“The first half of the 1980s was perhaps the city’s lowest point, philosophically and economically. Scousers were labelled as thieves in the press, the city’s working class moved ever leftwards as
Margaret Thatcher was feted and the culture gap between Liverpool and the rest of
England was stretched to breaking point.”
The phrase “managed decline”- shocking in its conservatism - was revealed when the
Hillsborough campaign for justice for the 98 victims of that stadium disaster was entering its third decade in pursuit of official accountability and an acknowledgement of the facts.
The race to blame Liverpool fans for the disaster, the smear campaign by The Lying Rag newspaper, the police cover-up and lies left a permanent hurt and anger across the city. It echoed with the sneering establishment portrayal of Liverpudlians; the Scouse ‘calm down’ stereotype invoked in old
Harry Enfield sketches and mimicked by community secretary
Michael Gove in an addled television interview he gave just a week ago.
“So that sense of not belonging to the rest of the country, those elements were sewn not at the FA Cup last Saturday but four decades ago,” Grant continues. “It makes them sick, the sense of entitlement, it makes the blood boil. There is a section of society that will never touch or experience difficulty - possible hunger, being cold, not having a worthwhile job and not maybe much to look forward to in life. And our current prime minister epitomises that. He has no sense of feeling for the people around him.”
When Grant thinks about the pop cultural portrayal of Scousers, he can see that it has created a stigma.
“But it also deepened that sense of otherness.”
It was that quality which attracted Amann to the city. He grew up in Lincolnshire, the son of a Trinidadian who came to Britain in 1958 and worked in the British royal airforce. By the time Paul first came to Liverpool to study in the 1990s, he was already a steadfast Liverpool supporter because of his father.
“When I was a kid, he idolised
Bill Shankly and
Bob Paisley. I grew up with that. I think it was the values that Shankly espoused. A lot of people talk about Bill Shankly as a bastion of invincibility but one of my favourite quotes is one his granddaughter Karen told me: ‘We are pro-Liverpool but we are anti-nobody.’
“My father faced more than his fair share of prejudice coming from the West Indies and he is a very generous man and he adopted that generosity of spirit that he would also dole out with the cheeky competitive side that Shankly had as well.”
Shankly-isms have become part of England football folklore and the sharpness of wit has travelled through the generations and forms one of the characteristics of the Kop. Rogan Taylor, an academic and a former chair of the Football Supporter’s Association, is the last word on Kop lore.
His stand-out moment, as
he told The Irish Times in an interview in 2005, was at Tommy Smith’s testimonial, two nights after the European Cup win in 1981. The Kop crowd, mischievous and still exultant, sought to liven the evening by singing instructions to other parts of the ground. They chanted for the Anfield Road terrace to sit down.
“And bugger me, but they all sat,” Taylor said. “Then it sang for the main stand to rise and all the older season ticket people rose. Then it called on the director’s box to stand and you could see what was going on there, that it was a statement of power and letting everyone know where the heart of this club was located.
“And you could see all the old camel coats thinking, ‘fuck it boys, we better stand up here.’ And then, see, the Kop took it that bit further and it did this genius thing where it sang for itself to sit down. And then the Kop sat. It was the most powerful piece of street theatre I ever saw in my life.”
The Wembley protest was not about theatre as much as about being heard. The low key but unwavering support of Jürgen Klopp ran a straight line to the clear-eyed socialist tenets by which Bill Shankly lived his life. Klopp’s £15 million salary is the most obvious example of the untethering of financial limitations within the English game.
However, his social and political comments are infrequent and seem in perfect synchronicity with those of his adopted city.
“He gets it. He is hand in glove,” says John Grant. “The Irish get it. The Irish come here for weekends and they just get the city. I think the same thing happened to Klopp.
“When he first came here, he went out with his wife to have a beer and thought he wouldn’t be bothered. And I think he was out for a smoke and all these girls were coming up to his missus and were saying, we’ll take you shopping, we know all the good places.”
