IPPR” stands for. That is a deeply weird thing. At the fringes, all manner of legislative tweaks are plied as the answer to our woes. Net zero will be a catalyst for climate jobs. Planning reform will keep the wolves from the door. One activist, skeptical, tells me “we’re fucked”. Is it any wonder that lower-income, non-graduate workers are abandoning them in droves for Nigel Farage, someone even a sober, Left-leaning former Bank of England economist, Andy Haldane, has described as the closest thing the UK has to “a tribune of the working class”?

In private, some MPs express despair. Others think it can be turned around. More than one reminds me that Thatcher, in 1981, was desperately unpopular, and yet two years later she won a landslide. But there are two variables which they have conveniently forgotten. One is that Javier Milei is hardly about to invade the Falklands — which means no British warships dispatched to drive a patriotic national fervor to rescue our PM.

The other is the growing economy of which Thatcher was the beneficiary: back then, Britain was leaving the recession of the early Eighties, buoyed by North Sea oil tax receipts. Today, growth remains elusive. We’re living in a different world. Rather than being boosted by the beginnings of China’s pro-market economic reforms and Reaganite deficit spending, the developed world’s whole economic model has been upended by Donald Trump’s tariffs and the decoupling of Washington-Beijing’s “Chimerican” growth engine. Labour faces a hostile global economic environment, a bear market for the sovereign debt of advanced economies. The Budget will raise taxes and be perceived negatively. It will not give us a Big Bang.

And so it’s no wonder that at conference drinks receptions, at private dinners, in quiet corners of the strange, clinical corridors, people are speaking of regicide. The Prime Minister’s authority hangs by a thread. With his personal polling worse than Liz Truss, the mood in Liverpool is dour and, among some, resigned to what will constitute a disaster of historic proportions — a nail in the coffin of social democracy at the next general election. The paucity of an obvious alternative is all that saves Starmer from open, desperate insurrection.

That may come soon. But not yet, they say. Perhaps after the forthcoming difficult budget, or a disastrous round of local elections next May. Maybe cabinet colleagues will one-by-one visit the Prime Minister in Downing Street, to tell him, with regret, that he no longer retains their confidence. But not yet. The Labour-loyalists of the SW1 army live in an alternative reality. They inhabit a political space in which hundreds of thousands of people aren’t marching the streets in support of Tommy Robinson. In which they’re not 10 points behind a party promising mass deportations.

But outside, communities don’t feel on-the-up, or united in Starmer’s fever dream of camaraderie; they are plagued by the visible fraying of the public realm, disinvestment, and a breakdown in cohesion. Outside, the cost-of-living crisis never ended. The Labour response, echoing emptily in Liverpool, seemed almost a denial, a tired boosterism delivered by a PM whose rhetorical capacity is fundamentally suited only to a register of dull miserablism.

Hermetically sealed in a self-soothing conference, progressive, graduate officialdom will try to convince itself that a weary public will cling on to each word of Starmer’s speech on BBC News, assuming piecemeal reforms are quite enough to turn things around. But it couldn’t be more detached from the people Labour was founded to represent.

The stonemason wrote his socialist paean two years before the Labour Representation Committee, created to provide the working-classes with an alternative to the bourgeois Liberals, became the modern Labour Party. Today, Starmer’s lanyard class has reclaimed it for the bourgeois liberals. The wage slaves will be seeking a new home.

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: containerization 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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Everton are the real Scousers

By Brian Groom

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 labor 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 center 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 organization 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 deindustrializing 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 criticized 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.

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Everton are the real Scousers

By Despotic Inroad

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 center, which has remade and reinvigorated 42 acres of the town’s center, 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 symbolized 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 moldering 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 center 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 labeling 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. 

Every football fan will tell you that their stadium is a special place. But in an era when the Premier League is dominated by Gulf petrostates, American billionaires and sportswashing autocracies, the 133-year-old Goodison Park stands out. Its old wooden seats and rickety stands, thronging with an aggressive Scouse crowd, distill the mood of a world-gone-by, a throwback, a museum-piece of an old game and an older culture.

The Grand Old Lady juts suddenly upwards from a sea of low-rise, red-brick Victorian terraces. The match-day turnstiles adjoin narrow residential streets, drawing fans into blue-tinged, cramped urban corridors and tunnel-like choke points around strip-lit bars where passing pedestrians jostle with smokers drinking out of plastic cups and Elton John covers belt out of the speakers. Goodison has the highest proportion of season ticket holders as match-day attendees in the league, meaning the crowds are still made up mainly of locals who go to every home game, often down several, usually patrilineal, generations.

The walk to a home game induces a feeling of old-time coziness, like entering a Lowry print — a portal to a different age which doesn’t end inside the ground. We Toffees still welcome a “Toffee Girl” in milkmaid fancy dress to throw sweets into the crowd on match-days as part of an old club tradition. Navigating most of the four stands involves narrow caverns, with fans crammed like sardines towards laughably outdated bars with only a small hope of being served a warm lager or a Bovril before the second half.

But no more. The stands will fall silent for the last time on Sunday after a final match against Southampton — at least until the promised move of Everton’s women’s team gives the ground a renewed feel, and a new, much-welcome but probably more subdued lease of life. Having spent almost a decade under the disastrous stewardship of an Iranian oil magnate, who many said to have been the pawn of a sanctioned Russian oligarch, the club will move to a brand new stadium on the Liverpool waterfront under new ownership in time for the 2025-26 season.

For a while, Everton FC has been as integrated into the globalized, contemporary cash nexus as any other top-flight club, just without being particularly good at operating this new, transnational business model to its advantage. Rather than building patiently upwards with sensible signings of unknown talent from far afield, the boardroom cowboys attempted to short-circuit the game via botched investments in overpriced and aging players, not to mention a superstar manager tasked with leapfrogging us to success. All the while, the structures of the club were corrosively undermined as the owner involved himself in transfer business over the heads of coaches and directors of football. But now, we have just been bought by a film mogul. Dan Friedkin, the new owner, was also Tom Hardy’s Dunkirk stunt pilot, and so will be familiar with our habit of spinning certain inglorious episodes as evidence of the superior spirit of plucky warriors turning things around against the odds.

Any yet, despite the club’s obvious assimilation into all the sullied, pecuniary culture of today’s footballing elite, Everton somehow manages to exude the aura of a scrappy David against cooler, modern Goliaths. We have nine historic first division titles to our name, more than “Big Six” global mega-brands Chelsea and Tottenham put together. But it’s been a while since Everton won any silverware — an FA Cup three decades ago, and no first division title since 1987.

The biggest eruption of Evertonian roars I can remember have been for last-minute winners, the occasional derby victory, or riotous scenes in the midst of ugly relegation dog-fights. Not, alas, for lifting trophies. But any lower-league supporter will be able to attest that these moments of joy are felt just as viscerally, just as intensely, as the lifting of a silver cup at the apex of the football pyramid.

When my dad watched Everton as a young man, he saw plenty of that. We were even known as the “School of Science”, for our progressive, cutting-edge style of play. It was the Guardiola-ball of its time. With honorable, short-lived exceptions, for most of my life a more recent moniker has seemed more apt: the Dogs of War. What we lack in finesse, artistry and star power has been amply compensated for in effort expended and dogged determination. Some likened the approach of our last manager to “Brexit-ball”, meaning defensive, stubborn, not pretty, with lots of long balls reminiscent of the traditional English game.

It’s no accident that two of the biggest “club legends” of recent years, the embodiments of the Everton spirit, have been Séamus Coleman — a long-serving, passionate Irishman bought from Sligo Rovers for the wild sum of £60,000; and Duncan Ferguson — the only man to have been jailed for a foul committed on a football pitch, who famously “filled in” two burglars who had broken into his house in the heyday of his playing career.

A lot of the Evertonian self-image built up over 30 years of hurt is down to the relative success of a strange group of upstarts based just a mile from Goodison, in the same postcode in fact. Readers may have heard of them — Liverpool FC (the junior team in the city by 14 years compared with us, original founders of the football league). And they have just been crowned champions. No matter: their victory will provide much-needed tourist income for a cash-strapped local economy on Merseyside. It’s a matter of real-life poetic justice that our final local derby in Goodison ended as a 2-2 draw after a 98th-minute equalizer from Everton’s big, six-foot, northern English defender who joined the club on a free transfer, prompting scenes of insane, blue bacchanalia.

But the rivalry between the two clubs almost reflects the Janus face of the city itself: Liverpool — brash, swaggering, sharp, bolshie; and Everton — the perennial underdogs, down-on-their-luck, forever gritty, embittered, aggrieved, and ready to argue, with a chip on both shoulders. If Liverpool’s Anfield draws in visitors from across the world for a glimpse of some melodic chanting and Scouse braggadocio, then Goodison is more associated with the atmosphere of a bear pit, full to the brim with naked aggression interspersed with moments of glorious, reckless, chaotic abandon.

For the three previous seasons we have flirted haphazardly with dropping to the second tier, circling the plughole, like the turd that won’t flush. No other team has spent as long in the top flight as Everton. Leaving it would destroy us, a final nail in the coffin; a last, humiliating deflation after years watching the slow, painful decline of a former giant turned garden gnome.

It’s been a harrowing, sorry saga that has removed cumulative millennia off the life expectancy of tens of thousands of Evertonians through nervous exhaustion. Now, as we await a new stadium, many hope we are turning a corner. But our move begs the question: who are we without Goodison Park? Goodison is Everton. Everton is Goodison. How will we adapt to life apart when so much of our own collective Everton ego is wrapped up in the walls of a big blue behemoth among some of the most deprived streets in northern England?

If Goodison Park represents a time capsule, a monument to the old version of the working-man’s game and proletarian nostalgia, the new stadia have adopted built environments that reflect the spirit of the modern sport: more open, more anonymous, more accessible, inclusive, infinitely better but infinitely worse, an almost computer-generated aesthetic with a big gift-shop ready; day-trippers first, “legacy fans” second. What does it profit a fan if he gains a trophy, but sells his soul? Maybe, just maybe, we’ll find out.

But make no mistake, for all the incongruity of a place like Goodison in the modern age, something priceless, something important, something rooted in the relationship between people, history and place, is now lost forever.

It had been 70 years since that FA Cup victory in 1955, 70 years in which a once-mighty club had swapped trophies for atrophy. It was a story all the more poignant for it mirroring the simultaneous industrial decline of the city and region. And now the story had a happy ending.

This is a city whose football club is its spiritual heart. Walk out of Central Station and you will see St James’ Park, a vertiginous and imposing old stadium, towering over you. In Newcastle, the club is at the center of civic life. As Wembley basked in the glow of regional pride, one could imagine Sir Bobby Charlton, his brother Jack, his uncle Jackie Milburn as well as the likes of Sir Bobby Robson, English football legends all, looking down with pleasure. Nobody could have appreciated this victory more than Newcastle United fans. Only an extreme curmudgeon, or a Sunderland fan, would have remained unmoved.

We might never know whether the news of Newcastle’s win reached Malaz Prison, in Riyadh. Here, the fitness instructor Manahel al-Otaibi is serving 11 years, some of it in solitary confinement, for opposing male guardianship, campaigning against the hijab, and, according to her prosecutors, “going to the shops without wearing an abaya, photographing this, and publishing it on Snapchat”.

So much for the reforms promised by Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince. MBS. His close ally, Yasir al-Rumayyan, is the governor of the kingdom’s Public Investment Fund and the chairman of Newcastle United. As al-Otaibi sat in jail, al-Rumayyan lifted the League Cup.

It is an uneasy contrast, and the imprisonment of al-Otaibi is only one example of the MBS regime behaving barbarically. Take the dismemberment, in 2018, of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi: an operation approved, according to the USA’s Director of National Intelligence, by MBS. Or the 2017 “Sheikh-down”, when the nation’s billionaires and captains of industry were corralled into Riyadh’s Ritz Carlton hotel. Amid accusations of abuse and torture, they handed over their assets and paid fines to the state, now embodied by its Crown Prince, in return for their freedom.

Al-Rumayyan is the Crown Prince’s henchman in matters of sport, in which the Saudis are heavily invested. There is the LIV golf tour, viewed by critics as a hostile takeover of the sport, and there was the successful bid to host the 2034 Football World Cup. The kingdom has thrown money at the Saudi Pro League, signing expensive luminaries such as Cristiano Ronaldo, and has hosted numerous boxing world title fights and Formula 1 Grands Prix. One of MBS’ ambitions appears to be that young Saudi nationals — 60% of the population is under 30 — consume sport as a quasi-religion, it being a safer opiate than the extreme Islam that forged the nation’s most famous citizen, Osama bin Laden. Adherents of this kind of worldview might ask awkward questions about the legitimacy of the al-Saud dynasty.

Given that all this is taking place in a faraway land over which we have little influence, it is hard for football fans to know what to feel. Is the appropriate response revulsion at the sight of another British cultural institution being hawked to the highest bidder, regardless of human rights concerns, as the nation accepts its status as a post-imperial supplicant? Or should fans accept that they can’t change these circumstances and allow themselves to revel in a glorious sporting storyline?

Understandably, most Newcastle fans settle for the latter. A few, including the lifelong fan John Hird, have set up a campaign group called NUFC Fans Against Sportswashing, which campaigns for al-Otaibi and the like. The group holds vigils outside St James’ Park – vigils that are often lonely.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is playing a central role in current geo-political stakes. Last week, in the run-up to the final, Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, was meeting Mohammed bin Salman, and Saudi Arabia was hosting talks between US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the Ukraine delegation. The Saudis, in short, were brokering peace between Russia and the West. In that context, the Carabao Cup seems a tiny footnote in the kingdom’s broader project.

In keeping with this central role for Saudi, President Trump directed his first phone call after his election victory to MBS. Trump’s first foreign trip, as it was in 2017, is likely to be to Riyadh. The world genuflects at the court of MBS, including the former human rights lawyer Keir Starmer. The Prime Minister, who visited in December, has said his “No 1 mission is for economic growth and for that we need Saudi Arabia”. Indeed we do, especially in a volatile world of Trumpian tariffs and a downgraded economic forecast from the OECD.

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By Malise Ruthven

Newcastle fans, though, have been burdened with the outsourced moral angst of a nation. Governments can sup with the Saudis with near-impunity, but football is held to a higher standard, castigated when it joins the gold rush to Riyadh. Naturally, Newcastle fans resent those questioning their joy. The country accepts Saudi money for its regeneration projects in the north of England, clean energy investments and stakes in Uber, Heathrow and Selfridges. Newcastle United happens to be the most visible target.

Newcastle City Council, controlled by Labour until a spate of resignations last November, recently met ALQST, a Saudi-focused human rights organization. But we shouldn’t expect the council to issue excoriations of the city’s new overlords. Aside from needing the votes of Newcastle United fans, the council is hoping that the Saudi state might emulate what Abu Dhabi did in east Manchester when the emirate bought Manchester City.  The area around the City of Manchester Stadium has been transformed: new housing, a health center, and sports facilities, as well as the Co-op Live Arena. The projected PIF takeover of Newcastle Airport may be the first local dividend outside of the football club.

Five years ago, when campaigners tore down the statue of slave trader and philanthropist Edward Colston in Bristol, many cheered, not least those on the Left concerned with human rights. It is easy to be clear-sighted, 300 years later, about the awful contradiction of taking money from slavers to build wonderful churches, schools and civic amenities; it is harder to turn down Saudi money now. That money might improve the lives of ordinary people and regenerate the local economy – just as Colston’s money once did in the South-West.

Though Britain can seem a mere vassal state, the relationship isn’t quite as clear-cut as it appears. In his book States of Play, Miguel Delaney quotes the human rights activist Iyad el-Baghdadi on MBS. “He wants to be loved. And he wants his image [as a reformer] back.”  Another campaigner told me: “The Saudi authorities really don’t like it when you write about human rights issues. They want to be seen as reformers.”

Therein lies the contradiction. Saudi Arabia looks to Mecca in its prayers, but for investment assets and a degree of approval, it looks to London, New York and Paris. This approval is the only leverage that remains. Resisting the lure of Saudi money is like shouting at the moon: all well and good for purists, but ineffectual. Newcastle fans, being impotent, have little option other than to enjoy their moment. But our society should ask tougher questions of the Saudis, and we should not give in to the temptation to ignore the kingdom’s manifold human rights abuses. It is that Saudi longing for approval that provides the best hope of change.

In a sober moment, after the cup final hangovers have faded, perhaps we can remind ourselves that we have been here before. Not so long ago, we embraced an exciting geopolitical and trade partner. Its leaders’ henchmen were investing in soccer clubs and transforming London’s economy. That President Putin seemed such a nice guy.

What we have seen since the Southport attack is the precise opposite response: uncontrolled spontaneity, which government policy is expressly designed to prevent. When Keir Starmer attended the scene to lay flowers, he was heckled by locals demanding “change” and accusing him of failure to keep the British people safe. Self-evidently, Starmer, who in August had been in power for less than a month, bears no personal responsibility for the attack: instead, he was derided as a representative of Britain’s political class, and of a British state that cannot maintain a basic level of security for its subjects.

In the same way, rioters in Southport — fuelled by false claims the killer was a Muslim refugee — cheered when they injured police during the violent disorder that followed the initial vigil, which included attempts to burn down the town mosque in what can only be termed a pogrom. Like the riot that followed in Hartlepool, violence against emissaries of the state — the police — was coupled with objectively racist and Islamophobic actual and attempted violence against migrants.

There are strong parallels with the ongoing disorder in Ireland, which is an explicit reaction to mass migration: last year’s Dublin riots, sparked by the attempted murder of schoolchildren by an Algerian migrant, were in some ways a foreshadowing for the current mass disturbances in Britain. In Southport, the spark for the rioting — the attack itself — was swiftly absorbed into a wider sense of hostility towards mass migration: protestors carried signs demanding the state “Deport them” and “Stop the Boats” to “Protect our kids at any cost”. As in Ireland, presumably local women were prominent, hectoring police and silencing wavering voices with appeals to group solidarity. While this is a very different dynamic to previous football casuals-dominated street mobilisation organised around Tommy Robinson — as represented by Wednesday’s desultory clashes in Whitehall — liberal commentators in Britain, as in Ireland, have nevertheless chosen to portray the violence as orchestrated by Robinson, rather than him piggybacking on it, as is also the case in Ireland.

Shocked by the jolt to their worldview, British liberals, for whom the depoliticisation of the political choice of mass migration is a central moral cause, have also blamed Nigel Farage, the media, the Conservative Party, the Labour Party and Vladimir Putin for the rioting, rather than the explicitly articulated motivations of the rioters themselves. But there is a matter-of-fact social-scientific term for the ongoing disorder: ethnic conflict, a usage studiously avoided by the British state for fear of its political implications. As the academic Elaine Thomas observed in in her 1998 essay “Muting Interethnic Conflict in Post-Imperial Britain”, the British state is unusual in Europe for being “exceptionally liberal in granting political rights to new arrivals” while dampening interethnic conflict by simply refusing to talk about the issue at all, and placing social sanctions on those who do. When it works, it works: “Interethnic conflict has never been as severe, prolonged, or violent in Britain as it has been in many other countries” — for which we should be thankful.

But as Thomas notes, sometimes it doesn’t work, as in Enoch Powell’s famous intervention, supported by 74% of British respondents polled at the time, when, “once the silence was broken and public debate was opened, the liberals found themselves in a weak position. Having focused on silencing the issue, they had not developed a discourse to address it,” and found themselves discomfited by demonstrations in support of Powell. The Labour government of the day dealt with the rising tensions surrounding immigration by rushing through emergency legislation that imposed an effective moratorium on extra-European immigration via the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, with the aim of assimilating migrants already here and dampening nascent violence by preventing others arriving.

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Under New Labour, however, this mostly successful policy was torn up, with the conscious intention of transforming Britain into a specifically multi-ethnic — rather than multiracial — society, largely derived from the era’s brief enthusiasm for globalisation. Downstream of then-fashionable social-scientific theories on the simultaneous inevitability and desirability of such a transformation, policy papers like the Runnymede Trust’s influential report “The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain” pushed to reshape Britain as “a community of communities”, a genuinely multicultural state that rejected the “narrow English-dominated, backward-looking definition of the nation”. Ethnic identities — of which the British one was framed as one among many — were to be embraced, within the parameters of the newly multicultural state, and immigration restrictions lifted to achieve this goal.

Yet Labour’s shift towards an explicitly ethnic understanding of community relations would not last long. Following the 2001 ethnic riots in Bradford, Oldham and Burnley, the Labour government performed a dramatic about-turn. As the Tunisian academic Hassen Zriba observed: “All of a sudden, multiculturalism became the disease that needed urgent solution.” Blair’s government commissioned five separate reports, all of which declared “that excessive cultural diversity is a hindrance to inter-racial harmony, and that community cohesion is the best solution”.

