Holed below the Waterline

In late​ 2004, Boris Johnson cowered in a ‘cold, damp three-star hotel’ in Liverpool, worried that if he went outside he’d be attacked. He had embarked on what he called ‘Operation Scouse-grovel’, after the magazine he edited, the Spectator, published an (unsigned) editorial describing Liverpudlians as having ‘a peculiar, and deeply unattractive, psyche’: ‘They see themselves whenever possible as victims, and resent their victim status; yet at the same time they wallow in it.’ The editorial repeated malicious lies about the victims of the Hillsborough disaster, which Johnson – admitting to ‘mistakes of facts and taste’ – now acknowledged as untrue. He was in the city to apologise, but he couldn’t find anyone willing to accept his apology.

After the disturbances in the Toxteth neighbourhood in 1981, Michael Heseltine, then a member of Thatcher’s cabinet, argued that ‘tactical retreat, a combination of economic erosion and encouraged evacuation’, had been going on in Liverpool for decades, and was at least partly the result of government policy. He thought he could turn the city around, and was gunning for the job of ‘minister for Merseyside’. By contrast, the chancellor of the exchequer, Geoffrey Howe, suggested to Thatcher that the ‘option of managed decline’ shouldn’t be discounted: Liverpool’s problems were the most intractable of any urban area in Britain, and it might be better simply to write it off. Heseltine carried the day and the Tories committed considerable resources to the city. Sam Wetherell agrees with Heseltine that postwar governments presided over ‘tactical retreat’, but thinks that what Thatcher and her successors did was little more than a continuation: ‘Liverpool’s continued purpose was never fully resolved.’

In his first book, Foundations: How the Built Environment Made 20th-Century Britain, Wetherell suggested that ‘the built environment can be seen as a giant museum, exhibiting the decrepit and shabby remains of prior means of capital accumulation along with obsolete visions of society.’ In his second, he makes Liverpool a test case for this claim. The city’s explosive growth followed the construction of a deep-water port in 1715. Soon it was a centre of the British imperial maritime economy. It became the largest slave-trading port in Europe, yet survived Britain’s abolition of the slave trade in 1807, and by the mid-19th century its docks handled 40 per cent of global trade. But decline set in after the First World War. By the 1970s and 1980s, the churning forces of capitalism and imperialism had receded, leaving the city stranded and struggling. As Wetherell writes, the ‘mystifying tendency for the spaces of everyday life to be dissolved and remade by capital had stalled … Jobs and money had melted into air, but jetties, warehouses and uninhabitable terraced houses remained stubbornly solid.’ Liverpudlians lived in and alongside these storehouses of obsolescence.

Unlike many recent histories which have represented 1945 as the moment ‘social democracy’ triumphed in Britain, Wetherell is sceptical of the Attlee government’s achievements. In Foundations, he characterised the political settlement of the mid-20th century as ‘developmental social politics’, aimed at boosting production and productivity (especially of male, industrial workers), catering rationally to the needs of consumers (generally supposed to be women) and constructing a homogeneous national community (which meant disciplining people of colour). It was racist, sexist, heteronormative and not particularly democratic. A similar pessimism pervades Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain. The end of total war brought celebrations in the streets but also a state-led campaign to expel Chinese migrants. The Chinese population of Liverpool had grown significantly during the war, but after its end, government officials and police agreed that Chinese seamen who refused to work on one-way voyages back to China should be rounded up and deported. Many of these seamen had married local women and started families, but the officials agreed it shouldn’t make any difference – ‘Many of the wives were of the prostitute class.’ Nearly two thousand Chinese men complied with the demand that they work their way back, and eight hundred were forcibly deported. Many wives and children believed they had simply been abandoned.

Meanwhile, the growth of massive new suburban council estates, replacing inner-city slums, broke up communities and isolated women and children in nuclear family homes with indoor bathrooms but few shops or amenities nearby. One of those who moved said it was like ‘Outer Mongolia’. People of colour were unlikely to be allocated one of these new homes: when they did get social housing, it was generally in older buildings and less attractive locations. The only area from which reports of racist abuse didn’t flood into the Merseyside Community Relations Council was Toxteth, the deprived inner-city area where Black Liverpudlians were concentrated.