In 2022, the good places in Liverpool - shopping or otherwise - are in abundance. The city has taken immense strides since the sinister consideration of a graduated lapse into dereliction as evinced in that infamous government letter.
Why should we take pride in Englishness when Englishness does not take pride in us? I can understand that. I am also pro Liverpool and anti-nobody
The docklands are sparkling tourist attractions. The city centre is booming. The football teams are worth half a billion pounds to the wider economy. The improvements are general. When
Paul Amman was growing up, his parents wouldn’t allow him to go to football games to shield him from inevitable racist abuse.
Since he set up Kops Out, his engagements with Liverpool have demonstrated the club’s sincere intent to make sure that the anthemic You’ll Never Walk Alone is adapted as an article of faith so that none of their fans feel marginalised.
“To me, that is special. They actually engage with that.”
His meeting with Klopp was broadcast on Liverpool forums and the effect was instant.
“Because so many more decent fans felt empowered to stop others. And also, the vast majority of fans didn’t even realise that singing the chant was being homophobic. And many not only stopped chanting it, they then became allies. And we owe a huge debt of gratitude to so many genuinely lovely fans for that.”
Although Amann has been living in the city for 20 years, his local friends often tease him that he isn’t a ‘proper’ Scouser. But the feeling of being at a remove from England seeps into anyone living in the city. Assertions of exceptionalism leave Liverpudlians open to jibes - as was the tone of a 2004 Spectator piece written by Boris Johnson in which he took the city to task.
“’Self-pity city’. Slurs like that stick in the memory,” says Amann. “It creates a sense of: why should we take pride in Englishness when Englishness does not take pride in us? I can understand that. I am also pro Liverpool and anti-nobody. I might not have been booing had I been at Wembley. But I wouldn’t have told anyone not to boo.”
Faith
This weekend, another football league season closes in the city. On Thursday night, Everton edged out
Crystal Palace 3-2 in their nail-biting battle for Premier League survival. On Sunday, Liverpool must win their final game of the year and then hope that
Aston Villa, led by the Kop’s enduring boy-idol
Steven Gerrard, execute the shock of the season against
Manchester City.
Even in a club with an unreasonable faith in football magic, that outcome is highly improbable.
“If you are first, you are first,” went one of Bill Shankly’s famous aphorisms. “If you are second you are nothing.”
Perhaps. But if Liverpool do finish within a point of City, they’ll have done so by playing some spellbinding football and losing just two league games since last August. Keeping pace with this City team, whose limitless financial reach was recently evident in the £51 million signing of Erling Haaland for next season, feels like a miracle.
Liverpool’s celebrated 85/86 league-cup double winning side had the luxury of drawing 10 and losing six games over that league season. Shankly’s third and final league title, in 1973-74, was achieved with seven defeats and 10 draws. The margins for error are close to non-existent.
And there’s an awareness of Liverpool, even as tens of thousands prepare to head to Paris for the Champions League showdown against Madrid, that this is a dream-time, revolving around the unique alchemy created by Klopp.
It has been a rare season, irrespective of what happens over the coming week. In a fretful anxious year, the city’s biggest football team has been a vital source of joy and escapism.
“Yeah, that phrase, the opiate of the masses,” says Paul Amann. “This is a thriving city in parts but we have tens of thousands living in abject poverty worrying about whether they can heat their homes and eat. People do not feel that the state is acting in a way to effectively support people. People have been failed in so many different ways.
“Football is a wonderful, lovely distraction from everyday life and it is the life of the banter of the city. Not everyone here supports Liverpool, of course! The footy does lift your spirits. When we got the second trophy, the vibe was terrific. And we have a team of players who want to do stuff to address the social issues of the city, like
Andy Robertson and
Trent Alexander and many others who come from dead working-class backgrounds who want to do right by this city.
“These are not photo opportunities. They do things all the time.
Sadio Mane has just sponsored a scholarship at LU management scheme. And when you put that with the football, well, it has been brilliant, yeah. It felt like it was slipping away at some points during the season. And the way we have fought back. It’s still City’s to lose. But it’s been a hell of a ride.”