This emphasis on community cohesion was heightened by the mass casualty jihadist attacks of the 2000s and 2010s, leading inexorably — along with the Prevent programme, widened state powers of coercion and surveillance, and the accelerated construction of a civic conception of Britishness — to the “controlled spontaneity” project, the terminus of which we witnessed in Southport. While the other northwest European states which adopted a multicultural ethos, notably Sweden and the Netherlands, have since abandoned it, rhetorically the British state is still committed to multiculturalism.

In practice, however, the British state has quietly adopted a revived version of assimilationism. Over the past two decades, a capacious version of Britishness has been constructed around little more than superficial national symbolism and the desire to avoid ethnic conflict, euphemised as “British values”. Interestingly, Blair himself, who now rejects multiculturalism, has recently become an advocate of Lee Kuan Yew, in whose political philosophy Singapore’s ethnic diversity is, rather than a strength, an undesirable hindrance derived from well-meaning British colonial intentions.

But latent authoritarianism aside, Starmer is no Lee Kuan Yew. His faltering attempt to steer the discourse following the Southport attack towards tackling “knife crime” — itself a British state euphemism — highlights the state’s ideological inability to address ethnic tensions frankly, and so manage them effectively. If it were happening in another country, British journalists and politicians would discuss such dynamics matter-of-factly. This is, after all, simply the nature of human societies. Indeed, it is one of the primary reasons refugees flee their countries for Britain in the first place.

Yet when they occur in our own country, such dynamics are too dangerous to even name. Instead, ethnic groups are euphemistically termed “communities”, and the state-managed avoidance of ethnic conflict is termed “community relations”. When Balkan Roma rioted in Leeds recently, it was as an ethnic group responding to what it saw as the British state’s interference in its lives: the British state, in return, addressed its response to the nebulous “Harehills community”. When Hindus and Muslims engaged in violent intercommunal clashes in Leicester two years ago, it was as rival ethnoreligious groups, and was again responded to by the British state as an issue to be dealt with by “community leaders” — the state euphemism for its chosen intermediaries, in a form of indirect rule carried over from colonial governance.

But when the rioting is carried out by ethnic British participants, as is now the case, the limitations of this strategy reveal itself: the perception of an ethnic, rather than civic British or English, identity is actively guarded against as state policy, just as is the emergence of ethnic British “community leaders”. As such, political advocates of a British ethnic identity are isolated from mainstream discourse, as has been state policy since the Powell affair: any expression of such feeling is what Starmer means by “the far-Right”, rather than any traditionally defined desire to conduct genocides or conquer neighbouring countries. This mainland state of affairs, incidentally, is in strong contrast to Northern Ireland, where the existence of rival Irish and British ethnic groups is the basis of the political system, reified by the British state through the ethnic power-sharing apparatus of the Stormont parliament. In Northern Ireland, Britishness is an ethnic identity: across the Irish Sea, it is a firmly civic one: that these constructions differ is a function of political expediency rather than logical consistency.

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This ambivalence over referring to Britain’s various ethnic groups is contrasted by the British state’s deep engagement with identity groups based on race, a cultural quirk that academics have long highlighted, and which distinguishes Britain from its European neighbours. Even today, political discourse in Britain evades ethnicity for a focus on race in a way unusual outside America, where it stems from an almost uniquely stratified slave economy, overlaid on a settler colonial society deriving from genocide. Yet British liberals squeamish at ethnic identities — especially their own — instead obsess over the politics of race. Ethnic conflict is taboo to even discuss in the abstract: but minority racial rioting, even over imported grievances, is viewed sympathetically.

Perhaps well-intentioned, the assimilationist aim of this dynamic was counteracted by the British state’s parallel promotion of the new “BAME” identity, assembling various geographically unconnected ethnic groups together in one political whole solely by virtue of their non-European origin. Instead of reflecting our lived reality of a country now composed of multiple ethnicities, among which are the majority native British, an entirely artificial racialised binary was constructed for ideological purposes, in which the ethnic British, along with other Europeans, were merely white, while non-white Britons were encouraged to self-identify as a counterbalancing force. I am legally, but not ethnically British — like most descendants of migrants, I am perfectly happy with my own inherited ethnic identity — but in pursuit of its own convoluted logic, the British state instead chooses to define me as white, an identity of no interest to me. The long-term contribution to social harmony of this explicitly racialised innovation was, as both the ethnic conflict literature and common sense suggest, doubtful in the extreme, and the government dropped the BAME label in 2022: its mooted replacement, “global majority” is, if anything, more problematic.

The British state’s differing strategies to ethnic-minority rioting, on the one hand, and British ethnic-majority rioting on the other, are, as conservative commentators observe, markedly disproportionate. This may not be “fair”, but it is not intended to be. The function of British policing such tensions is increasingly not to prevent crime — as anyone living in Britain can see — but simply to dampen interethnic violence, in which the shrinking ethnic majority population is, as the literature is clear, analytically the most obvious and potentially volatile actor. In the words of the sociologist John Rex, whose advocacy for a new multicultural Britain was highly influential during the Nineties, the fundamental task of multi-ethnic governance is the twofold desire to “ensure that those who will come are peacefully integrated and that their coming does not lead to the collapse of the post-1945 political order”.

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That is, after all, the logic of “controlled spontaneity”: to prevent a backlash to sudden atrocities or a generalised sense of insecurity that would detach the ethnic majority from Britain’s post-Blair settlement and potentially lead to the formation of ethnic parties. Indeed, the formation of explicitly ethnic parties is the deciding factor in what academics term the shift from a pluralist society — in which ethnic conflict is managed within the existing political order, as in mainland Britain — to a plural one, where the political system revolves around ethnic rivalries, as in Northern Ireland. We are not there yet, though the formation of notionally Muslim (but de facto Pakistani and Bangladeshi) political groupings is a step in that direction, as is Reform’s entry to Parliament, understood by Farage’s voters and opponents alike as a tacit ethnic British party, though one with a strong post-war assimilationist rather than ethnic exclusionist bent.

The government’s alarm aside, the potential for serious ethnic violence seems limited, as few of the precipitating factors listed by academic specialists exist: the British state retains vast coercive power, sympathetic elites aspiring to lead majority ethnic mobilisation do not exist, and, in any case, the most heated divisions on the validity of the British ethnic group remain within the British ethnic group itself.

Instead, like the daily drumbeat of violent disorder so new to British life, but now accepted as the norm, occasional outbursts of ethnic violence, whether currently by the British or by other ethnic groups acting in their perceived communal interests, will become commonplace, as in other diverse societies. To manage such conflicts, the state will become more coercive, as Starmer now promises his supporters. But modern Britain isn’t hell: for the most part it works, better than most places in the world, even if it is far less orderly or safe than the country we grew up in. There will be no violent rupture, no radical new dispensation: things will continue as they are, only more so. This is the nature of most post-colonial societies, and now it is the nature of our own.

***

This article was first published on 3 August. It was updated on 5 August to clarify the chronology of the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act.

Yet as it happened, fears about an orgy of racist violence proved unfounded. It may even be, as a couple of official bodies acknowledged privately, that the return of football helped mitigate the threat of further discord.

It might seem flippant to suggest that there’s no time to riot when you’ve got Coventry away, but the links between football and the far-Right can’t be denied. The English Defence League (EDL) emerged in March 2008 when a group calling itself the United People of Luton organised against local Muslims protesting the return of troops from Afghanistan. Common cause was found with various hooligan firms associated with football clubs, and by the summer there were EDL branches run by firms across the country.

This sporting symbiosis is not unusual, and certainly not unique to Britain. For those seeking to deploy bodies on the streets, hooligan groups are enormously useful: they are organised, have a clear leadership structure and are used to fighting the police. In 1997, for instance, when the mayor of Cacak, Velja Iljic, led the march on Belgrade that culminated in the toppling of Slobodan Milosevic, he was joined by the Delije, the hardcore fans of Crvena Zvezda who had formed the core of Arkan’s troops during the civil war. In Argentina, meanwhile, the barras bravas football gangs have essentially become muscle for hire.

Even so, it would be wrong to see Britain’s recent riots as eruptions of football hooliganism — or at least to see them purely as such. As Metropolitan police commissioner Sir Mark Rowley said last week, while some of those who have been convicted have football banning orders, around 70% “have previous convictions for weapon possession, violence, drugs and other serious offences”.

Rowley spoke of “thugs and criminals”, but there is a sense of groups intersecting. The riot in Sunderland came the night before three skinhead bands were scheduled to play in the city at a “Blood and Honour” gig which, according to Hope Not Hate, drew neo-Nazis from as far away as Stoke-on-Trent. A sense of being left behind seems to play a part: according to the Government’s Indices of Deprivation, seven of the 10 most deprived towns in the UK have witnessed riots, although it may be that Right-wing groups have targeted those areas rather than the violence being a spontaneous outbreak of despair or nihilism. Covid vaccine-scepticism seems to have radicalised another tranche of society, sending them into the orbit of the far-Right.

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But it’s also the case that some find rioting intoxicating. Talking to hooligans in Eastern Europe for my book Behind the Curtain, a recurring theme was how many just enjoyed fighting: it wasn’t a by-product or a means to an end; the fighting was the point. In a Czech bar near Moscow Zoo, I met Oleg, a heavyset member of a Spartak firm in his forties. “The best thing,” he explained, “is fighting with police in other countries. You throw things at them and then they run at you and you fight.” This is also one of the key insights of the US academic Bill Buford’s 1991 book Among the Thugs: for some, violence is fun.

The easy mistake is to see far-Right attitudes as characteristic of football. Given how violence has largely been eliminated from stadiums, it’s debatable to what extent the remaining hooligan groups can even be considered a football problem. The yob fan was always a lazy and misleading stereotype, even in the days when stands were urine-stained theatres of violence, neo-Nazis a visible presence at games and racist chanting commonplace. Leeds United fans, for instance, ran a successful campaign against the National Front in the late Eighties, based around the fanzine Marching on Together. Today, Britain’s most influential national football campaign is arguably Kick It Out.

In reality, football has always been too big to be defined by one outlook alone. Rather, particularly in post-industrial provincial cities, it has become a signifier of a place’s identity. If, say, Sunderland or Leicester are thought of at all by the wider population these days, it tends to be in the context of football. Even large British cities are now best-known globally for football: ask a taxi driver in Beirut or Bangalore what he knows of Liverpool, and he’ll probably be aware of the Beatles but will almost certainly have heard of Mohamed Salah.

That gives football a curiously powerful role that still hasn’t been fully appreciated. Take the Indices of Deprivation: of the 12 most deprived towns in its list that have suffered riots — Middlesbrough, Blackpool, Liverpool, Hartlepool, Hull, Manchester, Blackburn, Nottingham, Sunderland, Stoke, Bolton — only Hartlepool has not had a Premier League club in the past two decades.

And perhaps this shouldn’t come as a surprise. For all that it’s gentrified over the past 30 years, for all the glamour at the elite level of the game, for all the domination by overseas investment, football remains the great sport of the industrial heartlands. When there is nothing else, with churches, trade unions, even political parties in retreat, football becomes pretty much the only marker of identity. If you were an agitator wishing to gain ready acceptance in one of those towns, the easiest way would be to pull on the shirt of the local team.

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That has led to a curious subtext over the past fortnight: the attempts to control the message of the shirt. While a handful of the rioters in Sunderland were wearing SAFC shirts, the following day a far greater proportion of those who volunteered for the clean-up were wearing them. It’s an issue of which the MP for Sunderland Central, Lewis Atkinson, who turned up for the clean-up in an away shirt from the Seventies, is acutely aware. “When I got dressed that morning,” he said, “I just knew I wanted to wear that shirt. To me it stemmed from a determination to not allow a minority of thugs to own the most precious identity in Sunderland, to show that it was those of us sweeping away the shards of hate who were the true Sunderland.”

The point here is that while there is a relationship between football and the far-Right, there is a stronger relationship between football clubs and their local communities — even as top-level clubs increasingly come to feel like quasi-global franchises. And those communities, as the clean-up operations and the anti-racism demonstrations have shown, are opposed to the riots.

At 11.19pm on the night of the riots in Sunderland, Sunderland AFC posted a message on X condemning the violence, saying it did not “represent our culture, our history, or our people. Our great city is built on togetherness and acceptance, and Sunderland will forever be for all.” This was a club not as an inadvertent projection of regional identity, but one embracing its role as a community leader. And in doing so, it confirmed something important: the rioting is not a football problem, but football has a role to play in the aftermath.

Admittedly, tensions had been rising for over a month as politicians and fascists politicised a murder at a wedding to sow hatred and division. But nobody expected it to come to this. How could a European city so rich in culture and on the road to development be torn apart by such brutal violence? Overnight, Sarajevo had become a byword for the dangers of ethnic division, ultra-nationalistic fervour, tribalism and wanton extremism.

The events of the past few days in the United Kingdom reveal a number of familiar traces. Southport has become synonymous with Sarajevo, in the sense that, once again, under the watchful sun a small extremist minority is seeking to politicise a brutal tragedy and turn it into something whose consequences reach across the country. This is not protest; it’s about violence, terror and a naked appeal to intimidation.

The idea of a civil war has traditionally referred to an internal conflict where one armed group seeks to wrestle power from the state. While some may brush this aside by suggesting a civil war is not something that the British do, we should not be so complacent. Remember, after all, that alongside the American version, the English civil war between 1642-51 remains one of the most instructive. As a result of this very British version of civic slaughter, the modern theory of sovereignty appeared in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. Not only did it put forward the now-familiar mantra that there is no politics without security and no security without the state, it also set in place the fundamental understanding — later picked up by Max Weber — that only the state can engage in legitimate violence.

What marks a civil war from this perspective is a contesting of that very monopoly and the state’s right to use force for the preservation of order. That the police forces who appear on the front lines often become the first targets is not then incidental. But where is the line that needs to be crossed so that civil tensions become a war? Since the Seventies, critical thinkers such as Michel Foucault sought to invert the logic of civil war to explain how states are always waging a kind of silent battle upon minority groups. Through this, notions such as structural violence emerged. Presenting a civil war as a process — one that is not always about widespread slaughter but can also be measured in terms of a broader account of violence and social tensions — does have some merit. The danger with such reasoning, however, is that if everything is a civil war, nothing is.

If Sarajevo made explicit how the new emerging contours of civil war would be written in ethnic terms, it had already been shown in Somalia, Mexico and later Rwanda how the very idea of a civil war was no longer bound to single movements whose sole aim was the capture of the state. Such unbounded violence went global with 9/11, which revealed the utter nihilism of certain ethnic doctrines. It also showed how the lines between race, religion and political beliefs are far from homogenised.

Political violence has since been very much driven by ethnic division, which speaks to a problem that is far more expansive than reductive explanations that focus on race. Of course, there are some overlaps between race and ethnicity, but they are not mutually exclusive. A failure to recognise this means we fail to properly understand the causes and the solutions.

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Three decades on from the violence in Yugoslavia, the world is undeniably a different place. The UK political landscape is notably a world away from how it looked in the early Nineties, divided as we have become by all the social media tensions that, as recent days have shown, actually makes violence easier to provoke by non-uniformed and misinforming online generals. This has been matched by the Americanisation of our political system, where performativity — including the performativity of violence and outrage — has replaced substance and where the complex lines of identity and ethnicity have been reduced to crass caricatures based on neat categories of race, sex, gender and whatever other category we care to impose.

The category of race, for example, in itself tells us little about a person’s privileges or political and religious beliefs. That is why counter-narratives around “whiteness” are also unhelpful here; just as they are useless in explaining why many black and Asian people in the US support Donald Trump, or why Enrique Tarrio ,who is of Afro-Cuban descent, became the chairman of the neo-fascist organisation Proud Boys. We should not forget their cos-play riot on Capitol Hill, for what that pantomime showed was such movements today really don’t expect to be able to take on the state. Instead, their enemy are other Americans who have a different vision of what being American actually looks like.

Unlike in Britain, the idea of a possible civil war there has been part of mainstream discussion in America for some time now. Indeed, what marked out Alex Garland’s compelling film Civil War was precisely its plausibility. Garland revealed one of the truisms of a civil war, where its experience is never universally shared. A civil war has never meant that every street is a battlefield. The violence is always concentrated. Witnessing the streets ablaze in Belfast at the weekend should remind us of this. That city, which for many impartial observers looked on the precipice of a civil war for a number of decades, was also liveable even as the ethnic divisions required the physical construction of walls. Belfast also shows how the lines of ethnic divisions are never static but take on new forms.

How should we respond to it? Many have dismissed those engaging in the weekend’s violence by emphasising its thuggery and blaming the likes of Tommy Robinson or Nigel Farage. While I sympathise with this instinct — the criminality was parasitic and abhorrent — it shouldn’t come at the expense of understanding that it was also carried out in the name of a certain ethno-nationalistic vision. So, just as we asked “why do they hate us?” in the aftermath of 9/11, so we must now ask “why is there so much hatred in Britain?”.

A staple explanation in studies of global conflicts since the mid-Nineties has been the idea that poverty is the greatest single cause for violence. Indeed, the edict that underdevelopment was dangerous has been advanced by every single international organisation and humanitarian group tasked with mitigating conflict and violence. Certainly, areas of Britain are desperately poor at the moment. And they have been suffering from the fallouts of years of austerity, the impact of Brexit and the costs of the Covid lockdown. That the anger is spilling out from those areas is cause enough for deeper reflection. But we should not fall into the trap of reducing everything to a question of economy.

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One of the best books written on the rise of extremism and how a small minority can change the course of history is Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism, which was published as Hitler was coming to power in 1933. Reich encouraged us to move beyond simplistic explanations for fascism’s rise. Instead, he asked us to question the fascist that exists within each of us. We can all learn to desire power and violence, and seek to belittle, shame and intimidate others. Fascism as such doesn’t solely reside on the Right or the Left of the political spectrum. Any identity or ethnicity can become fascistic, just as any identity or ethnicity can become peaceful and welcoming.

Despite the protestations of radical moral puritans, then, there is nothing inherently fascistic about Englishness, the flag of St George, or any other symbolic accoutrements. It is instead about how they are mobilised and whether they are appropriated in the service of violent means.

History needs heeding. As Reich showed, once fascistic desires are liberated, that is when politics tends to get reduced to questions of survival. We saw this repeatedly played out over the weekend as narratives of survival, from the protection of our children to the preservation of a way of life, resulted in the open assault upon police officers and burning of libraries and advice centres. Such calls to violence thrive in febrile moments when questions of sovereignty are translated into everyday concerns. And more dangerous still, the freeing of that violence creates the very conditions in which rigid positions have to be chosen.

Thankfully, Britain is not an armed society, and its violence is mostly contained. But that shouldn’t mean that can’t change. Across the world, civil wars have been raging in the name of revitalised ethnic divisions, which have only required a single spark to set entire societies and nations ablaze. Britain is contending with these forces, and they could become much worse. It would be foolish to believe that we are too civilised to ever let that happen. The potential for civil war is written into the DNA of all ethnic conflicts — and, like a sleeping demon, once its fires are lit there’s no knowing where it will spread.

What we have seen since the Southport attack is the precise opposite response: uncontrolled spontaneity, which government policy is expressly designed to prevent. When Keir Starmer attended the scene to lay flowers, he was heckled by locals demanding “change” and accusing him of failure to keep the British people safe. Self-evidently, Starmer, who has been in power for less than a month, bears no personal responsibility for the attack: instead, he was derided as a representative of Britain’s political class, and of a British state that cannot maintain a basic level of security for its subjects.

In the same way, rioters in Southport — fuelled by false claims the killer was a Muslim refugee — cheered when they injured police during the violent disorder that followed the initial vigil, which included attempts to burn down the town mosque in what can only be termed a pogrom. Like the riot that followed in Hartlepool, violence against emissaries of the state — the police — was coupled with objectively racist and Islamophobic actual and attempted violence against migrants.

There are strong parallels with the ongoing disorder in Ireland, which is an explicit reaction to mass migration: last year’s Dublin riots, sparked by the attempted murder of schoolchildren by an Algerian migrant, were in some ways a foreshadowing for the current mass disturbances in Britain. In Southport, the spark for the rioting — the attack itself — was swiftly absorbed into a wider sense of hostility towards mass migration: protestors carried signs demanding the state “Deport them” and “Stop the Boats” to “Protect our kids at any cost”. As in Ireland, presumably local women were prominent, hectoring police and silencing wavering voices with appeals to group solidarity. While this is a very different dynamic to previous football casuals-dominated street mobilisation organised around Tommy Robinson — as represented by Wednesday’s desultory clashes in Whitehall — liberal commentators in Britain, as in Ireland, have nevertheless chosen to portray the violence as orchestrated by Robinson, rather than him piggybacking on it, as is also the case in Ireland.

