There are few as obsessed with identity as is an anti-identitarian. David Swift – who has previously written two books, the first about how the British left is too performative about identity and the second on how identity is keeping us apart – now considers Scouseness in this clumsy popular history.
Swift, who is from Liverpool, finds himself in the bind of disagreeing with identity in general while attempting to anatomise, quite lovingly if testily, Scouseness. (The term Scouse is thought to derive from the Norwegian stew lapskaus, a dish adopted by the city.) He’s more comfortable with the anecdote than the argument. This is a symptom of the deeper problem with the book, in that it lacks the requisite level of analysis to make sense of the material.
Take, for example, Swift’s assertion that “the importance of Irish immigration to the city can be overstated”. The evidence he provides seems to undermine this position. Approximately three-quarters of Liverpool residents are of Irish descent (while four-quarters of The Beatles had Irish ancestors).
TP O’Connor, an Irish nationalist from Athlone, was MP for the Liverpool Scotland constituency between 1885 and his death in 1929; other Irish nationalists sat on the city council. Sectarian tensions, often directly related to Irish issues, led to numerous riots; the city’s postwar suburbanisation and the consequent intermixing of Protestants and Catholics is thought to have contributed to normalising things. A growing sense of collective Liverpudlian identity must have helped.
Swift seems uncomfortable talking for too long about cultural diversity. The Chinese community gets a couple of paragraphs. His coverage of the Toxteth riots in 1981, which started in a largely black district, is cursory and begins, perversely, with sympathy for the police whose brutality during the events is well-documented.
The riots were enough to get the attention of Michael Heseltine, whose efforts to embed an entrepreneurial, deregulated culture in the post-riot city have arguably defined contemporary Liverpool (Heseltine is mentioned just once in the book). The Militant tendency, which faced down Thatcher’s government in the mid-1980s and lost badly, deserves greater consideration.
One emerges from this book still wondering what sharpened this idea of the city as a place apart. Without Toxteth and Militant, the mutual sense of sharp division between nation and city, which found its ultimate form in the horrors and aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster, can’t be properly understood.