The strategies of postwar governments for rescuing Liverpool’s workers – decasualisation on the docks and the channelling of manufacturing industry to Merseyside and other ‘development areas’ – amounted to a temporary lifeboat mostly for white male workers. Docker registration, introduced in 1947, ensured that, as long as they made themselves available for shifts, registered dockers now received a guaranteed wage and, once they had earned this out, extra payments for extra shifts. Local boards controlled the list of registered dockers; in the early 1960s one commentator suggested that getting a son into Eton was less complicated and less dependent on the ‘old boy network’ than getting a son onto the list.

Many women worked in and around the docks, in canteens, pubs and offices. Their work, however, was low-paid and few were unionised. None of the women who took on casual cleaning jobs on the ships was ever offered a guaranteed minimum wage. Their work went unrecognised, for the most part, by male dockers, one of whom told an interviewer in 1985 that women ‘had absolutely nothing to do with dock work’.

Merseyside’s designation as a ‘development area’ in 1949 was meant to reduce Liverpool’s dependence on trade and services and create a modern manufacturing base on its periphery. There were some notable successes: in the early 1960s, Merseyside gained three new car factories – Ford, Standard Triumph and Vauxhall. Cars came to Merseyside, and they transformed it. After an abortive plan in the early 1950s to create a network of heliports across the region, public transport was on the back foot. Some modes (buses and trains) were scaled back, others (electric trams and the overhead railway) eliminated altogether. A new underground rail system planned in the mid-1960s was only partially completed. Cars were the future. In the early 1950s one in fifty Liverpudlians owned a car; two decades later, it was one in eight. Roads and car parks proliferated – ‘dead public space’, as two urbanists put it – and a second road tunnel under the Mersey, the Kingsway, opened in 1973.

‘We know that progress is inevitable,’ complained residents who had been displaced from houses and new council flats in order to make way for the Kingsway tunnel, ‘but we think the authorities could have selected another site.’ When the Welsh-speaking village of Capel Celyn was flooded to create a reservoir to serve Liverpool, Labour and Tory politicians spoke in similar – often explicitly utilitarian – terms. ‘Everyone deplores the fact that in the interests of progress, sometimes people must suffer,’ the long-serving Labour MP Bessie Braddock said. ‘But this is progress.’ Modernity would be imposed by the authorities, in conjunction with the private sector.

Before long, though, this deference to progress began to falter, as the economic lifeboat sent out to rescue the white working classes was revealed to be holed below the waterline. Postwar industrial strategy left places like Merseyside reliant on branch plants of multinational corporations, and when subsidies dried up or labour proved cheaper elsewhere, these disappeared as quickly as they had arrived. In 1969, officials projected that Merseyside would gain 37,400 manufacturing jobs by 1991; in fact, it lost 92,000. Deindustrialisation, driven in part by technological change and growing demand for services, hit Liverpool particularly hard, and at just the same time as dock work evaporated. In 1972, all of Liverpool’s inner-city docks closed; a decade later, just a few hundred workers were left operating container terminals in Seaforth. According to one company’s estimate, containers cut shipping costs by 94 per cent and required much smaller workforces. Commodities that weren’t amenable to container shipping – particularly foodstuffs such as sugar and wheat – weren’t imported in postwar Britain in anything like the same volume, as the country underwent a push towards national self-sufficiency in food.

The vast dock complex built when Liverpool was at the heart of imperial power and British trade networks was abandoned. The new industrial estates created by the postwar social-developmental state were struggling. Obsolescence was layered on obsolescence. In 1972, 11 per cent of the land in parts of inner-city Liverpool was empty or derelict. A government report noted that ‘packs of half-wild dogs scavenge among bags of household refuse … children build fires with cardboard cartons and the abandoned timber from demolished houses … there is a pervading smell of old town gas from the partly buried gas pipes of demolished houses.’ By the end of the decade, nearly a third of the River Mersey was so polluted that nothing could live in it. Thatcher wasn’t the author of all Liverpool’s problems, though her monetarist experiment (which I discussed in the LRB of 8 May) exacerbated them by doing huge damage to Britain’s industry in the early 1980s. Her sub-Powellite rhetoric – ‘People are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture’ – did nothing for race relations. As early as 1971, a Toxteth councillor, Margaret Simey, predicted that the police would provoke a ‘civil war’ in the city. In 1981, her prediction proved accurate.

Toxteth was disproportionately Black and disproportionately unemployed. The police force was disproportionately white and racist, and police harassment of Black people sparked the disturbances of July 1981. They proved the most widespread and damaging instance of urban unrest in Britain since 1945: 462 people were arrested, 781 police officers injured and 150 buildings destroyed. One young Black man had his back broken by a police vehicle; a young disabled white man was killed by a police van accelerating into the group in which he was standing.