Shocked by the jolt to their worldview, British liberals, for whom the depoliticisation of the political choice of mass migration is a central moral cause, have also blamed Nigel Farage, the media, the Conservative Party, the Labour Party and Vladimir Putin for the rioting, rather than the explicitly articulated motivations of the rioters themselves. But there is a matter-of-fact social-scientific term for the ongoing disorder: ethnic conflict, a usage studiously avoided by the British state for fear of its political implications. As the academic Elaine Thomas observed in in her 1998 essay “Muting Interethnic Conflict in Post-Imperial Britain”, the British state is unusual in Europe for being “exceptionally liberal in granting political rights to new arrivals” while dampening interethnic conflict by simply refusing to talk about the issue at all, and placing social sanctions on those who do. When it works, it works: “Interethnic conflict has never been as severe, prolonged, or violent in Britain as it has been in many other countries” — for which we should be thankful.

But as Thomas notes, sometimes it doesn’t work, as in Enoch Powell’s famous intervention, supported by 74% of British respondents polled at the time, when, “once the silence was broken and public debate was opened, the liberals found themselves in a weak position. Having focused on silencing the issue, they had not developed a discourse to address it,” and found themselves discomfited by demonstrations in support of Powell. The Labour government of the day dealt with with the rising tensions surrounding immigration by rushing through emergency legislation that imposed an effective moratorium on extra-European immigration via the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, with the aim of assimilating migrants already here and dampening nascent violence by preventing others arriving.

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Under New Labour, however, this mostly successful policy was torn up, with the conscious intention of transforming Britain into a specifically multi-ethnic — rather than multiracial — society, largely derived from the era’s brief enthusiasm for globalisation. Downstream of then-fashionable social-scientific theories on the simultaneous inevitability and desirability of such a transformation, policy papers like the Runnymede Trust’s influential report “The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain” pushed to reshape Britain as “a community of communities”, a genuinely multicultural state that rejected the “narrow English-dominated, backward-looking definition of the nation”. Ethnic identities — of which the British one was framed as one among many — were to be embraced, within the parameters of the newly multicultural state, and immigration restrictions lifted to achieve this goal.

Yet Labour’s shift towards an explicitly ethnic understanding of community relations would not last long. Following the 2001 ethnic riots in Bradford, Oldham and Burnley, the Labour government performed a dramatic about-turn. As the Tunisian academic Hassen Zriba observed: “All of a sudden, multiculturalism became the disease that needed urgent solution.” Blair’s government commissioned five separate reports, all of which declared “that excessive cultural diversity is a hindrance to inter-racial harmony, and that community cohesion is the best solution.”

This emphasis on community cohesion was heightened by the mass casualty jihadist attacks of the 2000s and 2010s, leading inexorably — along with the Prevent programme, widened state powers of coercion and surveillance, and the accelerated construction of a civic conception of Britishness — to the “controlled spontaneity” project, the terminus of which we witnessed in Southport. While the other northwest European states which adopted a multicultural ethos, notably Sweden and the Netherlands, have since abandoned it, rhetorically the British state is still committed to multiculturalism.

In practice, however, the British state has quietly adopted a revived version of assimilationism. Over the past two decades, a capacious version of Britishness has been constructed around little more than superficial national symbolism and the desire to avoid ethnic conflict, euphemised as “British values”. Interestingly, Blair himself, who now rejects multiculturalism, has recently become an advocate of Lee Kuan Yew, in whose political philosophy Singapore’s ethnic diversity is, rather than a strength, an undesirable hindrance derived from well-meaning British colonial intentions.

But latent authoritarianism aside, Starmer is no Lee Kuan Yew. His faltering attempt to steer the discourse following the Southport attack towards tackling “knife crime” — itself a British state euphemism — highlights the state’s ideological inability to address ethnic tensions frankly, and so manage them effectively. If it were happening in another country, British journalists and politicians would discuss such dynamics matter-of-factly. This is, after all, simply the nature of human societies. Indeed, it is one of the primary reasons refugees flee their countries for Britain in the first place.

Yet when they occur in our own country, such dynamics are too dangerous to even name. Instead, ethnic groups are euphemistically termed “communities”, and the state-managed avoidance of ethnic conflict is termed “community relations”. When Balkan Roma rioted in Leeds recently, it was as an ethnic group responding to what it saw as the British state’s interference in its lives: the British state, in return, addressed its response to the nebulous “Harehills community”. When Hindus and Muslims engaged in violent intercommunal clashes in Leicester two years ago, it was as rival ethnoreligious groups, and was again responded to by the British state as an issue to be dealt with by “community leaders” — the state euphemism for its chosen intermediaries, in a form of indirect rule carried over from colonial governance.

But when the rioting is carried out by ethnic British participants, as is now the case, the limitations of this strategy reveal itself: the perception of an ethnic, rather than civic British or English, identity is actively guarded against as state policy, just as is the emergence of ethnic British “community leaders”. As such, political advocates of a British ethnic identity are isolated from mainstream discourse, as has been state policy since the Powell affair: any expression of such feeling is what Starmer means by “the far-Right”, rather than any traditionally defined desire to conduct genocides or conquer neighbouring countries. This mainland state of affairs, incidentally, is in strong contrast to Northern Ireland, where the existence of rival Irish and British ethnic groups is the basis of the political system, reified by the British state through the ethnic power-sharing apparatus of the Stormont parliament. In Northern Ireland, Britishness is an ethnic identity: across the Irish Sea, it is a firmly civic one: that these constructions differ is a function of political expediency rather than logical consistency.

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This ambivalence over referring to Britain’s various ethnic groups is contrasted by the British state’s deep engagement with identity groups based on race, a cultural quirk that academics have long highlighted, and which distinguishes Britain from its European neighbours. Even today, political discourse in Britain evades ethnicity for a focus on race in a way unusual outside America, where it stems from an almost uniquely stratified slave economy, overlaid on a settler colonial society deriving from genocide. Yet British liberals squeamish at ethnic identities — especially their own — instead obsess over the politics of race. Ethnic conflict is taboo to even discuss in the abstract: but minority racial rioting, even over imported grievances, is viewed sympathetically.

Perhaps well-intentioned, the assimilationist aim of this dynamic was counteracted by the British state’s parallel promotion of the new “BAME” identity, assembling various geographically unconnected ethnic groups together in one political whole solely by virtue of their non-European origin. Instead of reflecting our lived reality of a country now composed of multiple ethnicities, among which are the majority native British, an entirely artificial racialised binary was constructed for ideological purposes, in which the ethnic British, along with other Europeans, were merely white, while non-white Britons were encouraged to self-identify as a counterbalancing force. I am legally, but not ethnically British — like most descendants of migrants, I am perfectly happy with my own inherited ethnic identity — but in pursuit of its own convoluted logic, the British state instead chooses to define me as white, an identity of no interest to me. The long-term contribution to social harmony of this explicitly racialised innovation was, as both the ethnic conflict literature and common sense suggest, doubtful in the extreme, and the government dropped the BAME label in 2022: its mooted replacement, “global majority” is, if anything, more problematic.

The British state’s differing strategies to ethnic-minority rioting, on the one hand, and British ethnic-majority rioting on the other, are, as conservative commentators observe, markedly disproportionate. This may not be “fair”, but it is not intended to be. The function of British policing such tensions is increasingly not to prevent crime — as anyone living in Britain can see — but simply to dampen interethnic violence, in which the shrinking ethnic majority population is, as the literature is clear, analytically the most obvious and potentially volatile actor. In the words of the sociologist John Rex, whose advocacy for a new multicultural Britain was highly influential during the Nineties, the fundamental task of multi-ethnic governance is the twofold desire to “ensure that those who will come are peacefully integrated and that their coming does not lead to the collapse of the post-1945 political order”.

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That is, after all, the logic of “controlled spontaneity”: to prevent a backlash to sudden atrocities or a generalised sense of insecurity that would detach the ethnic majority from Britain’s post-Blair settlement and potentially lead to the formation of ethnic parties. Indeed, the formation of explicitly ethnic parties is the deciding factor in what academics term the shift from a pluralist society — in which ethnic conflict is managed within the existing political order, as in mainland Britain — to a plural one, where the political system revolves around ethnic rivalries, as in Northern Ireland. We are not there yet, though the formation of notionally Muslim (but de facto Pakistani and Bangladeshi) political groupings is a step in that direction, as is Reform’s entry to Parliament, understood by Farage’s voters and opponents alike as a tacit ethnic British party, though one with a strong post-war assimilationist rather than ethnic exclusionist bent.

The government’s alarm aside, the potential for serious ethnic violence seems limited, as few of the precipitating factors listed by academic specialists exist: the British state retains vast coercive power, sympathetic elites aspiring to lead majority ethnic mobilisation do not exist, and, in any case, the most heated divisions on the validity of the British ethnic group remain within the British ethnic group itself.

Instead, like the daily drumbeat of violent disorder so new to British life, but now accepted as the norm, occasional outbursts of ethnic violence, whether currently by the British or by other ethnic groups acting in their perceived communal interests, will become commonplace, as in other diverse societies. To manage such conflicts, the state will become more coercive, as Starmer now promises his supporters. But modern Britain isn’t hell: for the most part it works, better than most places in the world, even if it is far less orderly or safe than the country we grew up in. There will be no violent rupture, no radical new dispensation: things will continue as they are, only more so. This is the nature of most post-colonial societies, and now it is the nature of our own.

***

This article was updated on 5 August to clarify the chronology of the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act.

Then there are those who, far from being curious, want to stare into the face of a suspected perpetrator and see their worst enemy projected back at them. Since the Southport knife attack on Monday, it is this tribe that has been most vocal.

Until today, the name of the suspect behind the stabbing rampage was not released; he is 17 and the law prohibits the naming of child suspects in criminal proceedings, except in very rare circumstances. And yet, within hours of the Southport rampage, a number of accounts on X claimed to have seen his name. “He is alleged to be on MI5’s watch list, had ‘mental issues’ and was a Channel migrant,” wrote one conservative “journalist” with more than 200,000 followers. Laurence Fox, meanwhile, blamed the attack on the “national emergency” of uncontrolled immigration. In response, he croaked, “you’re about to see the roar of the British lion”. In the event, that lion turned out to be a tanked-up geezer in a tracksuit, while his roar amounted to hurling wheelie bins and bricks at police.

Within hours, it had become clear that these claims were false. According to Merseyside Police, the suspect was in fact born in Cardiff. We also know that he moved to the Southport area with his Rwandan parents when he was aged six. In other words, he was a second-generation immigrant, not an undocumented migrant who had recently arrived in an illegal boat.

But put this knowledge to one side — should the personal identity of the perpetrator of mass-casualty violence matter? From a human perspective, it shouldn’t; had the suspect of the Southport atrocity been a white teen whose parents were from Reading instead of Rwanda, the horror wouldn’t be any less horrific. Yet even so, it does matter, to the degree that it might shed a light on the motives (if any) of the perpetrator. Atheists called John Smith, for example, are unlikely to carry out acts of jihadist violence, while women don’t commit incel-inspired outrages.

And of course, in today’s atomised world, identity has never commanded such political and existential power. Had the suspect of Monday’s stabbing spree indeed been white, and targeted a Beyoncé-themed event where the victims were predominantly black children, it seems likely that many on social media would condemn Britain’s racist superstructure. Which is to say that politicising massacres isn’t just a vice of the online Right, but is fully alive among online progressives too.

Merseyside Police, for its part, has said that the motivation behind the Southport attack is “unclear”, that it is not being treated as terror-related, and that the suspect acted alone. Two possibilities follow from this. The first is that the suspect had personal reasons for launching his attack, however outrageously shallow, incomprehensible or incoherent they may seem to us. For all we know, he may have wanted Taylor Swift to notice him, much like John Hinckley Jr, who tried to assassinate President Reagan in 1981, wanted Jodie Foster to notice him. As Kat Rosenfield recently observed in a smart piece on Donald Trump’s would-be assassin, “the desperate desire to believe that life-shattering violence must have some kind of deeper meaning”, though understandable, belies the fact that a lot of violence is “not just senseless, but depthless, a lizard-brained impulse in search of an outlet”.

The second possibility is that the suspect may be mentally ill and that his illness is such that he had no clear or stable motives for doing his attack; that is, he acted not according to his free will, but in response to some imagined voice, command or imperative that he felt he had no choice but to follow. According to a recent report in The Guardian, police investigators are “increasingly focusing on the state of their suspect’s mental health or potential neurodivergence in the years before the attack”.

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For those seeking to make political hay out of the Southport massacre, this second possibility is vehemently rejected as a form of rank gaslighting designed to distract us from what they see as truth — which seems to be that the sort of people who commit monstrous atrocities against children are not from here but over there, where monstrousness is widespread. As one prolific commentator on the online Right put it: “If they come out and they say this geezer’s got mental health problems… I’m on it… We’re not in a Middle Eastern country… This is England.”

Elsewhere, another prominent poster sought to expose, in his view, the blatant double standards around the reporting of political atrocities in the UK: “If Southport killer is white = far-Right. If Southport killer isn’t white = mental illness/thoughts and prayers.” If this formulation has a familiar ring to it, it is because it is an exact inversion of a particular brand of Muslim victimology which holds that, if the perpetrator of lethal violence is Muslim, he is automatically branded as a terrorist by the media, whereas if he is white, he is portrayed as a lone wolf with mental health problems.

Others have insisted that the Southport attack, for all its unique and unspeakable horror, is part of a wider pattern of mass-casualty violence in the UK, where the perpetrators are disproportionately first or second-generation immigrants. Is it racist to point this out? It certainly can be, and much of the commentary in recent days has been infused with prejudice. But, crucially, it doesn’t have to be. For example, the claim that black or Muslim people are intrinsically violent or terror-prone is, undoubtedly, grossly racist. What isn’t racist, however, is to sensitively explore the economic, social and cultural circumstances in which individuals and groups act, and investigate how those circumstances may allow malevolent impulses to flourish.

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How might this look in practice? Most obviously, it requires us to look at the nature of an individual’s encounters with wider British society and how or whether it has failed them in some way. But it also requires us to explore the pathologies of tribal grievance and cultures of honour, shame and retribution that migrants themselves bring to their host society, and how this in turn shapes their encounters with it. We also need to probe the relationship between migrant populations and mental illness: if culturally displaced people, particularly those who have fled war zones, are more prone to mental health problems, how can we better treat them to manage their risk to others and to themselves?

These are difficult and urgent questions that neither the Right nor the Left seem willing to address; with the former seemingly content to stoke white victimology for clicks and likes, and the latter inclined to pretend that the real problem is the reaction to such violence by the far-Right. And in the middle, many are left idly wondering how such an outwardly normal and introverted kid could be suspected of doing something so unfathomably evil.

Mired in toxicity, there are surely few more depressing ways to honour the victims of Southport. There is nothing “British” about it, and nor is it “progressive”. And, almost certainly, it won’t help to prevent similar tragedies in the future.

If there is one city which embodies this national decline, it is surely Liverpool, where I spent much of this week, at the Labour Party conference. During the Thirties, this was the great imperial port: a place of extraordinary wealth and grandeur, though of course no paradise lost. While Liverpool was a heaving metropolis by the sea, it was also a place of appalling squalor and exploitation; an English Belfast, where Catholics and Protestants crammed into teeming tenements sealed off from each other. Today, life is immeasurably better: the slums cleared, the sectarian divide all but gone. 

But what has been built in place of its lost industry? What does Liverpool do? These are difficult questions to answer, but they are no easier for almost every other city in Britain today apart from London. What does Birmingham do? Leeds? Newcastle?

Walk from Liverpool Lime Street down to the conference centre where Keir Starmer promised a decade of national rejuvenation, and you are presented with a scene of civic failure: not only low-level littering and dirtiness, but startling homelessness — beggars either slumped outside the latest fashionable shop to have sprung up, or lying in tents, pizza boxes slung from their roofs, with pleas for help sprawled over them. You don’t need to study the latest GDP figures to know something is wrong; that there’s a sickness in our society, a failure in our way of doing things. You need only open your eyes to see that much of the nation is quite obviously less pleasant than similarly sized places across Europe or North America. Why is this so? And why aren’t we more angry?

How you choose to answer these questions is, I think, the real political divide in Britain. For many Tories, it is a question of waste, inefficiency and spending priorities. Our local councils just need to stop frittering away money on diversity training and the like — and the Government in Westminster on things like HS2 and international development Sunak’s speech in Manchester gave a clear sense of this. After casting his expert eye over the national books, he informed us that we’re wasting too much money on infrastructure projects. For Labour, meanwhile, it is the opposite. The reason the public realm is crumbling is principally because of austerity — we are not spending enough. Liverpool would be clean and pleasant and thriving, if only we would put our hand in our pocket to maintain it properly. 

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Both of these responses contain important truths, and yet they are both still wrong. To the Conservative charge, the response is simple: getting stuff done is now structurally expensive in Britain, a reality which is making us poorer and which the Government has done almost nothing to change. Cancelling HS2 doesn’t alter this. It accepts it. It is principally an admission of gross government failure. To Labour’s austerity charge, the answer is that Liverpool is now structurally poor, not just politically starved of cash. Central government spending can alleviate some of the worst symptoms — and should — but it cannot change the fact that it depends on money being transferred from other parts of the UK.

Like many other cities, the source of Liverpool’s structural woes is complex and contested, wrapped up in the decline of empire, geography, technological change and political mismanagement. Containerisation changed the docks forever before Britain made its choice to prioritise European trade. Together, this meant Liverpool not only had permanently fewer jobs but it was simply on the wrong side of the country. Dover and Felixstowe, facing Europe, are Britain’s premier ports now. But what is true for Liverpool is also true in similar ways for Belfast, Glasgow, Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle — all the great cities of the union outside London’s orbit. 

Back in Liverpool, the main industry is now tourism: the cruise-goers stopping off at the city to spend their cash, the stag and hen parties staying in Airbnbs, the football fans going to Anfield, the weekend shoppers visiting LiverpoolOne. But while tourism into Liverpool and our other great cities should be celebrated, it is hardly the route to prosperity. The kind of jobs linked to this industry are not those of an advanced, highly paid economy such as, say, the Netherlands or California. They are often low-paid, insecure and seasonal.

The truth is, you don’t have to venture far from the centre of Liverpool to see the limits of this approach. On Monday, I met the former Liverpool FC footballer Jamie Carragher in his home suburb of Bootle, just north of the city. It is a land of obvious, endemic poverty. Outside the Brunswick Club where we met, there was a giant mural to Carragher on the gable end of a terraced house. Perhaps it was this that made me immediately think of Belfast, as well as the general sense of economic decay only partially masked by the “redevelopment” cash ploughed into the centre. 

“Poverty”, however, is not the whole point here. Liverpool is not Bootle, just as it is not its city centre. Liverpool is also the middle-class suburbia of its south. If you are a teacher, a doctor, or a nurse, you have a better standard of living in Liverpool than in London. And yet, this does not mean all is fine. Such an economy ultimately depends on money generated elsewhere. And the fact is, too much of the country is in this same boat — reliant on too little of the country.

In Starmer’s speech to conference, he seemed to understand the scale of the challenge facing him, should he win the next election. “If you think our job in 1997 was to rebuild a crumbling public realm,” he said, warming to his task, “that in 1964 it was to modernise an economy left behind by the pace of technology; in 1945 to build a new Britain out of the trauma of collective sacrifice. Then in 2024 it will have to be all three.” For Starmer, such aspirations are surely right. Few can plausibly deny that our public services are in a bad way; that the economy is in desperate need of reform; or that the pandemic has left behind a complicated legacy of mixed emotions about our response.

When it comes to a remedy, though, Starmer’s solutions are inadequate. On public services, he offered what Duncan Robinson has rightly identified as the “Reform Fairy” — the idea that, simply by reforming our public services, we can avoid the more difficult redistributive choices forced upon us by our ageing society. On the pandemic, Starmer’s solution to that collective trauma seems to amount to restoring the good chaps to government and replacing a few bad eggs. This, again, will certainly help, but it also avoids the more difficult questions that our politicians need to address, from the vulnerability of our care homes to our dependence on China, not to mention the extraordinary extent to which we shut down our society based on little evidence and middling results. Are we willing to confront these issues? It seems not.

At one point in his speech, Starmer spoke of the need to modernise the economy by invoking Harold Wilson in 1964. Of course, he did not acknowledge that Wilson’s grand plan utterly failed, forcing him to devalue the pound, withdraw from the East of Suez and eventually apply to join the European Community (and be rejected) before losing power in 1970. Today, Starmer’s main economic offering is to double down on Net Zero as a way to re-industrialise the economy and shore up the union with Scotland, while also loosening planning laws to accelerate house-building and construction. One problem with these policy proscriptions is that, as Helen Thompson has pointed out, there is little evidence that Net Zero will bring back significant numbers of heavy manufacturing jobs to Britain. Another is that the main beneficiary of reformed planning laws will be the South-East, where houses are needed most.

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As any housing expert will tell you, Britain does not have the same housing crisis across the whole country but acute housing crises in particular areas — principally in and around London or Cambridge. In Bootle, for instance, you can find an end-of-terrace three-bedroom family home for around £150,000. In Cambridge, a similar property will set you back at least three times that. 

