Liverpool's reputation for militant politics, strikes and street protests
goes back at least to the 18th century, when seamen rioted for higher wages and
against press-gangs. The growth of the port in the 19th century created a large
but casually-employed workforce of dockers, who shared some of the attitudes and
popular image of the mariners. Bosses and trade unions alike found both groups
hard to organise and control. The workers in turn made a virtue of their lack of
job security and developed a culture of individualism and resistance to
authority. Liverpool's industrial relations were often more vocal and
confrontational than those of manufacturing towns with their strong, craft-based
unions and paternalistic factory-owners.
Party politics in Liverpool also diverged from patterns evident in most
British cities. A small, wealthy Liberal elite managed the port and its trade
for much of the 19th century, but the day-to-day politics of the town were
dominated by the religious divide between Protestant Toryism and Catholic Irish
Nationalism. Demonstrations and rallies often descended into riots, especially
in response to conflict in Ireland during the early 20th century. Tense
relations between Liverpool's ethnic minority communities and the police led to
the Toxteth riots of 1981, exposing the failure of the city's political classes
to deal with urban blight and social division.
The peculiar political culture of the early 20th century meant that Labour
was slow to develop as a major force, especially in comparison with other
northern cities. Not until 1955 did the city council have a Labour majority for
the first time. In the 1980s, the Militant Tendency's confrontation with both
the Thatcher government and the national Labour Party continued Liverpool's
tradition of political exceptionalism. The defeat of Militant and the
disqualification of its councillors symbolised the shift of political power away
from town halls and toward central government, and was also an important turning
point for the Labour Party on the way to the creation of New Labour in the
1990s.
As a world port, Liverpool's local conflicts have often been linked with
events elsewhere, and vice versa. Liverpudlians rioted against German
shopkeepers when Lusitania was sunk by a U-boat in the Great War. The Spanish
Civil War polarised opinion in 1930s Liverpool, with a range of left-wing
organisations, including the Unity Theatre, agitating against fascism while
far-right groups supported Franco and welcomed Oswald Mosley to Merseyside. The
Mersey docks dispute of the 1990s sparked sympathy action in ports worldwide.
Attempts to diversify Liverpool's economy from the 1930s onward created a
significant manufacturing sector on the outskirts, but the collapse of much of
this in the 1980s recession added another set of negatives to the popular image
of the city. Peripheral housing estates built to replace waterfront slums
suffered from a lack of amenities and jobs, and rising crime rates. Dock work,
finally decasualised after decades of struggle, was effectively abolished by the
containerisation revolution. Yosser Hughes's mantra 'Gissa job' in Boys from the Blackstuff (BBC, 1982) summed up a time
when Liverpool's old and new economies both failed at once, and when the current
regeneration of the city would have seemed a hopeless fantasy.
Graeme Milne
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