Wetherell rightly points out that the term ‘riot’ is political. Of course, his preferred alternative, ‘uprising’, is also a political choice (I doubt he would call 2024’s Southport riots an ‘uprising’). Confrontation with the racist police force certainly lay at the heart of the unrest, and some buildings were targeted for political reasons, including Thatcher’s Tea and Coffee House, run by the Conservative Association, which had its windows smashed. But there was also indiscriminate looting along Lodge Lane, where many businesses were locally owned; this was blamed by locals on white outsiders, but the claim is impossible to prove. It’s clear that the thrill of turning the normal order upside down was intoxicating; one participant, recalling the events thirty years later, said he was ‘trying to restrain the euphoria, even after all this time I can feel a rush … To see the power of people, a community united as one with one target … and they won! Can you imagine that, to see them running, to see officers actually getting up and running away?’

The police responded with extreme force. Tear gas, previously used in the empire, and deployed in Northern Ireland since 1969, was now used on the mainland. Canisters of pressurised gas that functioned like small bombs, emblazoned with the words ‘designed for barricade penetration only … do not fire at any person,’ were shot directly into the crowds. It’s amazing no one was killed. In the days afterwards, police raided the homes of suspected participants, dragging out men and beating them, yelling racist slurs and arresting or intimidating anyone who protested. The Tory government and right-wing press declared that the disturbances were the result not of material deprivation and racist policing, but of innate criminality. Some said that the presence of white people on the frontlines showed that racism couldn’t be a factor. Stuart Hall argued, conversely, that when a ‘whole community’ was ‘silently consigned to the scrapheap’, ‘something of a black-white common front’ could result.

The Hillsborough disaster of 1989 serves for Wetherell as proof that the white working classes had indeed been consigned to the scrapheap. Liverpool were playing Nottingham Forest in the FA Cup semi-final at the dilapidated Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield. The officer in charge, chief superintendent David Duckenfield, was grossly underprepared. When a crush developed at the entrance for Liverpool fans shortly before kick-off, Duckenfield refused to delay the start time, but belatedly opened one of the exit gates, letting fans flood into the Liverpool end, where signs pointed them towards a tunnel and two central standing pens. The stands were separated from the pitch by eight-foot metal fences, and the pens, created to stop crowd surges on the terraces, were divided by high barriers; each had a gate onto the pitch, but this was bolted during matches to prevent pitch invasions. No stewards were monitoring the influx. While people were still sitting down reading newspapers in the quiet pens on either side, the central pens were becoming catastrophically overcrowded. Nevertheless, the match got underway.

Liverpool fans who had been delayed at the entrance continued to stream into the central pens, adding to the overcrowding. With each surge, those at the front were pressed against each other and against the metal fences. The accounts of survivors are harrowing. One, Adrian Tempany, who became a journalist and investigated the disaster, recalled:

Every minute or so, fifty or sixty people would wheel as one under the pressure from behind; as they moved, impaling someone’s chest or ribs on metal or flesh or bone, a voice would cry out, then fall silent. The crowd would settle again, helpless and exhausted, trying to draw breath and scream … [people] seemed to be falling, sinking beneath us.

He thought he was about to die. Fans in the two side pens, who could see what was happening, started dragging people out of the central pens over the high dividing fences. One of the gates to the pitch burst open several times but police slammed it shut. When Duckenfield – who had a view of all the terraces from the control tower – ordered officers to go down and investigate, they found not a pitch invasion but spectators ‘unconscious, blue, covered in vomit’. One officer recalled that ‘the first three or four rows within my view were dead.’ Another, getting no response to his radio request that the game be suspended, ran onto the pitch to halt it. Police prevented ambulances from getting to the pitch.

Duckenfield claimed that drunk Liverpool fans without tickets had invaded the ground and caused the crush: it was a lie he later had to retract, but the damage was done. Ninety-four people died that day and three more afterwards. A few days after the disaster, the Sun claimed – baselessly – that Liverpool supporters attacked police and medical personnel, and stole from the dead. The paper is still boycotted in Liverpool.