Ultimately, then, Net Zero and planning reform will not make Liverpool, Belfast, Glasgow or Birmingham rich again. For that, far more difficult decisions will need to be taken that will almost certainly involve trade-offs with the South-East: decisions about infrastructure and education, taxation and general British competitiveness, some of which might even come into conflict with the aspiration to hit Net Zero by 2050. As one senior figure in Downing Street told me this week: “Everyone knows what’s needed. Everyone knows we need a far more active industrial policy paid for with higher taxes. But this government cannot do it for ideological reasons and Starmer’s Labour can’t do it for political reasons. And so we’re stuck.” And this is before we consider our future relationship with Europe: whether to diverge and compete or align and even potentially rejoin.

When I put this to a leading figure on the centre-right of British politics, he told me that the only game-changing option for the British economy involved a form of targeted, state-directed investment to create a new mega-city of 15 million people in the arc between Oxford and Cambridge. Will a future Conservative opposition grasp this nettle? Or finally back an alternative version of this in the North? It seems unlikely. Right now, we seem to have reached the stage where we are quietly acknowledging the scale of our problems, but are only prepared to offer the most timid of solutions. If there’s a gaping hollowness in the British economy, it is matched by the emptiness of our political rhetoric as well.

Tom McTague: You were born in 1978 in Bootle, Liverpool. I imagine in the hospital just around the corner?

Jamie Carragher: I’m not quite sure which hospital it was. By the time my mum was pregnant with me, she’d already had a couple of miscarriages, and the doctors knew there was something not quite right — but they couldn’t put their finger on it. I think they thought initially I would have spina bifida. My mum was very holy, and she didn’t want to terminate the pregnancy. She thought, if that’s what God wants, then that’s fine. When I was born, I had gastroschisis — and was rushed straight to Alder Hey Children’s Hospital.

TM: And that’s where your stomach is essentially outside your body?

JC: Yeah, it’s not still like that! But I’ve still got the scar. And I still have a great relationship with that hospital. Everyone in the city is so proud of it.

TM: I hadn’t realised that your mum came from Maltese stock. That’s where her Catholicism comes from?

JC: My grandfather was from Malta. I’ve had the call in the past: could I play for Malta before England?

TM: There’s a whole mad history of Malta. They applied to join the UK officially and we were too tight: the Treasury turned them down. It kind of says something about Britain, I think. But I assumed when I started reading your autobiography, Carra (2008), that the name Carragher meant you had an Irish background. Can you tell us about that side of your family?

JC: That’s my dad’s side of the family. My nan grew up just on the border of Bootle and Kirkdale. My grandad, I think, came over from Ireland with his family — that’s where the Carragher name comes from. There were lots of brothers and sisters; families were huge then. And they were a close-knit community. Everyone’s nan and grandad lived a few streets away from their kids and grandkids. So everyone was just always in and out of each other’s house.

TM: Was it sectarian growing up in Liverpool at that time? Was there a divide between the Catholic kids and the Protestant kids? 

JC: The only divide was whether you went to Protestant or Catholic school. You just didn’t know anyone outside your school. And this area is really Catholic. Liverpool as a city is a real stronghold of Catholicism, and maybe that stems from people coming over from Ireland. It always felt like every school was Saint-something.

I remember, in my last year of primary school, one boy said he was going to a Protestant school for seniors called Hillside. The Catholic teachers were aghast — they couldn’t believe he was going from St James’s to Hillside. It was a big part of your life as a youngster: going to church, Holy Communion.

TM: What I find interesting about Liverpool politically is that it hasn’t become like Belfast or Glasgow, where you’ve got this clear sectarian divide. Even though in Liverpool you had all of the same ingredients: you’ve got Irish immigration, you’ve got Irish names and Irish schools and Catholic churches. And there was sectarianism in the past. My grandmother was brought up in the Scotland Road area, which was at the time an Irish slum and had an Irish nationalist MP, the only one ever elected in Britain. There were Orange Order marches and sectarian violence, too.

JC: I remember those marches as a kid.

TM: What did they feel like? 

JC: To be honest, we were only kids and there was a band playing. But I always remember my dad telling me that, when he was a kid, there was a bit of trouble around them. And for his dad — my grandad — it probably would have been a lot worse. But over time, that strong feeling has died out.

TM: Do you think football plays a big part in that? In Belfast and Glasgow, where there are more heightened tensions, you have Protestant and Catholic clubs. My understanding is that in Liverpool, Everton is kind of seen as the Catholic club, but it plays in blue. It’s like football has somehow acted as a kind of detoxifying agent.

JC: You chose the team who your dad supported; more often than not, it was not to do with religion. The one thing I do remember is when I first started watching Everton in the mid-Eighties, people all wore bobble hats. Some of these hats were half-and-half: the Everton one would be half Celtic, and the Liverpool one half Rangers. That’s the only inkling I have that Everton was seen as the Catholic club.

TM: Your autobiography busts a lot of myths. Early on, people were always saying that you grew up in poverty in Liverpool — but you didn’t, you grew up in a nice house in a nice area. You had a great childhood. You also talk about how people romanticise this city where Everton and Liverpool fans get on; where Everton fans went to Liverpool games even if they weren’t playing. You say all this is rubbish. You’re also quite cutting about what seems to be a new sectarianism emerging in Liverpool, with Everton and Liverpool fans getting quite brutal with each other. Is that still the case today?

JC: Yeah, I think it still feels nasty. We’ve always been seen as the friendly derby, but I’m not sure it was ever quite like that. The notion emerged in the Eighties, when the economic situation was really tough — with people struggling as much as they are today — and the one thing both sets of supporters in the city had to shout about was the two football teams. We, Everton and Liverpool, played each other so often in the mid-Eighties in cup finals — basically the whole of Liverpool descended on London. There was this common camaraderie of going down to Wembley on the coaches together. So I think that’s where this idea of friendship between Liverpool and Everton fans came from. There was this togetherness because everyone was in the same economic situation: football was an outlet.

As a child, I remember we went down to London on a coach right outside here. And this woman, Ann Kirby — she lives just over the road, the old woman organising bingo when you walked in — knitted all the kids jumpers with EFC on. This must have been 40 years ago now. We wore them all the time. And the women sent us all off, because no woman would have gone to the cup final. It was all the dads taking the kids. And there was only one Liverpool fan on the coach of 50 or 60. A very, very brave man.

I don’t think you’d see this kind of camaraderie today — and this saddens me, because as a city, we are different in a lot of ways. We feel like we have to fight — whether it’s against the Government, the establishment. And we can do that as a city, but there’s a real split: red and blue. I think this is good: you need a strong rivalry. But sometimes it goes a little too far. Maybe that’s because, with the invention of social media, football is just in your face 24/7. It wasn’t like that when I was a kid.

TM: It’s like football was previously something that could bring the city together in a way that didn’t happen in Belfast or Glasgow — but now, it’s wrenching it apart. 

JC: Well, it’s easy to feel better about your team if they’re doing ok — but Everton haven’t done well for a long time now. The club’s been mismanaged for a very long time and it is tough for the supporters. They deserve a lot more, a lot better. Football stirs the emotions in the city and that will never change — and I don’t think that particularly helps relationships. You’ve got one team doing really well, and another finding it tough.

TM: There’s this sense in the rest of the country that people from Liverpool have some kind of grievance, that they get too upset by everything. Simon Hughes, The Athletic journalist, traces Liverpool’s identity as a united Labour city back to the Eighties — when you were growing up. There’s opposition to Thatcher, militants taking over the city, stadium disasters, and the appalling response from the government. All that comes together to create this Liverpool identity. Could you feel this as a kid?

JC: I’ve always felt that Liverpool people have got something about them — a personality, a character trait. You very rarely see a shy one. People from outside the city say: “Oh, they always complain, they’re never happy with this or that.” But I think we look at it a different way: we stand up for ourselves, we don’t accept what the Government is saying about a certain thing — even now, 30 or so years after Hillsborough. I admire that the city doesn’t allow people to walk all over us, and maybe that gets other people’s backs up around other parts of the country. But I actually love that about this city. It’s got that real backbone and it’ll fight and it’ll take on people. You don’t want to take on people from Liverpool, I can assure you of that.

TM: I’ve noticed recently that people like you, with an Irish name, or Rooney, with a very Irish name: you’re proudly English. You want to play for England, you wear the England jersey with pride. And yet I sense that there’s a certain kind of anti-Englishness starting to bubble up. People are asking: are we English? Are we a bit different? 

JC: I don’t think it’s bubbling: I think it’s been there for a long time. I wouldn’t say that I’m anti-English — and of course, you wouldn’t turn down the opportunity to play for your country — but I would never choose my country over my city. It wouldn’t even be a question. That’s just obvious to me. What people in the Midlands, the North East, or down South would choose, I don’t know. But if I went abroad and someone asked me where I’m from, I wouldn’t say I was from England. I’d say I’m from Liverpool. I’m sure there are other places in the country that feel the same. There’s a real North-South divide in this country, no doubt about that.

TM: Do you think it’s more acute than it was in the Eighties?

JC: Well, I was a kid in the Eighties. It always felt like it was a fight against someone. I remember my parents talking about Thatcher at the house. I think it probably feels bigger now just because social media has a major part in magnifying things. In the past, your parents would be having those political conversations in the back kitchen, but now it’s so much bigger and stronger because everyone can give their view on social media.

TM: You grew up at a time when Liverpool was earning its reputation as a Labour city. This wasn’t always the case: when your grandfather’s family came over from Ireland, Liverpool was a Tory city. The Protestants would vote Tory and the Catholics would vote Labour or Irish nationalist. It wasn’t until the Eighties that the city embraced its anti-Tory identity. What are your earliest memories of politics? 

JC: It was very simple for me when I was growing up: the Tory Party was for the rich, while Labour looked after the working classes. Even today, people around here are just trying to make ends meet, making sure there’s food on the table. I don’t think they’re watching Question Time, and finding out the policies of both parties. They’re thinking, we’re going to get more help from Labour — and that’s what we need.

TM: It would be difficult for you, wouldn’t it, if you were a Tory?

JC: I’m not sure there could be anything worse than being a Tory. I think people around here would rather I played for Man United. I’m serious.

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TM: Do you think that’s the social pressure — or is it something you believe in?

JC: Well, I didn’t grow up in a place where anyone voted Conservative and could explain why they did. Growing up, Margaret Thatcher was a real bone of contention in the city. At that time, there were a lot of celebrities in Liverpool who had done well. They left Liverpool for London, and I think a lot of them backed the Conservative Party and Margaret Thatcher.

TM: I’m thinking of Ken Dodd, Cilla Black, Jimmy Tarbuck.

JC: There was always a lot of resentment towards them from people in Liverpool, and I think rightly so. People in Liverpool love to see their own do well, as anywhere does. But I think you’ve always got to remember where you’re from. I remember they were always called “professional Scousers” — they used it when they wanted, but didn’t fully embody what a Scouser was.

You have to try to help the people you grew up with — even if it means people in my position perhaps paying more tax to a Labour government, which might help a young mother trying to bring up two kids. I think people in my position should never forget where they came from. But there are certainly people who have played for Liverpool in the past — I’m not naming names — who have forgotten this.

TM: Are there secret Tory footballers out there?

JC: I think there’s a few of them!

TM: You say you’re not too involved in politics, but you backed Andy Burnham for the leadership. Obviously, Andy Burnham’s from the North West — he’s an Everton fan who came to Liverpool to talk about Hillsborough. I think that was a pivotal moment for him. Is that how you got to know him?

JC: I’m not sure when the initial connection came — I think it was actually before he gave that famous speech at Anfield on the memorial of Hillsborough, I think in 2009. We went for a meal afterwards — something at the town hall. And yeah, at the time, I’d have liked to see him get the leadership of the Labour Party.

But the reason I say I’m not fully into politics is that I’m a little bit wary of getting too involved in something that’s not my area of expertise.

TM: Gary Neville’s not shy…

JC: Well, he’s working with local MPs. He probably knows a bit more about what’s going on.

I’d like to lend my support on initiatives where you feel you help people. It’s not just about Labour and Tory. Sometimes you might need the Conservative government to get certain things passed, and I can use my voice, because of who I am, in pushing certain things through Parliament. We’ve certainly done that with the help of people on the other team. It’s about getting behind a cause rather than getting fully into bed with a political party. I obviously would never be shy in saying I would always vote Labour and I would love them to be in charge in the next general election. But I am a little bit wary of getting into something that I don’t know everything about.

TM: You don’t need to. The theory goes that the less you know about politics, the more informed your opinion is. You can just see it: you either know that the city is doing well or is doing badly. It seems that you think the city is currently in a worse state than it’s been for a while?

JC: We see how many food banks there are now around this area. How many people are on the streets? It does feel like it’s never been as bad — on the back of the Tory government and Covid. The kids not being in school. That’s not just a Liverpool thing, of course. And I think that’s why people become disenfranchised with the Government — [the Tories] have been in a long time, and we’re still seeing these problems in a lot of working-class cities.

TM: It does feel very different. If you go into Liverpool city centre, it feels wealthy, buzzing, like a proper European city. And then you come out here, and it definitely feels poorer. Do you think the problem with the Labour Party holding a conference in Liverpool is that you get busloads of people coming up — people like me — and they arrive in the city, they get a black cab down to the conference event, and they go, “Liverpool’s doing great!” and actually, it’s a bit of a façade? It’s the same with Manchester. We were out there last week and you get the tram out two or three stops, and it feels very different.

JC: I think you could probably say that about a lot of places. Obviously a lot of the money goes into the city centre. It’s not just for the people from the city; it’s for tourists. There’s so much work being done in Liverpool — and it’s fantastic. But I think there’s always been a feeling in Liverpool that there’s not just the North-South divide in the country, but in the city as well. So when you come north from the city centre, you’ve got Bootle, you’ve got Kirkdale, you’ve got Walton. There’s still obviously places that are finding it tough in the south end of Liverpool, but the areas I’ve just mentioned are always looking for help.

You think of the stadiums — what the football clubs do for those areas, the North end. What Anfield does for the area of Anfield is massive — Liverpool [FC] being there. And Everton does need to move stadium, and it’s going to be absolutely magnificent — almost in the city centre, just on the edge of the docks. But you worry about the impact that’s going to have on Walton. The pubs around there, the cafes before the game, all the supporters. It’s going to have a real impact.

TM: Liverpool has always had a council that’s been opposed to the Government, against the establishment. And now you’ve got the prospect of a Labour government coming in, and Keir Starmer being Prime Minister. But already I get the sense in Liverpool that Keir Starmer is not particularly well-liked. That he’s seen as having promised things — like, not to appear in The Sun — and then he’s gone back on it. He’s seen as too cynical. It sounds like a bit of a warning: don’t take Liverpool for granted, Labour.

JC: Liverpool will always be Labour. It’ll never be Tory; that’ll just never, ever happen. I think Labour probably know that. But I’m pleased the Labour conference is in Liverpool. I think it’s good for the city. I was at a Q&A with Wes Streeting a few nights ago and he was talking about a plan, for the next two or three years, that the Labour Conference comes to Liverpool — and I was pleased about that.

I understand where you’re coming from in terms of Keir Starmer. The situation is not so much to do with his policies as a Labour leader, I think a lot of it is to do with The Sun. And I get both sides of the argument. He should never have said “I won’t speak to The Sun” — and then do it. If you give your word to people in Liverpool and you don’t deliver, you’re always going to have a problem — whether or not it’s speaking to The Sun, which is obviously a big no-no in this city. From his point of view, as Labour leader, I can understand. You need the press on-side.

In terms of his policies, Liverpool is a Labour city and Left-wing. I understand the problem that any Labour leader would have, that being really Left-wing is not going to get you into power. There is that feeling with Keir Starmer, and probably was with Tony Blair as well, that they’re almost a Tory: not Left, centre-left. But then, what would you rather have: a centre-left or a Tory government? Because it’s been proven, certainly with Jeremy Corbyn, that being real Left-wingers there’s very little chance that you’re ever going to get into government. You become known as a protest party, really. And yeah, you can protest, you can fight, and you can be disappointed in Labour — that they’re not doing everything you feel they should be doing, or really Left-wing. But it’s still better than what the alternative is.

TM: Better to win?

JC: Better to win and have the chance to actually implement policies that will help people in these areas rather than being a protest party just fighting against the Tories.

Tom: Jamie Carragher, the Blairite! The centrist dad who says, “Be sensible”!

JC: Yeah, well, that’s the only time I can remember Labour being in! I know what happened with the Iraq War — that’s always going to be a stain against them. But I think he was a great leader, wasn’t he? He just had it, didn’t he? When you saw him in the despatch box. Labour winning three general elections in a row. That just doesn’t happen because, you know, Labour very rarely win. And they’re in a great position to win now. I’d still rather a Labour government be in, even if it’s not Left-wingers, which people in the city would like.

TM: You think the problem, then, with Starmer is not necessarily the policies — it’s the cynicism? To so obviously say one thing and then do the other? Because outside of Liverpool that’s the criticism as well, from the Left: he promised all this and he didn’t deliver it. 

JC: I mean, do you believe things politicians say? I just think it’s a lot of bollocks if I’m being totally honest with you. I take it with a pinch of salt whenever we’re promised something by a politician.

TM: How has Liverpool dealt with the Tory conference the other week — where they reversed on HS2 coming up to the North?

JC: I don’t think it’s something that anyone on the streets is talking about. I think it was always seen as something that was going to Manchester. So I don’t know how much we’ll be affected. But again, it just goes back to that North-South divide. When they’re saying they can’t afford to finish it — I’m just not having that at all. And I’m not daft. I know the costs have spiralled, and they always do on things like that. But they have to find a way.

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TM: There’s talk about the Northern Powerhouse, which is kind of connecting Liverpool, through Manchester, to Leeds and across to Newcastle. But there is this other idea, which is the Osborne idea, which is that you need to create a megacity in the North West, with Manchester at the centre, connected up to Liverpool and Leeds. But I sometimes think: I wonder if people in Liverpool would be okay with being thought of as a kind of suburb of Manchester?

JC: No, Liverpool won’t be playing second fiddle to anyone — certainly not Manchester!

TM: There’s kind of two divides. There’s the divide within the North: Liverpool versus the rest, with Manchester getting all the special favours. And then there’s the North-South divide generally. For your work, you probably have to go down to London all the time — to all these clubs in the South. But when you were growing up, the North would have been dominant in football. And now [in the South] you’ve got all the small teams — not to offend any supporters! — Brentford and Brighton and Bournemouth. Is that a reflection, you think, of the state of the economy generally?

JC: Teams in the Premier League have got money, no matter where you are in the country — even the teams at the bottom are getting £100 million, so they can all afford massive wages. So if you’re going to play for a Brighton or a Bournemouth now, and you’re a foreign player, you can earn massive money — and you’re also not far from London. Whatever I was saying about this North-South divide, I go to London quite a lot, and it’s one of the best cities in the world. I think it could even be number one. So I think that plays a part in players wanting to be closer to the South — maybe it’s easier to get back home, flight-wise.

You think of some of the clubs in the North I grew up going to. Sheffield Wednesday — what a giant football club. Bournemouth and Brighton aren’t bigger football clubs than Sheffield Wednesday in terms of support, the stadium, history. But the way the Premier League is going now, the influx of foreign players, means it’s a lot tougher for teams [in the North] to attract foreign players than the teams you’re mentioning down South that, for me, aren’t as big.

TM: The way you were talking about Liverpool challenging the status quo made me think about Brexit. Is there a sense in Liverpool that that’s a Tory project? Because, going back to the Eighties, Liverpool was a great port for the whole world — and then, with trade diverting to Europe, the main ports became Felixstowe and Dover, down in the South. But I don’t get the sense that there’s anti-European sentiment here?

JC: The way people feel in this city [about Brexit] is the way my mum and dad feel about the Tory government of the Eighties. Brexit is the one thing that really winds me up. It’s a disaster. And this city was probably one of the strongest in voting to stay in Europe because we realise what Europe is doing for the city — not governments, especially not Tory governments.

TM: Because outside of Liverpool, being anti-establishment is voting against the EU. The argument goes: we’re poor, or poorer than we were, and that has coincided with being in the EU. And you could say the same about Liverpool: we used to have a port that went to the rest of the world and then we joined Europe and all that trade went South, because the South is closest, and so the EU hasn’t been good for us. It’s strange that that wasn’t more of a reaction in Liverpool.

JC: No, no. EU money changed the face of Liverpool. The Albert Dock was just rotting away in the Eighties, and look at it now. We’re really proud of it in the city. You think of the cruise ships going into Southampton — we’ve got the cruise terminal here, we’re getting a lot of that business ourselves now, tourists coming in. So no, I’ve never felt what you mentioned. The local press were fully behind staying in. And I think people in Liverpool just got it. It just wasn’t good to leave the EU. No sensible person or politician can ever make an argument for Leave. I just never heard one.

TM: Speaking of punching out at the establishment, do you sense that online conspiracy theories — about Covid, about World Government — are taking root in Liverpool at all? Wasn’t Rickie Lambert running something in Liverpool the other day? 

JC: I don’t believe in conspiracy theories in terms of Covid. I mean, Rickie Lambert went to something, but I don’t think there were that many people there. And I think when there’s actually been people coming here to protest in big numbers about things, against something that we believe in the city, they were pushed back. I don’t think there’s a big thing in Liverpool about conspiracy. I would call it more distrust — about a government or people in the higher echelons. And I think often it’s proved right.

Look at what was going on in Covid in No. 10. The way they were all carrying on. MPs expenses going back, what, 10, 15 years? These are our leaders, these are the ones we’re supposed to look up to, they are shaping the country. And then maybe people in Liverpool are getting criticised because they’ve got no jobs or they’re on benefits, or they’re trying to fudge the system in some way. And you’ve got the people at the very top doing exactly the same. I think there’s something sort of built into us in this city, that you never take things too much at face value in terms of people in the prime position. And to be honest, it’s been proved right.

Under the headline “Sickening”, Gorst was criticised for historic posts in which he called Queen Elizabeth “a useless bitch” and the Jewish former Liverpool Wavertree MP Luciana Berger, who eventually resigned from the party, a “hideous traitor”. The pamphlet also claimed that he lived in a “leafy” area and insinuated that he had jumped the queue on social housing, although that accusation is contested.

But if the intention was to make an opponent look bad, Labour may have shot itself in the foot. A joint statement released by the Liberal Democrats, The Liverpool Community Independents, The Green Party and the Liberal Party described the leaflet as “cynical”, “dishonest” and “shameful”. Their calls for a clean fight, however, have fallen on deaf ears, not least because the mud is being thrown in all directions amid widely reported allegations of Labour corruption and incompetence.

In recent years, Liverpool has been rocked by scandals. Former mayor Joe Anderson was arrested in 2020 on suspicion of conspiracy to commit bribery and witness intimidation as part of what is still an ongoing police investigation into property deals in the city. Four others were also arrested as part of the same probe, including ex-Militant Tendency firebrand, Derek Hatton. While Anderson denies any wrongdoing and none of the men have faced charges, the Government felt compelled to send in an inspection team led by Max Caller in 2021 to evaluate Liverpool Council. The result was damning: his Best Value Inspection report revealed serious failings in governance, a dysfunctional culture of intimidation, poor performance and wasteful spending. As a result, much of the authority’s work is now overseen by government-appointed commissioners.

Yet even this hasn’t solved things. Last year, for instance, £5 million was thrown away over a failure to renew an electricity contract on time; in February, a Liverpool Echo investigation revealed councillors were having their parking fines cancelled on the down-low; a scandal involving alleged fraud, corruption and council-run car parks also rumbles on.

In cities with a more contested political complexion, one might expect such failures to be severely punished at the ballot box. But this is Liverpool, and ousting Labour is the toughest of political challenges. Whatever happens tomorrow, the Conservatives won’t win a single seat.

Still, as Labour’s reputation has deteriorated, new political opponents have started to emerge. Labour has run Liverpool since 2010 and boasts 60 of the city’s 90 councillors. But it once had far more. Last year, eight former Labour councillors formed a new political grouping called the Liverpool Community Independents after they were suspended by the party, the majority for refusing to vote for budget cuts. The group leans to the Left of Liverpool’s new breed of increasingly Starmerite candidates imposed by the NEC-appointed fixer, Sheila Murphy. It’s tempting to say that in the context of Liverpool’s various shades of red politics, voters are being offered only the illusion of choice — but according to the Community Independents’ acting leader, Alan Gibbons, these elections are not about Left and Right, but “about right and wrong”.

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Another emergent group is Liberate Liverpool, which promises to focus on “community-led regeneration” over the self-interested “agenda of crooked politicians in the town hall”. Billing itself as a grassroots political movement of entrepreneurial socialists, this not-a-party party is putting forward 30 candidates on an ostensibly anti-corruption platform. However, it’s worth pointing out that everyone is playing the same game — the Liberal Democrats, who as the second largest party in the city stand to be the biggest gainers in the upcoming elections, are promising to “clean up Liverpool”.

Founded three months ago, Liberate Liverpool is backed by property developer, hotelier and one-time reality star Lawrence Kenwright. You may remember him as the star of the BBC series, The Grand Party Hotel, in which eager troops of stags and hens flocked to the city to taste the Signature Living brand of “affordable luxury”, with its double bunk-bed party pads equipped with flamingo ceilings, communal hot tubs and room names such as “WTF” and “OMG”. Despite playing a prominent role for Liberate Liverpool at its public gatherings, Kenwright has decided not to put himself forward for election, likely in part because his personal brand is somewhat divisive. In a city scarred by the rusting hulks of incomplete developments, where backroom property deals between public officials and a small coterie of the blessed became the norm, a large dose of scepticism now greets anyone working in the property sector. Kenwright’s patchy record of bankruptcy, history of architectural mutilation, and preference for leather beds, silk shirts and gold-sprayed thrones make him a strange choice to lead an anti-corruption drive. As one seasoned political campaigner told me: “If Lawrence Kenwright didn’t exist, Labour would have to invent him.”

But while it’s easy for Liverpool Labour to pick at the man, it’s harder to pick at the politics, simply because Liberate Liverpool is a blank canvas with a tendency to say what it thinks people want to hear. Its manifesto, for instance, has made broad pledges to “end austerity” and to “eradicate zero-hour contracts from the local economy”, which are beyond the power of any local government to implement. And yet, despite this, its promise to root out fraud and corruption in public office does hit home. The question is whether Liberate Liverpool is equipped to deliver it.

Despite their limited election prospects, it hasn’t taken long for Liberate Liverpool to make enemies. Employing all too familiar tactics, the city’s Left-wing and centrist progressives have already denounced it as a witless incubator for the far-Right. Last week, the Twitter account “LGBT+ Socialists” published a photograph of Dylan Cresswell, a former organiser for the English Defence League, standing next to a Liberate Liverpool sign at a city centre stall. The context is unclear, but proximity is taken as guilt. There are other mooted connections to the far-Right, including Barry Maguire, the candidate for the Fazakerley North ward, who is known to have taken part in the recent anti-immigrant protest in Knowsley. Maguire has also been outed as an anti-vaxxer, and one of his campaign posters was seen warning of the threat of 15-minute cities, viewed as code for conspiracism.

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Labour activists have been quick to take advantage of this. Labour Councillor Harry Doyle, Liverpool’s Tourism lead and chief political spokesperson for all things Eurovision, tweeted: “Looks like Liberate Liverpool is the new feeble attempt to normalise supporters of the BNP, EDL, National Action and the likes…” Elsewhere, there has been talk of Liberate Liverpool posters being torn down. But trying to characterise Liberate Liverpool as an enabler of the far-Right seems far-fetched. It’s far more likely that the movement is still a bit of a disorganised mess, which hasn’t yet managed the tightly choreographed slickness that the main parties take for granted. It’s plausible that an anti-corruption message could prove attractive to Right-wing candidates and conspiracists, but it’s just as likely to appeal to the Left because anti-corruption is a nonpartisan issue.

Even so, it wouldn’t be surprising if Liberate Liverpool do not win a seat. The general expectation among voters going into this election appears downbeat. Despite their troubles, Labour remains the favourite to hold on to power, albeit with a reduced majority. Indeed, rather than empower the opposition, there is a firm suspicion that Labour’s negative tactics are designed to lower turnout; to dishearten those voters who may lean towards change by convincing them that all sides are equally compromised. Better the devil you know, after all.

Beyond the hopes of its emerging political challengers, then, tomorrow’s elections are something of a test for Liverpool and its powerful incumbent. A test to see whether, in this supposedly most socialist of cities, Labour can continue to hide its failures behind the twin bogeymen of anti-Toryism and the rise of the far-Right — or whether its voters have had enough.

It is true that one nationalist group, Patriotic Alternative, promoted the Knowsley protest, and politicians who resort to inflammatory language to distract from their own failings deserve to be called out. But can these angry demonstrations really be blamed on a few bad apples, agitated by politicians and a generalised culture of racism? Or should they be seen as the symptom of a much deeper malaise, which has its roots in the impact of immigration on British working-class communities?

Uneasiness over immigration in the UK has been simmering below the surface for some time. Over the past few years, much has been written about the way in which anti-immigration attitudes among the British softened significantly after the EU referendum, despite the number of immigrants remaining broadly unchanged between 2016 and 2019. This left some baffled: it was the opposite of what they might have expected following the victory of a campaign which had been variously described as fuelled by racism, fascism and xenophobia. But in fact, it simply revealed the liberal elites’ ignorance of the real dynamics driving the Brexit vote.

Of course, the reason many people voted for Brexit was to lower immigration. There were both cultural and economic factors affecting this, the result of the very high and sustained immigration which took place under the Blair, Brown, and Cameron governments. However, it was also about sending a message to the country’s political establishment: citizens had been signalling their desire for stricter border controls at every election, only to be ignored. In this sense, immigration became the main focus of Brexit’s promise of greater popular sovereignty; not because of xenophobia or racism, but because it was where the political void between rulers and ruled had crystallised. It was mainly about accountability and democracy, not race or hatred of foreigners (which explains why the Leave vote had strong support among ethnic minorities as well).

This is why attitudes to immigration relaxed after the referendum: Leavers felt that they now had greater control over immigration. Or so they thought: since Brexit, the Conservatives have ushered in a system that, if anything, is even more liberal than before. As the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory points out, while the new system is more restrictive for EU nationals, who previously enjoyed freedom of movement rights, for the rest of the world “the policy reflects a notable liberalisation”. And we are now beginning to see the effects of this.

According to Home Office figures, there were 2.6 million visas granted in the year ending September 2022. While this represents an 18% decrease compared with 2019, estimates from the Office of National Statistics suggest that total net migration was 504,000 in the year ending June 2022, far higher than the previous record of 330,000. Work-related visas in particular rose to almost 400,000 — 80% higher than before the pandemic in 2019, and the highest number of work visas issued in any 12-month period since the data series began in 2005. Meanwhile, as a result of Brexit, the source of immigration has also begun to change in profound ways: net EU immigration has fallen steadily since 2016, while non-EU immigration has increased — mainly from countries such as India (worker visas are up 90%), the Philippines (93%), Nigeria (399%) and Zimbabwe (1,500%). This means that immigration is becoming more culturally, ethnically and religiously distinctive.

On top of this, we have also witnessed a significant increase in the number of migrants and asylum-seekers entering the country illegally. More than 2,300 migrants have crossed the Channel on small boats so far this year, according to official figures; over 1,000 migrants arrived in the first two weeks of February alone. Overall, in 2022, a record 45,728 people arrived in the UK, almost 90% of whom were adult men — an astonishing 2,000% increase over pre-pandemic levels.

And crucially, a disproportionate number of asylum seekers are being housed in some of the poorest areas of the country, with local councils and residents having no say in the matter. North East and Red Wall areas are housing respectively 13 and 7 times as many asylum seekers as South East England. Knowsley itself is the second most deprived borough in England, suffering severe problems of unemployment, ill health and child poverty. All this is driving a renewed stiffening in attitudes towards immigration compared with the past few years.

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So, perhaps it’s unsurprising that, according to the UnHerd Britain data released today, a majority of Britons think immigration is too high, with 34% strongly agreeing with the statement. Interestingly, the results are more or less the same across all socioeconomic groups, though as one might expect, opposition to immigration is particularly high in the country’s poorer areas: Midlands, Yorkshire and North East England.

What does this tell us about Britain? What is driving this change in attitudes to immigration? Are we to believe that 34% of the country is racist? There is very little evidence to support the claim that engrained xenophobia is to blame. Rather, the country has become incredibly more tolerant and less racist over the past decades. If one thing is clear, it’s that racism is definitely not on the rise. A 2019 EU survey ranked the UK as the least racist in the 12 Western European countries surveyed, while a recent poll showed that a majority of Britons believe that immigrants have had a positive effect in several areas, such as the NHS, the arts, and start-ups. This highlights the fact that one can be opposed to high immigration levels, while at the same time being positively predisposed towards immigrants. Hence past surveys have shown it isn’t just the majority of the white working class that wants to see immigration levels reduced, but the majority of respondents of non-white ethnicity (whether UK-born or not) as well.

Aside from the resentment over the clear betrayal of the Brexit mandate, could there be legitimate concerns about the impact of the recent wave of immigration, especially of the illegal kind, on local communities? More often than not, those who expose themselves to great personal risk to enter the country illegally are fleeing from horrendous situations: war, poverty and persecution. But this also means they are more likely to come from disproportionately lawless societies. It is not unreasonable, then, for people to be concerned by the sudden arrival into their communities of undocumented young males they know little about.

It is well-known, for example, that Albanian gangs are involved in very serious organised criminality in the UK, be it drug smuggling, human trafficking, or prostitution — and Albanians made up almost half of all boat arrivals in 2022. Then there’s the issue of the potential abuse of women: the protests in Knowsley, for instance, were sparked by a video circulated on social media appearing to show a young refugee aggressively propositioning a local 15-year-old girl for sex. We don’t yet know the veracity of the footage, but we do know that government and social services have historically ignored the abuse of thousands of white working-class girls by grooming gangs out of a fear of appearing racist. Justified or not, it’s not difficult to see why locals would express concern at the hint of any predatory behaviour going unchecked.

The usual progressive response is that much of the working-class resentment against immigration has to do with government mismanagement, with the growing material and existential precariousness of the working class, and with the erosion of communities caused by decades of neoliberal policies. This is certainly true. However, in this context of top-down class warfare, immigration, though not the main cause of the impoverishment and marginalisation of native workers, can easily become an exacerbating factor.

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Not only is immigration used to drive down wages but, in a context of welfare retrenchment and austerity, it can cause increased competition over scarce and declining public resources and infrastructure. This is why, historically, trade unions and the Labour Party were generally anti-immigration. It also explains why, even among those favouring lower immigration overall, 76% favour more high-skilled immigration — which would make no sense if people were primarily concerned about stopping immigration altogether.

That said, opposition to immigration isn’t all about economics. It also has to do with the fact that the majority of voters, unlike the globe-trotting cosmopolitan elites, continue to view themselves as national citizens who want to live in a community with some sense of a shared collective identity. Indeed, several studies show that, for most people, national identity remains the strongest form of collective identity around the world. A country’s national identity may be, to a large extent, an “imaginary” construct. It may also be hard to pin down, encompassing customs, culture, history, language, religion and social mores. But it exists and has very “real” effects, creating common bonds among members of — and giving rise to — a territorially defined community.

To deny the existence of the latter is, in effect, to deny the existence of society itself. All that’s left is a bunch of individuals who happen to share a piece of land. Indeed, democracy, as the term implies, presupposes the existence of an underlying demos. The latter is also crucial in generating the affective ties and bonds of solidarity that are needed to sustain the welfare state. Leftists used to understand this. As the Marxist scholar Paul Hirst wrote in 2005: “Unregulated migration would undermine both citizenship and welfare rights. This would threaten democracy, which depends on the notion of a national community”. Contemporary progressives, on the other hand, like to vilify the nation-state as intrinsically fascistic. But modern concepts of national identity are still incredibly “progressive”, in the traditional sense of the word, based as they are on transcending individual particularities — sex, race, biology, religion — to create cultural-political identities rooted in participation, equality, citizenship and representation. Yet, crucially, this isn’t open-ended: a society is by definition demarcated by borders and a relatively stable membership. While national identity is constantly evolving, the pace of that change is everything.

And here we get to the crux of the matter: anxiety over immigration is not primarily driven by racism or xenophobia, or even by an opposition to immigration per se, but by a desire to have a say over the form, pace and scale of immigration. This is why studies have shown that the strongest Leave-voting areas had experienced the fastest increases in immigration, not the highest absolute numbers of arrivals. When the national community perceives the pace of change to be too fast, it naturally, instinctively reacts against the breakdown of social cohesion.

This is not an argument against immigration or the evolution of a country’s national identity. It is an argument for respecting a national community’s right to have a say in the pace and form that such evolution takes. We have an obligation to try to welcome as many people as possible who are escaping hellish situations — many of which happen to be caused by Western interventions. But it’s ultimately up to the people who live in the receiving country to decide how this should happen. It’s called democracy, and our politicians, as the weekend’s protests demonstrated, disregard it at their own peril.

West Lancashire’s largest town, meanwhile, has a population of just under 40,000. Skelmersdale — or “Skem”  — was one of the very first New Towns, built in the Sixties to accommodate families from some of Liverpool’s worst slum housing. They were plonked down in the middle of a rural, mostly Tory-voting wilderness; the railway line to the city had closed to passengers in 1956, so these new arrivals were completely cut off from relatives and friends. This isolation was probably the main reason why “Skem” never flourished. But it nevertheless changed the fate of the surrounding area.

In West Lancashire the Tory tradition remained strong. But Skem’s growing size meant that the district council of West Lancashire had a strong Labour representation. Meanwhile local Toryism, once a powerful force, has fragmented. When the constituency of West Lancashire was formed in 1983, it elected a Conservative MP, Ken Hind, but it has had a Labour MP since 1992, as the “red” political influence of Liverpool spread well beyond Skelmersdale. Middle-class Liverpudlians have steadily relocated to the old market towns of Ormskirk and Burscough while continuing to commute into the city. Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, has boosted the economy of the area, as well as making the population more cosmopolitan, with a more Liverpool-centred attitude.

All of this begs what we might call the West Lancashire Question. While Tam Dalyell’s West Lothian Question related to dilemmas facing Scotland as part of a devolved UK, the West Lancashire Question might consider the fate of English regions in an increasingly muddled local government jigsaw. The constituency may be about to decide who it wants to send to Westminster, but how does it want to rule itself?

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Today’s local government structures completely fail to represent the reality of the area and its hinterland. At the moment, the local authority is West Lancashire Borough Council, which operates as part of Lancashire County Council. And yet the politics and economics of the area are shaped by Liverpool: surely, then, it should be part of the Liverpool City Region?

LCR represents around 1.5 million people, comprising the councils of Liverpool, Sefton, Knowsley, St Helens, Halton and Wirral. It has its own elected mayor, Steve Rotheram, and, with a remit that covers transport, housing and economic development, it has more power than not only West Lancashire Borough but the entirety of Lancashire County Council can dream of.

Although West Lancashire increasingly looks, feels and even sounds like the Liverpool City Region — listen to the accents in Ormskirk pubs and cafes — it is stuck within Tory-led Lancashire County Council, which has very limited resources. The county council does collaborate with Labour in Liverpool City Region and West Lancashire Borough: close work between them yielded what seemed an attractive bid to bring trains back to Skelmersdale with a direct link to Liverpool. But this was turned down by central Government, suggesting that cheaper options should be explored. The bid was backed by Rosie Cooper, who described the decision as a “betrayal”.

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If, however, this project had been proposed across the water in Wales, which has devolved powers over transport, the decision would have been different. As it was, Whitehall scuppered a project which would have brought major benefits to a town strongly in need of “levelling-up”. And the Westminster representative could do nothing about it. The region needs its own powers.

There is no simple solution, though the most obvious would be to make the constituency part of Merseyside. But some in West Lancashire, particularly those living to the north of the constituency, would argue that the link to Preston is just as important as the link to Liverpool. The irony of the current “combined authority” arrangements is that they are too restrictive: the old “historic” Lancashire included all of Liverpool, Manchester, Preston and beyond. It was a mighty region, dismantled by Government edict in 1974. The effect has been to weaken and divide what was a powerful province through its own democratic structures.

Part of the problem is one of democratic accountability. For all its faults and limitations, Lancashire County Council is a democratically elected body with county councillors representing local wards. The Liverpool City Region Combined Authority, apart from the mayor, is indirectly-elected. It doesn’t make for good governance and makes the combined authorities difficult to influence. The London model, where the Greater London Authority provides oversight for the mayor, would be an improvement: like the devolved governments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, it is elected through a proportional system.

It’s too late to restore pre-1974 Lancashire. Rather, we should imagine a much-enlarged Lancashire, which can include the combined authorities of Liverpool and Greater Manchester. Perhaps we could even start to seriously consider John Prescott’s idea of a “North-West” regional government with the resources and powers to create the sort of vibrant regional economies that the German Länder have supported. Most other European countries have strong regional governments, which are able to raise their own taxes and make decisions independently of the state. Here in England, even relatively small projects have to get approval from Westminster; all too often, they get rejected. Why not give Lancashire — which has almost as many residents as Northern Ireland — the same democratic government, and powers, that Scotland and Wales have?