After decades of campaigning, a government-sponsored report and two inquests, the grotesque failures of policing that caused the disaster are now well established. (The current Labour government’s proposed ‘Hillsborough Law’ is intended to ensure that victims and their families should never again have to endure such a protracted process in order to establish the truth about state failures.) Wetherell is just as interested in the conditions that led police to act as they did and allowed Duckenfield’s lie to flourish. Hillsborough was the culmination of two decades of football disasters which, Wetherell argues, must be understood in connection with deindustrialisation and the loss of relatively secure jobs for working-class men. Football had become less popular, fans younger, overwhelmingly male and rowdier. Policing had become increasingly punitive and the architecture of grounds more hostile. As the working classes became economically superfluous, the sport of the working-classes was demonised in the press and its fans rendered disposable.

One​ of the most high-profile assaults mounted against Thatcherism in the 1980s came from Liverpool’s council offices, and was spearheaded by Militant, a Trotskyist group whose strategy was to infiltrate the Labour Party, take control of its local branches and use its machinery to win power. Its experiment in Liverpool began in 1983 and lasted for three years. As Wetherell says, ‘the corpses of their lost causes are exhumed almost annually by politicians and journalists’ to tell a ‘morality tale about the futility of a surfeit of ideological zeal in the face of hardened economic facts’. His account sets out to demolish a slew of myths.

Postwar Liverpool was dominated by a Labour Party machine, but by the 1970s the machine was breaking down. The city’s tax base had been destroyed by deindustrialisation, the closure of the docks, unemployment and the dispersal of people and businesses to suburbs and satellite towns. Under Thatcher, its income from central government was slashed. A third of the city’s workers were in the public sector, many of them employed by the council. The city could not afford cuts in jobs and services and the Militant-led Labour administration promised to protect both. Its battle with Thatcher was founded on a refusal to raise taxes and reduce spending in order to set a balanced (and thus legal) budget. Its leaders, most prominently the charismatic Derek Hatton (described by another Liverpudlian as ‘your typical bolshie Scouser, good-looking, very uppity … overpassionate’), insisted that central government contributions to, and rules for, local government finances were political choices. This was hugely popular. A non-Militant Labour supporter recalled large demonstrations in support of Militant’s approach: ‘You had that sense, people were with you. The city was politicised.’

Militant’s bigger strategy was to tackle the city’s crisis of jobs and housing with an ambitious housebuilding scheme: five thousand new council homes were put up, their design influenced by the right-wing urbanist Alice Coleman, who was, as Wetherell observes, probably the only person both Thatcher and Hatton admired. Coleman thought that people naturally wanted to live in nuclear family homes with driveways and ‘defensible space’, and that high-density housing led to ‘homosexuality and other deviations’. Militant agreed. ‘Trotskyist suburbia’ was traditional, prim, ‘almost prudish’. Some of it was even built by Wimpey. Militant’s supposedly radical plan amounted to little more than Keynesian deficit spending. Its adherents believed that women’s, lesbian and gay, or Black rights were a ‘petty bourgeois’ diversion, and white households were somewhere between two and four times more likely to get one of Militant’s new council houses than Black applicants. The tragedy wasn’t that Militant was too radical but that it was too narrow-minded. When its leaders finally ran out of room for manoeuvre, they were fined and banned from holding public office for refusing to set a legal budget. The field was left open for Thatcherism.

Tory plans for revitalising Liverpool were based mainly on using incentives – typically low tax and reduced regulation – to attract private money. The Merseyside Development Corporation, the twin of the corporation set up to transform London’s docklands, turned the old Victorian docks in the city centre into a hub for leisure, shopping, culture, heritage and art. An enterprise zone was created in the peripheral town of Speke and a freeport in Seaforth. A national garden festival held in 1984 was a vehicle for cleaning up a vast swathe of brownfield land for future development. The festival discouraged political gestures: when a group called the Diggers (after the proto-communists of the English Civil War) proposed to create a pond with a hand emerging from it clutching a UB40 (unemployment benefits) form, they were told they should put on a quiz about the local area instead.

Football was late to the regeneration game. In the Thatcher years, it seemed like an unlikely candidate for gentrification, but after Hillsborough a series of reforms aimed to make the game more family-friendly; following the creation of the Premier League in 1992 it became bigger and bigger business. Everton’s new stadium is now the centrepiece of the redevelopment of Liverpool’s northern docks.