Labour should be hammering away on this. Not many miles away, in Oldham, the highly-respected Coliseum Theatre is closing because every penny of its funding from Arts Council England has been cut. Keir Starmer has been silent on this and other local disappointments. Is it because he doesn’t want to be seen to be too “Northern”?

Labour is likely to win this by-election. But it is not doing enough for West Lancashire. If it had any idea what was good for the region, the party would empower it, by supporting the creation of a Greater Lancashire authority. And not make it go to Whitehall with a begging bowl which is all too often thrown back in their face.

Are feminists welcome in the Labour Party? I mean the old-fashioned kind of feminist, who knows the difference between men and women. The answer appears to be that we’re not. Delegates to this year’s party conference in Liverpool will be able to browse stalls outside the main hall, talking to activists about everything from climate change to animal welfare. What they won’t be able to do is speak to representatives of the Labour Women’s Declaration, an organisation that advocates for women’s sex-based rights and single-sex spaces. It has been denied a stall at conference along with FiLiA, which last year organised the largest feminist conference in this country for decades.

Women hoping for an unequivocal statement from Sir Keir Starmer about our right to speak openly about biological sex will be disappointed. The Labour leader has repeatedly failed to condemn harassment of feminists in the party, who have been targeted by “pledges” and motions threatening “transphobes” with expulsion. Instead of standing up for free speech and women’s rights, as you might expect a former Director of Public Prosecutions to do, Starmer has proved himself anything but an ally. “Trans women are women,” he intones, holding to this line as firmly as devout Catholics preach transubstantiation.

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In the Seventies, Labour governments passed ground-breaking legislation on equal pay and sex discrimination. Now the party has been captured by an extreme ideology which, to anyone with half a brain, is an excuse for an outpouring of misogyny. We don’t know the exact number of trans people in this country but they appear to be vastly outnumbered by self-styled trans activists, who turn up at women’s events wearing home-made masks and balaclavas. They threaten us with sexual violence and their aim is to intimidate women into silence, driving home the message that we are no longer entitled to single-sex spaces. But instead of getting support from leading Labour politicians, all we get is trans slogans and hyperbolic claims about the “oppression” of trans people.

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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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Liverpool has long had a streak of exceptionalism. “Scouse not English,” say some. And as the diaspora came to see itself as more Scouse than Irish, Labour gained ground. Until a century ago, the Irish Nationalist Party (INP) was the dominant political force in Catholic wards. Journalist T.P. O’Connor became MP for Liverpool Scotland in 1885, a seat he held until his death in 1929. It was the only constituency outside Ireland ever to return an Irish Nationalist Party MP. But after the formation of the Irish Free State in 1922, support for the INP in Liverpool collapsed. The party no longer seemed relevant once Ireland left the UK. The Irish Catholic vote could hardly go to the Tories, so most went to Labour.

There were divisions within Labour, however, notably between the Right-wing Catholic caucus and Left-wingers such as Bessie Braddock, a renowned campaigner on housing and public health. Braddock and her husband gained control of the party after the Second World War and moved Rightwards, while pushing the party in a more secular direction, in line with the decreasingly sectarian public mood.

Internal divisions lessened after the war, but Labour never had a secure hold on the city. It won eight of the 11 Liverpool seats in its 1945 general election landslide, though it slipped to three out of nine in the mid-Fifties as Labour’s local standing varied in line with national swings. It took control of the city council for the first time in 1955, but was not able to hold it consistently, due to a mix of its own performance and the party’s national fortunes. The Tories regained control in 1961-3, and for the last time between 1967 and 1972, after which Liberals under Sir Trevor Jones held power for some years, with Tory support.

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It was a backlash against the Tories, rather than their own merits, that solidified Labour’s hold on the city. The recessions of the Seventies and Eighties badly affected Liverpool’s docks and manufacturing base. There was rioting in Toxteth in 1981. Support for the Conservatives, already fading, took a severe hit under Margaret Thatcher’s government when chancellor Sir Geoffrey Howe suggested in cabinet that the city be allowed to go into “managed decline”.

Even efforts by Michael Heseltine, environment secretary, to regenerate Liverpool failed to repair the Tories’ image. He made public and private sectors work together, clearing derelict sites for redevelopment. The city centre was designated an enterprise zone with tax breaks and government support for investment and jobs in new sectors. Liverpool’s docks were repurposed as a tourist attraction with museums, hotels, shops and housing. Heseltine was no doubt seen as a non-typical Tory — which raises the question today of whether, even if “levelling up” measures are successful, it would benefit the Conservatives’ image in some northern cities.

And yet, Labour was still plagued by internal divisions. Liverpool’s city council, at this time, became dominated by the party’s Trotskyist Militant group, leading to a confrontation with the government over spending caps. Labour eventually succeeded in expelling members of Militant.

Still, Labour cannot take Liverpool for granted. The city’s politics have remained rumbustious. The Conservatives collapsed swiftly — Liverpool has not had a Conservative MP since 1979. And it has not had a Tory councillor since 1998, but it was the Lib Dems who won control that year under Mike Storey, arguing that Labour had delivered poor services and high council tax.

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By 2010, voters had tired of Lib Dem rule and gave Labour another chance under Joe Anderson. He became Liverpool’s first directly elected city mayor in 2012, but stood down in December 2020 after being arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit bribery and witness intimidation, as part of an investigation into building and development contracts. He denies any wrongdoing. Mismanagement and suspected corruption remain a major problem in Liverpool’s local politics. In March 2021, government-appointed commissioners were sent in to run the council’s highways, property management and regeneration functions after an independent report found multiple failings. Irish influence is seen by some as encouraging an American-style “city boss” culture.

Joe Anderson was replaced by Joanne Anderson (no relation), the first black woman to become a directly elected mayor in the UK. But the political turmoil has continued. Her administration this year became embroiled in controversy about mistakes over the council’s energy bill, which will cost it millions. Recently, government commissioners took over all the council’s financial, governance and recruitment decisions. Ahead of that move, the chief executive resigned. As happened at national level with the Conservatives in recent months, Labour’s internal travails in Liverpool are distracting from the real issues the city faces.

Liverpool desperately needs some political direction. It is the third most deprived local authority in England, after Blackpool and Knowsley, according to the government’s indices of deprivation. The area around Stanley Park is home to two of the world’s wealthiest football clubs, Liverpool and Everton, but is one of the poorest places in the UK. Recent shootings, including the unsolved murder of nine-year-old Olivia Pratt-Korbell, are an unwelcome reminder that parts of the city still have problems with gang violence.

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Both the Conservatives and Labour appear to be struggling for ideas about how to solve Liverpool’s problems. Greg Clark, levelling up secretary (since replaced by Simon Clarke), appointed a “strategic futures panel” under Mr Rotheram to guide the council out of its problems. But aside from sending in commissioners, the Conservatives have not so far offered help to Liverpool along the lines of Heseltine’s efforts in the Eighties.

Starmer, meanwhile, supported the intrtoduction of commissioners. He told the Liverpool Echo he wanted to devolve spending decisions from Whitehall to the city. Next May, the council will ditch the role of mayor and replace it with a leader and cabinet model. Labour will need to elect a new leader to succeed Joanne Anderson, who is expected to stand down. “I have to acknowledge things have gone wrong,” said Starmer. “My focus is on ensuring that what needs to be fixed is fixed for the people of Liverpool, because I want this city to thrive.”

Does Starmer have a grasp on the local politics? He was criticised last year for writing in The Sun, which many Liverpudlians revile for blaming Liverpool fans for the 1989 Hillsborough disaster. And Labour’s plans for the city are vague. The party cannot simply reply on voter loyalty and Tory failure. At least the Tories have a levelling-up strategy, even though it is being radically revised under Liz Truss. Northern cities need more than platitudes, if they are to “thrive”.

I have lived through the estate’s highs and lows, and have counted far more lows than highs: its rapid decline at the hands of Thatcherism, the riots that took place in 1981, and the rocketing unemployment the following year. Coupled with a ceaseless spate of burglaries, car crime and vandalism, Cantril was transformed from a council vision of new prosperity and hope into a social abyss, nicknamed the “the worst estate in Europe”.

Today, the estate has tried to build a way out of its past. Gone are the design-for-crime dimly lit subways and three of the nine tower blocks that had been turned into a springboard for those weary of their misery and in search of an early grave. But these architectural changes, part of a major regeneration programme in 2010, have only diverted attention from the real problems so conveniently avoided by local councillors and our representatives in Westminster. The facades of our buildings may have crumbled and been replaced, yet the accompanying cloud of social exclusion and cultural deprivation still lingers. With an estimated 49% of its male inhabitants still unemployed and youth unemployment reaching 80% by 2019, it is hardly surprising that young people in the renamed “Stockbridge Village” see little alternative to following their fathers, mothers and brothers into the temporary escapism of drug and alcohol-induced stupor — and then, inevitably, into the dark and violent economy of gang culture and organised crime.

Since nine-year-old Olivia Pratt-Korbel was shot dead in her home in Dovecot last Monday, Merseyside Police have carried out dozens of raids and arrested more than 200 people. When Olivia’s killer is eventually found, I suspect that he, or at least his motives, will have roots in an estate like Stockbridge. As well as living here, I have spent the last decade studying the city’s criminal underworld, and have interviewed more than 50 young people — males and females aged between 18 and 25 — involved in violent gangs across Merseyside. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that when a community collapses, organised crime often fills the void.

My research points towards three significant drivers of gang culture on Merseyside: the absence of both bonding and bridging in communities; the powerful allure of risk-taking; and the blurring of perception between legal employment and criminality. All of these, if addressed effectively alongside inequality, could prevent young people from being driven into the arms of gangs and violent criminality. If unchecked, they stand little chance of escaping the city’s lawlessness, dragging innocent children such as Olivia Pratt-Korbel into the vortex with them.

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Where the importance of friendship networks was concerned, “bonding” and “bridging” appeared to be the prime determinants that decided whether a young person fell in with the wrong crowd. My study noted that most of Merseyside’s communities, including my own, were extremely insular, suffering from high levels of minimal bonding with very few, if any, forms of bridging — that is, very few attempts by residents to connect to other areas, people and organisations outside of their boundaries. This had a significant impact on the young people I interviewed: those who became embroiled in gangs and violent crime developed restricted friendship networks consisting of friends from only their school days and residential street. This meant that values and beliefs were often bound around the dominant philosophy of street gangs and violence. As one interviewee told me: “It was on my doorstep.” By contrast, those young people who decided to abstain completely had done so through building extended friendship networks beyond their respective school and street — taking up Saturday jobs or becoming involved in activities that had brought them into contact with law-abiding peers.

But friendship networks aren’t everything. As the American criminologist Jackson Katz noted in the Eighties, there is a seductive nature to organised crime: a “black box of criminality” which very few researchers can open. Katz was referring to the difficulty of getting offending individuals to discuss the attraction of the actual risks posed by criminality — what in criminological terms is now referred to as “edgework”. In the context of street gangs, Katz argued that it wasn’t just the allure of criminal participation that was so enticing. More important was the emotional charge of the preparation and run-up to the act, climaxing in the adrenalin rush of successfully getting away with the crime and the rewards that it brought.

Katz asserted that such an allure can also extend to projecting a street identity. Even by dressing as a gang member, he claimed, individuals can derive criminal (almost erotic) physiological pleasure from the entire experience of this role-play.

My research found considerable support for Katz’s observations within gangs on Merseyside: that such causes lay not merely in the need for the external material benefits derived from crime, but also a craving for risk-taking, with this latter element expressed in dress. (In most cases: a black North Face hoodie topped off with tracksuit bottoms and “110” Nike trainers.) This was further emphasised in the marking of territory through graffiti, which talked of “street soldiers” whose condemnation of Merseyside Police was projected through the simple graffiti tag of FTM (“Fuck the Matrix”).

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Interestingly, my study found evidence for the allure of risk on two levels. In the first instance, in the much-cited and discussed traditional form, the great majority of male gang members reflected on the buzz derived from going out and the unpredictability of what the night might bring. Second, my research identified a newer form — what I call indirect “vicarious edge work”. This saw young women associates derive a dose of excitement through the turbulent criminal life of male gang members.

As I continued my interviews, it became clear how infectious this allure really is. Every community I visited was home to chronic levels of unemployment which had disproportionately affected young people. And without any real prospect of securing a legitimate job, these people were being forced to find alternative means of financial survival through gangs and drug crime — to the extent that the boundaries between legitimate employment and criminality had become entirely clouded. From the vivid descriptions given to me, the young men I interviewed had long-ceased positioning themselves as gang members. Instead, they had adopted an alternative identity of deviant entrepreneurs ready to utilise marketing strategies: they offer Buy-One-Get-One free on bags of “lemo” (cocaine) and send out price menus, with opening and closing hours of serving, via text message. They have, in effect, convinced themselves that they are doing a job just like any other. They have internalised their own language and normalised their crime. Its allure is simply too potent — and is infectious, too.

It’s no coincidence, after all, that more than a week after the horrifying killing of Olivia Pratt-Korbel, her killer is yet to be captured. This, despite the fact that we know who the target was, and despite the fact that, the day after Olivia’s death, the chief constable of Merseyside Police reassured reporters on the scene that “Merseyside is different in terms of where it was 15 years ago”. The truth, however, is that while it may have taken a new form, the allure of gang crime on Merseyside remains as strong as ever. Olivia’s death was the fourth in Liverpool in just one week; afterwards, relatives of the intended target warned on social media that “snitches get stitches”. None of this suggests that the allure of gang crime is waning.

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And yet, perhaps there’s a glimmer of hope. Merseyside Police have started to think about what is being called “preventative policing”. It’s not going to change anything overnight, but it’s a start. Finally, there is the realisation that partnership collaboration has become a vital cog — that, to have any impact on this problem, structural issues must be addressed and the social biographies of communities must be scrutinised. But this will take time, and time doesn’t fill me with hope: in Knowsley, we have seen out-of-touch ministers brag about levelling-up on our TV screens, but so far haven’t seen any tangible solutions to poverty, homelessness and, of course, organised violent crime.

So when Olivia’s killer is finally found, and the national news cameras inevitably move on, I can’t escape the feeling that business as usual will return. Social exclusion and cultural deprivation have created a vacuum in Merseyside — and without any meaningful alternative, the region’s gangs will continue to fill it.

Unfortunately, however, Liverpool’s local Labour Party does not repay the city in kind. For the past five years, it has been mired in scandal, culminating in the arrest of former mayor Joe Anderson in December 2020, on suspicion of conspiracy to commit bribery and witness intimidation. Now, that in itself isn’t a first for Liverpool — senior figures in the previous Liberal Democrat regime were also investigated by the police. But unlike previous scandals, Labour’s had wide-ranging ramifications for the city and its governance. And come Thursday, the consequences of this will be laid bare: as a result of a damning government inspection into Anderson’s behaviour last year, Liverpool Council will no longer be participating in this week’s local elections.

Anderson’s arrest in 2020 led to the commissioning of a Government “best value inspection” of Liverpool City Council, led by Max Caller. His report, published last year, found evidence of severe wrongdoing, ranging from repeated incompetence to corruption. The Labour leadership, he concluded, oversaw a climate of fear, harassment and bullying in Town Hall. As a result, our city has suffered the humiliation of having government-appointed commissioners oversee council decisions. For those who wanted to see Tories back in the Town Hall, this was not the way they had in mind.

Labour’s current state of ignominy was years in the making: it is not fair to paint Anderson’s downfall as the result of a few bad apples at the head of Labour. For years, a culture of impunity had developed around the mayor, always something of a political bruiser, which was accelerated following a decision in 2015 to scrap the mayoral select committee, a body that was supposed to scrutinise the mayor’s decisions and behaviour. Who’d have guessed that wouldn’t turn out well?

As a result of the Caller Report, the city faces significant changes to its local government arrangements. Previously, a third of the council’s seats were up for election in three of every four years. But Caller’s report found this frequency distracted the council from actually improving the lives of residents; they were too busy fighting the next electoral battle. The logic of this is not very sound — other councils manage such a pattern of elections without such scandal — but nevertheless the government has replaced it with a system of all-out elections, where every seat is up for grabs, every four years. The first will take place next year.

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Chief among the reasons for this remarkable intervention — and for the chaos within Labour more broadly — is the lack of appropriate candidates among the city’s leading politicians. The current mayor, Joanne Anderson (no relation to Joe), was not the party’s first choice. She wasn’t even their third choice. Unlike Joanne Anderson, the original shortlisted candidates — all female — all had experience of running the city: Wendy Simon was acting mayor, Ann O’Byrne was a former deputy mayor, and Anna Rothery was a former committee chair and a councillor since 2006.

However, before the ballots could go out, Labour HQ halted the process, re-interviewed the candidates, and then, for some unexplained reason, took the unprecedented decision of restarting the whole process and banning the three women from recontesting. The local party claimed “there was a clear risk of political damage to the party”. Rothery took legal action against Labour, but lost, and had to pay the party’s legal costs of around £65,000.

This chaos fed into Labour’s second weakness: its top team’s lack of political experience. The two eventual candidates are a case in point: Anthony Lavelle, who would have been the youngest mayor at 25 years old, and Joanne Anderson, who had only been a councillor for roughly 18 months. Anderson eventually triumphed, and promptly put together one the most inexperienced cabinets the council has ever seen — the city’s Liberal Democrat leader labelled them as “babes in the wood”. Of the seven cabinet members, four had less than three years’ experience as a councillor when they were appointed.

Unsurprisingly, this inexperience led to a number of policy missteps: the reversal of a cast-iron promise on a referendum on the existence of our mayoralty, instead opting for a public consultation; the introduction of a £40 charge to collect environmental waste; and an omnishambles budget which saw seven Labour councillors rebel against their own party. Five of these councillors joined with three previously-Labour independents to form the Liverpool Community Independents. The LCI are now the third-largest party on the council.

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And voters are starting to pick up on this chaos. Joanne Anderson’s term as mayor started at an all-time low — it was the first instance of the vote going to the second-round count in Liverpool’s brief mayoral history. Labour could only scrape together 38% in the first round, in the face of a strong independent candidate, Stephen Yip, who won 22%. Established opposition parties also took a hit, with both the Liberal Democrats and the Greens seeing a reduced vote share.

In next year’s elections, with no strong local challenger, my own analysis suggests that the Labour vote is likely to fall further. Compared to the 2018 local elections, Labour’s vote share in 2021 decreased in all but one ward, at an average of 14.5%. Two recent council by-elections support this prediction: last month’s by-election in Warbreck ward saw Labour’s vote share decrease from 68% to 48% and the Liberal Democrats’ vote rise by 31.4% — a 1,647 majority cut to just 38. The by-election in Everton, held at the same time, saw Labour’s Ellie Byrne win 62% of the vote, down from the 87% her father, Ian Byrne, won in 2018. (He had eventually resigned as a councillor after winning his seat in the 2019 general election; conveniently, his daughter was selected as the best candidate.)

So, what we’re left with is an inexperienced Labour cabinet, fighting among themselves and with the central party. Voters are increasingly turning elsewhere and the mayoral contest shows there’s genuine demand for a challenge to the Labour Party. The problem, however, is obvious: in the short term, there is no realistic alternative to a Labour government in the city. In 2021, even with falling support, the first-past-the-vote voting system gave Labour 74% of the seats on just 50% of the vote. The Greens, who won 14% of the vote gained one seat, and the Conservatives, who won 6% of the vote, failed to gain a single seat.

The upcoming boundary reform — forced on the city by Labour Party failings, let’s not forget — is likely to see more of the same. My own estimates found that the party breakdown on the council would remain largely unchanged. Neither will abolishing the mayoral system lead to meaningful change: we had just as many scandals under the council leader model. The third option, the committee system, is an open invitation for decisions to be made behind closed doors by a small number of councillors no-one has ever heard of. At least the mayoral system gives us an individual all voters can hold to account via elections, not just those voters who happen to live in the leader’s ward.

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Yet there is one obvious answer to Liverpool’s problems, which would inject political competition into town halls across the country: proportional representation. The Welsh government has allowed local authorities to opt into PR if they choose. The Scottish government went one step further and chose the single transferable vote system — where voters rank candidates — for all local elections since 2007: as a result, Glasgow went from 90% of seats being held by Labour on 48% of the vote in 2003 to a much more balanced 57% of the seats on 43% of first-preference votes. In Liverpool, my analysis shows STV would even see the Conservatives return to Town Hall.

Such a scenario remains unlikely in the near-future. But the grim truth is that until something changes — until genuine party politics returns to the council — Liverpool is likely to lumber from one scandal to the next. The city has already lost one mayor; its council has been deemed incapable of carrying out its most basic function. In Liverpool, Labour isn’t working. And that doesn’t look like changing soon.

The rise of this view on the Left has coincided with the decline in support for the Labour Party among those traditionally considered ‘working class’, and an increase in their support for the Conservatives. But if we see housing tenure as the real indicator of class in modern Britain, then we can still claim that the working class has not abandoned Labour. All that was needed was to change its definition.

The first thing to say about this argument is that it’s a little too convenient. Only five years ago, the Labour Left was using ‘working class’ in the traditional sense and upholding the dichotomy between ‘university-educated middle-class professionals’ on the one hand and ‘working-class communities’ on the other. Indeed, this understanding of class, culture and political values held until as recently as the eve of the 2019 general election.

You don’t have to be a cynic to think that this new understanding of class would not be put forward if the traditional class alignment of the post-1945 period still held, and if young people and renters were as supportive of the Tories as they had been in 2015. Certainly, the old concept of ABC1-C2DE is inadequate, as argued by a range of academics. But disregarding the importance of class and insisting on the primacy of housing tenure is politically misguided and empirically unfounded.

Just look at the ten safest Labour seats in the country. Five of them are in Liverpool; two each in London and Birmingham; and one in Manchester. There is, in fairness, a clear disparity between the percentage of people who own their homes outright in these seats and the national average — only 19% on average in those ten constituencies, compared with 30.6% nationwide.

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However, when we look at the percentage of homes with a mortgage, the average across the ten safest Labour seats is 25.6% — just over six points behind the UK as a whole. If you take out the three outliers of Liverpool Riverside, Birmingham Ladywood, and Tottenham, it is 29.3% — barely distinguishable from the UK average of 32.9%.

The idea that Labour can build a ‘coalition of the renters’ is also undermined by the stats. In the ten safest Labour seats the average proportion of private renters is 23.3% — exactly seven points more than the national average of 16.3%. Seven points is not insignificant, but it is not indicative of a massive disparity in housing tenure between Labour’s heartlands and the average UK constituency. What’s more, if you take away the outliers of Liverpool Riverside, Manchester Gorton and Tottenham, the average proportion of private renters in the safest Labour seats is 19% — only 3% more than the national average.

There are some qualifications to this argument: just because these are the ten safest Labour seats, it does not mean they are typical Labour seats. In fact, the five Merseyside seats are demographically very different from Labour heartland seats, with low numbers of university graduates and even fewer immigrants. But if housing tenure truly is the new dividing line in UK politics, we would surely expect to see more significant discrepancies in rates of mortgage-holders and private renters between the ten safest Labour seats and the national average.

And there are other reasons why the Left should not pin its hopes on an alliance of young, graduate, private renters riding to the rescue. As recently as the 2010 election, there was no difference between the proportion of 18-24s and over 65s voting Labour, both at 31%, and the Tories were only one percentage point behind Labour among 18-24s, on 30%. In 2015, while the age alignment that characterised the last two elections began to take shape, the Conservatives actually did slightly better than Labour among university graduates, with 35% voting Tory as opposed to 34% for Labour. (The Tories also had a two-point lead among private renters that year.)

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In the last six years alone, the Conservatives have moved Left on culture and won their first majority in 27 years. Four years later, they moved Right on culture and (somewhat) Left on economics and won an even bigger majority. It is not beyond their wit to pivot once more, moving Left on culture and introducing policies to help renters.

While it seems too politically difficult for the Tories to build millions of new homes, it is not too difficult for them to throw small and medium-landlords under the bus. They have already introduced pro-renter legislation such as the 2019 ban on tenancy fees; further legislation to make life-long renting as desirable as it is in large parts of continental Europe and North America could see the Tories make up lost ground among private renters. And if combined with another about-turn on cultural issues, as after 2005 and 2016, they could quickly catch up on Labour’s lead among young people and graduates.

There is an increasing sense that Boris Johnson’s days are numbered, and his likely successors — currently Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss are the safest bets — would represent a move away from the Red Wall-courting strategy of the last five years and a return to economic and cultural liberalism. The cancellation of the HS2 extension from Birmingham to Leeds might be the first sign of this coming pivot.

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But perhaps most importantly, the Left’s new focus on homeownership ignores the importance of geography and cultural capital: there are all kinds of advantages that middle-class and even poor renters in London and other big cities have over homeowners in small towns. As even the ‘It’s homeownership, stupid!’ school concede, the areas where you are least likely to be able to afford a house are those where all the prospects are.

As long as that remains the case, it is unlikely that homeownership will swing an election. In the meantime, the Left ignore the importance of class at their peril.

How appalling! How dare you pipe out ganache to pretend you are one of us! What will these dastardly immigrants think of next?

I don’t mean to belittle what happened in Liverpool on Sunday. Emad al-Swealmeen, an Iraqi asylum seeker, died when an improvised bomb went off in the back of a taxi. He was allegedly on his way to the Remembrance service at Liverpool’s vast Cathedral, the place where he was prepared for confirmation, photographed smiling beside the Bishop. Had he succeeded in exploding his home-made bomb as worshippers made their way from the remembrance of deaths past, he would have caused carnage. This was wickedness itself.

But the fall-out from this incident has laid the blame at the very church he was seeking to blow up. Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, is reportedly appalled that the Church of England is naively complicit in ‘gaming’ the immigration system, converting hundreds of asylum seekers as a way of helping them avoid deportation to countries where being a Christian could be a death sentence. But that simply isn’t true.

My church in South London welcomes asylum seekers. Until lockdown, we hosted a weekly surgery where asylum seekers, mostly from Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, could find support, including legal advice. I have been to court several times to speak on behalf of people in my congregation whose legal status here is uncertain. I have visited members of my congregation held in detention centres. And yes, I am unapologetically ‘on their side’.

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But to conclude from this that we are naive is like concluding that a defending barrister is gullible for presenting the best case for their client before the judge. The immigration authorities have their role and I have mine. It is not my job to do their work for them.

This is not naivety. Pretty much every day, I have someone on my doorstep telling me a tale. They have to go somewhere to see a dying mother; can I give them £20 for the train fare? Can I sign this document to say that they are churchgoers? These are the easy ones. Many stories are dark and frightening. Some are threatening. Posh middle-class people tell me stories too. Like many clergy, I have a bullshit detector honed by decades of such daily encounters.

Sometimes the story is true. But even if I think it is not, I still look for a way to help them. After all, something very real has driven them to ring a stranger’s door and ask for help. My job is to juggle suspicion with compassion. To be “wise as serpents and innocent as doves” was Jesus’s commission. And if I do find a way to help, it doesn’t mean I believe them. It’s because someone asked me.

So good on Elizabeth and Malcolm Hitchcott, the Christian couple who took al-Swealmeen into their home, and provided him with food and shelter. They were not suckers or liberal do-gooders. Jesus was not a sucker for sharing his table with the man who would betray Him to death. The Hitchcotts are heroes, models of Christian compassion. It is a part of the Christian faith that in the cosmic battle of good against evil, kindness will win the day. Indeed, this is the message at the very heart of the Christian story: faith is about exposure to risk and death. There is no such thing as risk-free Christianity.

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“Christians are more renowned for their bake sales and the ferocity of their whist drives than for their eagerness to commit mass murder,” wrote Tom Harris, former Labour MP, this week. But he misunderstands where Christianity fits into Sunday’s attack. If the question raised by this incident is the nature of true believing, then look to the Hitchcotts. They embody it.

Was Al-Swealmeen himself pretending to be a Christian? For the sake of argument, let’s assume he was. But tell me: how can his sincerity or lack of it be tested? He studied the Bible. He went to church. He asked to be baptised and confirmed. What am I supposed to be looking for to confirm whether he means it or not? Eyes too close together? A certain hesitancy of speech? Shall I hook up my confirmation class to a lie detector test? “I have no desire to make windows into men’s souls” said Elizabeth I. Quite right too.

But Priti Patel is not interested in such matters. Here is a telling comparison. Earlier this year, struggling for votes before the Knesset elections, the then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu raised the spectre of “false conversions” to Judaism, hinting that migrant workers from Africa might overrun Israel, using conversion to gain citizenship. This followed a High Court ruling that those who had converted to Judaism through the Reform and Conservative movements should be recognised as Jews and thus entitled to Israeli citizenship. What we heard from Netanyahu is the same spiel now offered by Patel: conversion is a way of avoiding border control. In both cases, it’s not about religion at all. It’s a political line designed to appeal to their political base.

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This forms part of a broader double-think concerning religion and immigration that often takes place on the Right. On the one hand, conservatives tend to value Christianity because they regard it as in some way constitutive — at least historically — of who we are as English, and of the West in general. Christianity is a part of our cultural identity. Thus, for instance, the Right might argue they are protecting Christianity by insisting upon more stringent immigration policies. Sometimes, this particular use of Christianity bleeds over into a subtle racist code for ‘not Muslim’. In recent years, cultural Christianity has become a part of Right-wing identity politics. Fake Christianity comes in many forms.

But when this sort of Christianity as culture bumps into the real thing — such as that of Elizabeth and Malcom Hitchcott — they run a mile from it. If the response to Sunday’s attack has exposed one thing, it’s that the Right wants the religion of choral evensong and of the kindly vicar’s village fete — not all that dodgy stuff about loving your enemies or turning the other cheek.

But the biggest irony is the attempt by a bunch of American owners to create a closed shop in European football. In the interest of money-making and in the name of laissez-faire capitalism, they want to drive competition out of European sport.

For those who never quite understood the motivations of the Glazers, John Henry or Stan Kroenke, the key is the parallel (or lack of parallel) between the Premier League and the way American sports operate. The American owners of Manchester United, Liverpool and Arsenal have always dreamed of replicating American conditions on European soil — and thus replicating the riches of NFL and Major League Baseball owners. The Glazers have done very well out of their NFL franchise, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and John Henry out of the Boston Red Sox.

But American rules are very different from European ones. Professional sports leagues in North America operate with a fixed number of teams, known as franchises. The franchisees have territorial rights, usually covering a large metropolitan area exclusively. New teams may enter the competition only by a vote of current members. The leagues operate in a closed system and do not have to contend with the inconvenience of promotion or relegation. Very occasionally a league may decide to grow by admitting a new team, the last new team to join the NFL being the Houston Texans in 2002.

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There is another fundamental difference between American sports and European football, and that is the way the transfer markets work. New players out of college in America are recruited through an annual draft. This is scrupulously fair, even egalitarian. The NFL draft is seven rounds long, with each team getting a pick in each round, in reverse order of the finish of that season. The worst team picks first, the second worst next and the champion picks last. But there is also a salary cap, which  places a limit on the amount of money a team can spend on salaries.

Although the original intention of this may have been to level the playing field, the effect has been to enrich the owners in a closed system where the surplus can only go to the owners or the players. The problem in Europe is that there is no cap on footballers’ salaries so that the players get to keep much more of the surplus. It also leads to a free-for-all in the transfer market, with new teams constantly vying to enter the top leagues and new owners trying to pour in money, which they can spend freely on transfers in order to buy success.

With precious few rules around ownership and suitability, the Premier League is a constant lure to questionable money, whether it be Middle Eastern sheiks or Russian kleptocrats, who know that with a big enough budget they can buy the top players and secure the prestige which comes with success. Cue Manchester City and Chelski, the parvenus of the Premier League.

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The lack of entry barriers is not specific to Europe — there are plenty of new owners in the US, too. The difference is that in Europe, without any restrictions, owners with enough money can be almost assured of getting their hands on a trophy — and this is what brings us to the closed shop “Super League” proposed by the Group of Six. It is a protectionist money grab intended to ossify a momentary status quo in the interests of the current owners, preventing even richer club-owners from muscling in.

And of course it is much worse than that. Football clubs are not just capitalist enterprises. Indeed they should not be seen as capitalist enterprises at all.  The leading clubs have illustrious histories — some, like Liverpool and Manchester United, with more than a share of tragedy, redemption and heroism. Clubs have souls. They play in a certain way. Manchester United always have brilliant wingers, and the No 7 is a hallowed shirt. Great Liverpool teams are built on a bedrock of dominant central defenders.

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Football clubs have their origins in working men’s clubs or factory teams, bringing together their local communities in shared support of their local side. In areas which have seen the downsides of globalisation, they are one of the last great symbols and anchors of local community, even if some have become global brands. They represent the sense of place. They enrich and unite their towns and cities. They give local pride.

This is no doubt why the German clubs have refused to take part. With its 50+1 model, the Bundesliga has created a much more balanced model for football club ownership, trying to achieve a balance between staying competitive financially while preserving the association with and respect for the local supporters.

It is no surprise that Boris Johnson came out so quickly against the Super League proposal. He may not be a football fan, but he understands intuitively that this is about much more than the game. It is about the ties that bind. It is also about the globalisation debate that defined Brexit. Unfortunately it may not be sufficient for the Prime Minister just to tweet on this.

I bear the scars of trying to challenge the Glazer takeover of Manchester United, through the Green and Gold campaign and the Red Knights. There is no way of regaining control of the club unless the owners want to sell, and the Glazers acquired control through a legitimate takeover process (albeit by saddling the club with huge debts). Private markets cannot rescue English clubs and it is fairly clear that the Premier League have no intention of challenging the current ownership model.

The only hope is that the latest proposal triggers a long-overdue review of football ownership rules in the UK, one that reconnects football clubs with their supporters, protects local communities and deters the predators from the other side of the Atlantic.

My old friend was surprised to see me so emotionally invested in the match. It was a bloody hard game not to get invested in: fixture congestion meant that Liverpool had to field the reserves — four teenagers started the match — and it ended up 5-5, with Liverpool winning on penalties. Eventually, perhaps because I was constantly distracted and staring over his shoulder, he asked me something that I’d never been asked before and which I had to think a lot about. “Tell me,” he said: “Explain it to me. Why do you like football? What do you get out of it?”

He, like me, had been a Warhammer-playing, model-aeroplane-building nerd at school; neither he nor I had had the slightest interest in football. Nerds of a certain kind have a sort of superior attitude towards sports in general and football in particular — they call them/it “sportsball”, and sniff dismissively about people competing to see how hard they can kick a ball. (“But if all that’s true, then football … is a game!”)

I was probably one of them; but in my late teens and early 20s I changed. I’ve now been a Liverpool fan for more than 20 years, having gone to university in the city. I’m a bit of a plastic, in that I’ve only been to a dozen or so matches in that time, but it matters to me; I am grumpier when they lose and happier when they win.

But I don’t think I’d ever stopped to think about why. It is objectively quite strange that I invest a small but real amount of my happiness in the number of times a group of men whom I have never met can put a ball into a net 180 miles away from me. It’s a medium-sized part of my identity; I say “we” won at the weekend, as though I had anything to do with it. It’s as if, in Mitchell and Webb’s words, I watched Raiders of the Lost Ark and started talking about how “we” had defeated the Nazis. 

Now that football’s back, and Liverpool are champions, I wanted to look at the answer I gave my friend; to try and interrogate what it is that I get from it. In short, I wanted to try to explain football to nerds.

The most obvious explanation for football fandom is that it’s a sort of emotional gambling. You bet a small amount of psychological wellbeing on whether your team will win or not. If they don’t, it makes you sad; if they do, it makes you happy. A good win in the early Saturday kickoff can genuinely improve the mood of the whole weekend; conversely, a crucial defeat can make me several percentage points less fun to be around. 

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There’s a bit of research that suggests that football fans suffer more pain from losses than they get joy from winning, and that’s been taken as meaning that football fandom is irrational, as in a rational actor would not make the choice to be a football fan in the first place; much as it is economically irrational to play blackjack, because in the long run the house always wins. I’m sceptical of happiness/wellbeing research, but intuitively that feels about right — nonetheless, I think it misses the point.

At the risk of ending up in Pseuds’ Corner, the utilitarian calculus around football fandom isn’t limited to the individual games, and whether they add or subtract to your Happiness Points. There’s more going on. 

First, here are long-term payoffs. Sure, most league seasons are a trudge, and most cup runs end in disappointment, but every so often something happens which you treasure forever, and which becomes part of your memory of a period of your life. A few games — England thrashing Germany 5-1 in 2001; Liverpool’s Miracle of Istanbul in 2005; last season’s extraordinary turnaround against Barcelona — become joyful little memories partly separate from the real-world stuff of work and family, that contain all their value within them.

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Then there is the obvious point that watching the games themselves has a joy in the form of watching people who are just incredibly good at their jobs. There is a skill to watching football — to appreciating the skill involved (much as there is a skill in appreciating concert pianists, a skill which incidentally I lack entirely). 

This isn’t football-specific. You can get that with anything; the format is somewhat irrelevant. I’m terrible at chess, but I can appreciate a beautiful move or a clever checkmate. If I happened to be a fan of Fortnite I could get it from watching Fortnite matches on Twitch. Or rugby. People being good at stuff is pleasing to see. And sport involves not just physical skill but mental; watching Steph Curry, the basketball star, effortlessly recall details plucked from any of the hundreds of games he’s played is honestly astonishing. His expertise (LeBron James does the same thing) allows him to view the game in such a high-level way that is opaque to those of us who don’t understand it. 

But I think there is a particular beauty in football, especially the sheer, feathery, delicate precision of a beautiful first touch. People talk too much about goals in football. A goal blasted in from 30 yards is impressive, but I think if you want to show someone the aesthetic beauty of the game, the best thing to show them is the way a footballer uses their body to control the ball. 

There’s a pragmatic reason to be a fan, too, which is that football is a sort of lingua franca, especially for men. Its ubiquity makes it valuable. If you’re fluent in it, you have a ready-made topic of conversation with a majority of men (and a significant minority of women) almost anywhere in the world. 

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I went on a river safari in Borneo, on honeymoon in 2012, and was chatting away to the Malaysian porters about how good a signing Robin van Persie was for Man Utd. When you’re put at a table at a wedding with a bunch of people you don’t know, there’s a good chance you’ll be able to strike up a conversation about what’s gone wrong at Arsenal in the last decade or so. Those embarrassing moments when someone comes to fix the boiler and middle-class dads find themselves dropping their aitches and saying “innit” become much less awkward if there’s a mutual appreciation of what a good job Jurgen Klopp’s done.

I have male friends who don’t enjoy football and it’s just that little bit harder for them to find conversation-starter topics with strangers. Relatedly, if you’re a boy who’s good at football, it’s a fairly cast-iron defence against bullying at school. It’s a bit cold-eyed, but for a boy in Britain, there are good practical reasons to be interested in football.

Football has been off for lockdown; Liverpool were just two wins from their first league title in 30 years. But it started again recently. And last week, Man City lost to Chelsea. They did so in hapless style, via a calamitous bit of defending from their own corner, allowing Christian Pulisic to run the length of the pitch and score, and a comedy handball on the line which led to a penalty and red card. That defeat ended even the mathematical possibility that City could retain the Premier League, and handed us the championship.

The circumstances make it all a bit surreal. Liverpool are simultaneously the earliest ever Premier League winners with seven games to spare — and the latest, with the league not decided until 25th June. But I’ll watch them be awarded the trophy at Man City’s ground when they play them on Thursday, and I’ll cheer and drink with friends and it’ll be fun. And that, I’ll explain to my nerd friend if and when I see him again, is what I get out of it.

Viewed from a certain perspective — admittedly very much the perspective of the Sheikh Mansour — City have done what every other super club has done: invested in excellence, got results, done a bit of good along the way. “Were you not entertained?” he might well ask. His team is a thing of on-field grace, power and beauty that simply would not exist without him.

To conjure that from the state that Manchester City were in circa 2007, when they hadn’t won the league for 40 years and were “a sleeping giant” — that tremendous euphemism for mismanagement, misfortune and decay — is quite something, however rich you are. One man’s sports washing is another’s act of mutually beneficial regeneration.

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Though hypocrisy exists in that perspective, there is plenty on the other side, too. UEFA, for example, whose Financial Fair Play (FFP) rules have been breached by City, are not simple regulators but a commercial entity competing for sponsorship and other funds under what Manchester City’s chief executive Ferran Soriano has called “very advantageous conditions”.

And then there’s Paris St Germain, another super club. Its president Nasser Al-Khelaifi is the chairman of Qatar Sports Investments — a subsidiary of a state-controlled wealth fund (Qatar being fractious rivals of the UAE, of which Sheikh Mansour’s seat Abu Dhabi is the capital). Al-Khelaifi is also the chairman of BeIN Sports, which as a rights holder for the Premier League indirectly steers the business of Manchester City.

There’s also Juventus, owned by the Agnelli family and funded by Fiat, an arrangement similar to that of City and PSG. The club president Andrea Agnelli sits on UEFA’s executive committee and, reports The Athletic, “is said to have brought Nasser Al-Khelaifi into the fold”.

City, according to that report, have prepared a dossier on the financial practices of PSG, Juventus and Bayern Munich and are ready to go full scorched earth  if they need to. Their disdain for UEFA was made plain in the email dump that has been used to establish their guilt. One from the club’s lawyer Simon Cliff read: “Khaldoon [Al Mubarak, the City chairman] said he would rather spend £30 million on the 50 best lawyers in the world to sue them for the next 10 years,” than pay any fine imposed for breaching FFP. Jonathan Wilson of The Guardian reported that Simon Cliff had joked, “one down six to go” on hearing of the death of a member of UEFA’s investigatory chamber.