History, by contrast, was an early and willing player. But this was a version of history that, in Wetherell’s phrase, was ‘ambient and imprecise, re-enacted rather than interrogated’. That Beatlemania would form one base of Liverpool’s tourist economy might seem, in hindsight, obvious, but in the 1970s it wasn’t. The Cavern Club, the venue that launched the Beatles (and where a young Cilla Black got a job as a cloakroom attendant, hoping to make it as a singer), closed early in the decade, and was soon demolished to make way for a ventilation shaft serving the city’s new underground railway. When that plan faltered it was turned into a car park. Only in the early 1980s did Cavern City Tours kick off Fab Four tourism, ultimately building a replica of the club next door to the original site. The Beatles Story Museum opened in 1990 and the National Trust later purchased Paul McCartney and John Lennon’s childhood homes.

Liverpool’s history as a port has also been central to its economic revival, but this legacy is more contested. In 1984, the Maritime Museum opened in an old warehouse on the Albert Dock, with a mission to recount the city’s ‘proud history’; the first tall ships parade took place the same year. In 1992, a ‘Columbus Regatta’ to celebrate the explorer as ‘discoverer’ of the New World involved more than a hundred sail ships. The suppression of histories of enslavement, violence, expropriation, genocide and ecocide came in for increasing criticism, and in 1991 the Maritime Museum announced a new slavery exhibition, which grew into the International Slavery Museum. But in pursuing its laudable goal of globalising the story of slavery, the museum has inadvertently enabled some (white) Liverpudlians to reduce the city’s own role in transatlantic slavery to, as one resident put it, a ‘mere footnote’.

‘All factories entail some degree of mystification,’ Wetherell writes, and ‘Liverpool’s history factory is no different’: its commodities ‘circulate, for the most part, among people who know little about the conditions in which they were made’. By the early 2020s, Liverpool had 31 million visitors a year, and 35,000 people worked in tourism in the city, as many as worked on the docks in their heyday. The city’s past has been turned into a resource to be mined in the service of a ‘macroeconomic mission’, and difficult parts of that past are, accordingly, filtered out. Meanwhile, under the influence of free-market experiments and culture-led regeneration, inequality has got worse, not better. Liverpool has the highest incidence of ‘deaths of despair’ (from suicide and substance abuse) in England.

Wetherell​ began working on his first book in 2014, a moment ‘when historical time still felt suspended’ after the 2008 financial crisis. He wrote in the conclusion that in the intervening six years, ‘history has begun moving extremely quickly’: the ‘ideas and structures that hold neoliberalism together’ seemed to be ‘starting to dissolve’ and the future felt ‘radically open’. This was the moment of Brexit, Boris Johnson’s rewriting of the class map of electoral politics, the heady enthusiasm and angry divisions of the Corbyn years, and the disorientation of many on the left in the wake of Corbyn’s final defeat. History seemed to be moving fast but no one foresaw the coming disruption of a global pandemic. By the time Foundations came out, in late 2020, the world looked rather different.

In Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain, Wetherell writes that ‘historical time’ now ‘appears to have glitched and stalled’. The pandemic, that disruptor par excellence of globalised capitalism, had the paradoxical effect of causing the Labour Party to revert to a blithely optimistic Blairism. What’s needed, by those lights, isn’t a radical shake-up of our political economy, or the financial sector, or public services, or the global terms of trade, or action on climate change, but simply a series of sensible technocratic fixes. A third runway at Heathrow and a few cuts to disability benefits. Keir Starmer rejects the idea that there’s anything fundamentally broken about Britain’s political economy, is wary of grand visions and refuses to conjure anything that could be called ‘Starmerism’. This sort of attitude from the prime minister is surely what determines the current affection on large parts of the left for Gramsci’s phrase ‘the old is dying and the new has yet to be born.’

Given the gloomy picture he has painted in the preceding 350 pages, Wetherell’s call for hope at the end of Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain feels like optimism of the will. He does offer some encouraging historical examples: rent strikers on the Tower Hill estate in 1972; feminists helping Irish women seeking abortions in Britain; Black radicals pulling down a statue of William Huskisson (who opposed the abolition of slavery within the empire) in 1982; the founders of Britain’s first large-scale needle exchange, who saved countless people from Aids in the 1980s. But these were small, grassroots efforts. Wetherell wants to suggest that ‘under the right political conditions’ obsolescence could perhaps be ‘a type of freedom, a prerequisite, perhaps, for imagining a better world’, but he never makes good on this promise. His account of Liverpool anatomises the failings of successive political projects, left and right, moderate and radical, national and municipal. But it’s less convincing when it comes to imagining an alternative.