Part of City’s raging hubris emanates from the email dump, as the many thousands of documents in it were hacked and leaked by this story’s Assange figure, Rui Pinto, a Portuguese national working out of his bedroom in Budapest. Pinto was extradited last March and now resides in a Lisbon prison awaiting trial.

So yeah, it isn’t easy being Manchester City, caught up in all of this and more.

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It isn’t easy being a Manchester City fan, either — a simple love of a football club has become a complex geopolitical issue. Howard Hockin wrote a blog post titled The Fatigue of Being a Manchester City Fan:

“You could set your clock to the routine. Log on, deal with human rights accusations, brunch, debate about empty seats, light lunch, argue about net spend, cup of tea, slag off a journalist, log off, watch Pointless. Rinse and repeat.”

It isn’t easy, and it doesn’t sound like much fun either.

There is injustice in sport, and there is injustice. There is the last minute goal, the dodgy decision, the lip-out putt, the lucky punch, the drugs-cheat opponent(s). Even mad old darts has its much-loathed bounce-out. It’s the run of the balls, the rub of the green, the volatile unlikeliness of it all that so often provides the magic.

In this context, injustice plays a valuable role. In others, the search for advantage is endless and ongoing and patrolled only sometimes. ‘The line’ is there to be pushed, and always has been. “Sit your opponent with the sun in his eyes,” advised the 16th century chess player Ruy Lopez. “They’ve come to watch me bat, not you umpire,” lectured Dr Grace. “It was the hand of God,” concluded Diego Maradona.

There is a certain moral clarity about the use of performance-enhancing drugs, but none when it comes to other advantages, from genetics to money. And football, above all, is unrealistic. These are businesses that compete to sign up 10-year-olds and pay out almost 60% of their turnover in wages. The FFP concept exists not to level the playing field but to save them from themselves: left alone, the mania for success has and will result in self-destruction. Football clubs are like giant, seductive fruit machines, the jackpot always one more pull away.

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When the legislation was introduced by UEFA, then-President Michel Platini said:

“Fifty per cent of clubs are losing money and this is an increasing trend. We needed to stop this downward spiral. They have spent more than they have earned in the past and haven’t paid their debts. We don’t want to kill or hurt the clubs; on the contrary, we want to help them in the market.”

You might as well tell hedge fund managers not to take risks. Michel Platini has now been banned from all “football related activity” until 2023 for corruption.

Sport is many things, but it is not egalitarian. At its best, in the arena, it can be a meritocracy. But however monotonous the successes of some, it craves its Davids and its Goliaths, one of its longest-running storylines. It needs its plucky minnows and sleeping giants to retain that sense of scale and the possibility of an upset.

Last year, Amazon Prime screened a glistening box set about Manchester City, part of its All or Nothing series. The title doesn’t appear to be ironic, but one glimpse revealed that there wouldn’t be much nothing going on. The most voyeuristic and enjoyable parts were shot in the training complex at the Etihad Campus, a part of Sportcity and home to the club’s ‘world headquarters’. The language itself tells a story.

The inside looks like a cross between a six star hotel on a fake island and something from that Don DeLillo novel about secret desert facilities in which you can live forever. The players stalk it like snow leopards, sleek organic machines programmed by the manager, Pep Guardiola, a man who gives inspirational talks to everyone from the kit man to Khaldoon Al Mubarak as he passes by. The players banter, sure, and laugh too loudly, but the whole thing is conducted in a state of hushed awe at its own existance. Like the best of all sport, there is something both pointless and moving about it.

Above all, it is the opposite of egalitarian. Perhaps it suits the new Britain in its overwhelming belief in its own excellence. Everything is against Manchester City, but then, in football, everyone is against everyone else all of the time. Clubs will never poll their fans on which centre back they should purchase, or ask for supporter approval for a Christmas Tree formation away from home. Equality as a concept is in one of its unpopular phases, and football has often mirrored that.

There is a thought that City should be stripped of their 2013-14 Premier League title, but that idea is compromised, too. The team that finished second, Liverpool, paid £1m in compensation to City for hacking into their scouting database. It’s a cliché to say you couldn’t make it up. You could make it up, quite easily. But in the case of football, you usually don’t have to.

It is a pity because Lord Heseltine could have offered uniquely useful advice to the re-branded One Nation Conservative Prime Minister as he seeks to embrace his new MPs from constituencies, many in northern England, that traditionally voted Labour.

Dispatched to Liverpool after the 1981 Toxteth riots in his role as Environment Secretary, Heseltine became at his own insistence minister for Merseyside. As such, he persuaded Margaret Thatcher not to give up on the city — as some, including the then Chancellor, Geoffrey Howe, were advocating — and became its champion.

He helped to drum up investment not just for a selection of high-profile projects, including an international garden festival, Tate Liverpool and the regeneration of the Albert Docks, but for jobs and decent housing. He persuaded business from inside and outside the region that Liverpool had a future, while in London, he was grudgingly praised for managing to cut through Whitehall bureaucracy and get departments to work together on his Liverpool projects.

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Since then, Heseltine’s Liverpool phase has received only intermittent attention, not least perhaps because it does not sit well with the prevailing image of heartless Thatcherism. Yet Liverpool did not entirely forget and he received the freedom of the city in 2012 — regarded as a quite remarkable gesture from a staunchly Labour council to a Tory peer. But there was criticism at the time and since, in particular that after the initial 12 months London’s interest started to wane, that more junior ministers and civil servants were sent to meetings, and that the initiative lost steam.

The ups and downs are well charted in Batting for the Poor, the just-published biography of the then Anglican Bishop of Liverpool, David Sheppard. And there were plenty of misgivings and disputes along the way.

Without Heseltine, though, it is more than likely that the city would have been left to its decline and that any regeneration would have been much longer in coming, if it ever did. The point is that Margaret Thatcher was open to persuasion; the Government’s purse-strings were partially untied, and having a convinced, articulate and well-connected champion in central government made a difference. This is a precedent that Boris Johnson should heed, with or without direct counsel from Lord Heseltine.

If something similar is attempted with the “new blue” constituencies, it will be crucial to avoid any impression of neo-colonialism; any envoy has to be careful not to behave as any sort of viceroy. But the benefit of having named and recognisable champions taking responsibility for long-term regeneration, people with a sense of mission who can serve as champions of their designated town or area, identify the opportunities and unlock the funds, cannot be contested.

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As Lord Heseltine looks at it now — and said at a conference in London earlier this year — he sees his work in Liverpool as some of the most important of his career, not only in its own right, but in the example it set for renaissances elsewhere.

Nonetheless, that initial intervention was crucial in making Liverpool what it is today. Its city centre and the regenerated docks area are flourishing. The waterfront is as sparkling and distinctive as that of any erstwhile port city in the world. If you fly in to Liverpool, you arrive at John Lennon airport; it has capitalised with huge success — though some might feel ad nauseam — on the Beatles and their global fame, adding £82m a year to the local economy.

When I visited Liverpool at the very end of November, the central streets thronged with shoppers (the proof of their seriousness in their bulging bags); there were tourists; hotels were full. The blight described by so many reporters on pre-election profiles of the places where they grew up — John Lichfield’s report on Stoke-on-Trent being a classic of its kind — and reinforced for me by a visit I paid last year to Nottingham, where I spent the first 12 years of my life, does not apply to the main areas of Liverpool.

Where so many cities have approved insensitive redevelopment that seems only to have made incipient decline worse, Liverpool managed a massive, largely low-rise and outdoor redevelopment of its central commercial area that has brought the downtown back to life.

Politically, Liverpool has also held somewhat aloof from the regional pack. Along with Manchester, it was one of few northern cities to vote Remain (58 to 42 per cent) in the 2016 EU referendum. And in last week’s general election there were no defections to the Conservatives; none at all. All of its 14 constituencies remained faithful to Labour. Greater Manchester, in contrast, saw five seats change hands from Labour to Tory.

A recent study, one that made a bit of a stir in journalistic circles at least (UnHerd critique here ), suggested that Liverpool’s political exceptionalism, and specifically its vote for Remain in 2016, might be explained in part by the city’s 30-year long boycott of The Sun newspaper that followed its coverage of the 1989 Hillsborough disaster. The academics’ thesis was that the absence of the eurosceptic Sun, and the shift of many of its readers to the pro-EU Mirror, might have helped to convert what had been a euro-sceptic city.

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Among the flaws in their argument would be that Manchester voted even more strongly for Remain (60-40), that as a strong Labour-supporting city, Liverpool may have followed the party in its shift from being eurosceptic at the first, 1975 EU referendum to becoming pro-EU from the Kinnock and Blair years.

More to the point it’s possible that as a major port city, which has now graduated from cargo to cruises, Liverpool looks outward in a way that many cities elsewhere in the country might not. At least as significant may be the Irish dimension, which not only gives the city some of its distinctive character, but also a special relationship with the island of Ireland, both through direct ferry connectiions and continuing family links.

What is more, its successful regeneration, along with Liverpudlians’ fierce sense of their own identity, may have encouraged its voters to take a more positive view of the present than their fellow-countrymen in the Brexit-voting towns left behind.

This is another reason why Liverpool should perhaps be recognised as the current exception that could prove a future rule. If Boris Johnson is serious about his One Nation ambitions, and if he wants all those new votes he won last week to be more than just “lent” for the short-term purpose of “getting Brexit done”, then he could do worse than mobilise a team of special envoys to fan out across the country with the task of adapting the Liverpool model for elsewhere.

Of course, that could present something of a personal challenge for Johnson, whose history of relations with Liverpool has not been plain sailing. Most famously, when editor of The Spectator, he was dispatched there on the orders of Tory leader Michael Howard to apologise for an article in the magazine that said Liverpudlians liked to wallow in self-pity.

Then again, how better to start mending fences not just with Liverpool — presenting it as a template for successful regeneration — but with the erstwhile minister, now Tory grandee, who staked his personal and political reputation on the possibility that it could be done.

The trouble is that it’s very hard to study. If you see that readers of Right-wing papers are more likely to vote for Right-wing parties, you can’t conclude that the one causes the other; it could just be that people who vote for Right-wing parties enjoy reading that they’re right to do so.

That’s why there’s been some excitement about a new report, not yet published or peer-reviewed but available in preprint form. Its authors saw the opportunity for a natural experiment: the impact of Merseyside’s post-Hillsborough boycott of The Sun on Eurosceptic attitudes in the region.

In 1989, 95 Liverpool FC fans were killed in Britain’s worst football stadium disaster; a 96th, Tony Bland, died four years later, having been in a coma caused by brain damage from the crush. The Sun blamed the disaster on the Liverpool fans themselves, accusing them of urinating on police and picking the pockets of the dead, under a banner headline of “THE TRUTH”.

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How politics makes us irrational

By Tom Chivers

It has since been shown that none of this was true and that the disaster was the result of failings by the police and other emergency services. Liverpudlians, appalled by the Sun’s coverage, boycotted the newspaper – not just Liverpool fans, but their Evertonian rivals and the rest of the city, too.

The authors of this new study reasoned that, since the boycott was mainly in the Merseyside area and the rest of the country was largely untouched by it, they could see the impact of the Sun’s Eurosceptic campaigning on attitudes to Europe. They looked at responses to the statement “Britain should continue its EC/EU membership” in the British Social Attitudes surveys between 1983 and 2004, and compared those in the 15 Merseyside constituencies to the rest of the country.

The study says that Sun readership on Merseyside post-Hillsborough fell from around 55,000 daily sales to about 12,000, although that is an estimate because News International did not release regional figures. It sounds believable to me, though: I went to university in Liverpool and most newsagents didn’t stock it; you’d see “don’t buy The S*n” written on walls or the backs of replica football tops. It was very much despised there, and understandably so.

But the study then goes on to say that the boycott led to an “8 percentage-points to a 15 percentage-points decrease in Euroscepticism” in Merseyside. And this is what caused the excitement. The authors argue, and the papers have reported, that this shows how sustained media campaigns have major impacts on public opinion.

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I am pretty sceptical. For one thing, when you look in the paper at the graph of attitudes towards Europe on Merseyside, Euroscepticism was declining pre-1989, and it continued to decline post-1989. There doesn’t seem to be a noticeable change at or shortly after 1989 itself; it levels off in the 1990s. The “control” group – a “synthetic Merseyside”, or conglomeration of other English areas weighted for similarity to the Liverpool area – also declines in Euroscepticism, just rather more slowly, and then increases for a bit in the early 1990s. Eyeballing it, at least, it doesn’t scream “Hillsborough did this” to me; it looks like some longer-term trend.

I’m also intrigued to note that, in the actual 2016 referendum, Liverpool (the city, not Merseyside) voted 58.2% Remain. Manchester, just up the road and (they’ll both hate me for saying this, but) relatively similar economically and culturally, voted 60.4% Remain. If somewhere between 8 and 15% of that Liverpool vote is due to the boycott, what drove the Manchester Remain vote? After all, they still read The Sun there. Alternatively, you could just say that most big cities tended, outside the North-East, to vote Remain. Or you could point out that both are big university towns, and that young people tend to be less Eurosceptic.

For another thing, the effect seems enormous. Let’s assume that the sales figures were correct, and that it did indeed drop from 55,000 daily readers to 12,000. If all 43,000 daily readers who stopped taking The Sun immediately became Europhiles overnight that would represent about 3% of the total population of Merseyside.

If we only look at the population of Liverpool itself – around the 450,000 mark – it’s about 10%, but the study does say it’s looking at Merseyside sales. And, still, it would need pretty much every single former Sun reader to have started as a Eurosceptic and become a Europhile for the 8 to 15% figure to make sense.

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This doesn’t mean it’s not true. You could tell some complex story about knock-on effects: several people reading the same newspaper, or the Eurosceptic at the pub suddenly going quiet and no longer spreading the word to his or her friends. But I am sceptical.

Of course, we still need to explain why Merseyside started out as more Eurosceptic than the country at large and ended up less. I could reach for my favourite explanation, which is “a lot of this stuff is essentially random and any explanation will be post-hoc storytelling”. But I think I might indulge in some post-hoc storytelling of my own, actually.

Liverpool is, traditionally, a hugely Labour city; of the 15 Merseyside constituencies, 12 are held by Labour, and two by former Labour MPs who have left the party since 2017; the seaside area of Southport, which is well to the north of the city, is the only one held by a Tory.

Liverpool seriously hates the Tories and it especially hates Margaret Thatcher. In the 1975 referendum, the Conservative party – led by Thatcher – largely backed a Yes vote to join the EU; the governing Labour party, led by Prime Minister Harold Wilson, was split. Wilson backed Yes but (as in the 2016 referendum) Cabinet collective responsibility was put aside and several ministers campaigned for No.

In general, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Labour was the more Eurosceptic of the two main parties. And, in Liverpool in particular, the Labour council was heavily influenced by Derek Hatton of the Militant Tendency, who voted No in 1975. It was only in 1983 that Neil Kinnock made Labour explicitly pro-Europe, but Militant and Bennite Labourites still fought back (Denis Healey and others formed the Labour Against The Euro group as late as 2002, although that was specifically against joining the single currency). Meanwhile, Tory Eurosceptics became ever more vocal over the same period.

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I can’t find a way of plotting levels of Labour Euroscepticism, but you could easily tell a story in which Liverpool’s wariness of European integration decreases at the same rate that Labour’s does, until around the John Major period when Conservatives were tearing themselves apart over Europe. At this point, even the previously Europhile Thatcher has swapped teams.

Suddenly, if you’re a Labour-voting Liverpudlian, you see that the hated Tories are associated with the anti-Europe side and Labour with the pro. So you answer the polling question accordingly.

Is that really what happened? Maybe? It’s a just-so story I came up with a few minutes ago. All we really know is that Merseyside shed its Euroscepticism more quickly than the rest of the country. That’s hardly surprising, in itself – it’s an ethnically diverse, cosmopolitan port city, it has three universities, it’s proudly Left-wing; I’m not sure there’s anything to explain.

But we like explanations, and we particularly like explanations that provide us with a clear antagonist who we can blame. After all, if the boycott made Liverpool pro-Europe, then The Sun made the rest of the country anti-Europe, and we can blame it for the referendum result. And in these Brexit-riven days, people will cling to this, even though the study doesn’t prove it was The Sun wot dun it.

Today, Liverpool is in the papers for the right reasons. Liverpool FC’s long awaited victory in the Champions League doesn’t just feel like a triumph on the pitch – it’s a validation of Jürgen Klopp’s inclusive, hard-working and always-improving culture; it’s a celebration of a football team that reflects the best parts of the city that (give or take a few Everton fans) loves them.

This victory and the efforts leading up to it reinforce my belief in Liverpool. It makes me all the more convinced that it’s where the future of the nation could and should lie. But I’m also aware that, in spite of today’s headlines, if you want to understand Liverpool’s appeal, you have to slough off a long history of bad press. As long ago as 1849, Herman Melville was complaining: “Of all sea-ports in the world, Liverpool, perhaps, most abounds in all the variety of land-sharks, land-rats, and other vermin, which make the hapless mariner their prey.”

And then, towards the end of the twentieth century, people really began to stick the boot in. The city endured long stagnation and then a sharp descent into the mass unemployment and deprivation of the 1980s, the Toxteth riots and the infamous Derek Hatton years – when the Militant tendency took control of Liverpool City Council.

Liverpool became a byword for urban decline, bad planning, and hatefully ugly modern architecture. It was the butt of endless bad jokes about moustaches, tracksuits, accents and thieving. A few good jokes too. Bill Bryson took a train to Liverpool in Notes from a Small Island. “They were having a litter festival when I arrived,” he wrote:

“Citizens had taken time off from their busy activities to add crisp packets, empty cigarette boxes, and carrier bags to the otherwise bland and neglected landscape.”

You get the gist. I’m as guilty as anyone for making people think ill of Liverpool. The city made the top 10 of Crap Towns, a book about the worst places to live in the UK, which I edited in 2003. Back then, when I was canvassing opinion, hundreds wrote in to complain about the city and the rut it was in. They were especially frustrated because the city had fallen so far.

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My correspondents pointed out how fantastic Liverpool could still be, with its rich culture, with its history of innovation and rebellion, with its astonishing architecture (to give just one illustration: it has more Georgian buildings than any other UK city except Bath). “I think it has the potential to be a visionary city,” said one contributor – if only someone would come along to help it fulfil its potential.

Fortunately, the people of Liverpool did just that. There was its triumphant year as European Capital of Culture in 2008 – when it was proved that Liverpool could not only compete with the best of them when it came to inspiration and artistic flair, but that hundreds of thousands of people would flock to its world-beating museums, galleries and music venues.

Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of pounds began to pour into Liverpool from the EU. Buildings around the historic waterfront and throughout the city have been brushed up, restored and saved for future generations, public spaces have been fitted out with fountains, trees and seating, the public transport infrastructure has been radically improved, there are new cruise liner terminals, and thousands of skill-building projects have been initiated around the city. Its magnificent centre looks cleaner and brighter than at any point in its history.

And it doesn’t just look better, it feels better. When I was growing up in Lancashire in the 1990s, I was frightened of Liverpool. It was the big bad neighbouring city. The place where my 80-year-old relative got mugged, where people were scared to leave their cars in case their radios got stolen, of wailing sirens and a low constant throb of trouble. When I visited, I barely noticed how impressive so many of its buildings were, because I was too busy keeping my head down, concentrating on getting to where I was going unscathed.

Now it feels like one of the most walkable and welcoming cities on earth. The change has been psychological as much as architectural, a British version of the renaissance in New York after it cleaned up its act. Which feels right. The cities have always been closely tied – and look so similar that Liverpool often doubles as the Big Apple in Hollywood films. When you visit Liverpool nowadays, you also get that same stiff neck from staring up at so many imposing buildings as you do in Manhattan. The same realisation that you’ve just been walking around saying “wow” when you probably should be getting somewhere.

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It’s been quite the turnaround – so just imagine how much more Liverpool could achieve if it were made into the UK capital. That feels like justification enough for making the move. There’s a strong moral case for continuing to undo the years of neglect that have still left large parts of the city poverty-stricken and underpopulated. There’s a similar case to be made for having a capital in the North, bringing improved transport infrastructure, investment and political awareness to a region so criminally neglected by Westminster.

But there’s an even stronger practical case for shifting the political centre of the UK to Liverpool. Liverpool still has thousands of empty houses – not to mention countless commercial properties and vast acres of office space. They could comfortably and stylishly accommodate Parliament and all its attendant personnel. Those people would find themselves in a city that already looks like an international capital, that has top class universities, excellent schools, and world-class art galleries and museums.

They’d also be somewhere fun. Somewhere that now has a thriving cultural scene, exemplary food and drink, and that has always had the kind of nightlife that inspires local kids to form bands and conquer the world.

Somewhere that is putting the problems of the past behind it and has earned a better future. If you don’t believe me, go there.