How history, politics and football shaped Liverpool's complicated relationship with England
When Liverpool play at Wembley, the national anthem is often met by loud booing from parts of the club's support. The reaction is reported, condemned and then usually reduced to one of two explanations: Liverpool supporters are either courageously anti-establishment or habitually disrespectful.
Neither explanation is sufficient.
I do not like hearing the national anthem booed. This article is not intended to excuse it, celebrate it or claim that everyone associated with Liverpool shares the sentiment. Its purpose is to understand why the behaviour occurs and why it has proved so persistent. Disapproval may be justified, but disapproval alone explains nothing.
One qualification is essential before going any further: not all Liverpool supporters boo. Those who do are audible; those who remain silent are not. Even those attempting to sing may be overwhelmed by the greater force of a sustained boo. The sound establishes that the sentiment exists and is strongly held. It cannot tell us what every individual in the stadium believes, still less what every Liverpudlian believes.
I am also old enough to remember when supporters commonly adapted the national anthem into “God Save Our Team”, irrespective of which club they followed. It was not peculiar to Liverpool: Arsenal supporters sang it, while Tottenham produced the wonderfully specific “Hod Save Our Team” during Glenn Hoddle’s time at the club. Liverpool and Everton had their own versions, but this was part of a wider terrace culture in which familiar songs were borrowed and rewritten. Over time, that custom seems to have receded and largely been forgotten. The relationship between football crowds and the national anthem was therefore never as solemn or straightforward as present-day reactions sometimes suggest.
Human beings habitually turn visible behaviour into collective identity. Britain “voted for Brexit”, although 48 per cent of those who voted chose Remain and millions did not vote at all. Liverpool supporters “boo the anthem”. Scots wear kilts. A complicated population becomes a single character because the label is easier to remember than the variation within it.
"Scouse, not English" should therefore not be read as a declaration issued on behalf of an entire city. Some Liverpudlians identify strongly as English and British. Others feel Liverpudlian first. Many hold several identities without finding them contradictory. The phrase matters not because it is universal, but because it expresses an estrangement strong enough to be heard.
Scouse or Liverpudlian?
I do not particularly like being called a Scouser. I prefer Liverpudlian. That may be partly generational: when I was younger, "Scouser" was rarely said to me without at least the suggestion of a sneer. It could carry an entire inventory of assumptions about intelligence, honesty, class and criminality.
Many younger people have reclaimed the word. They have grown up in a city with a restored waterfront, major universities, an international visitor economy, global music and sporting identities, and a confidence that was much harder to sustain thirty or forty years ago. They have every reason to use "Scouse" proudly. Many have little idea how recently the physical and psychological landscape was different.
I remember the Liver Building blackened by decades of grime. I remember the Albert Dock filled with silt, looking less like a future international attraction than the abandoned landscape shown in Boys from the Blackstuff. I remember flying from the old Speke Airport terminal to Jersey in 1976. These are not sepia memories of a lost golden age. I would not choose to return to the Liverpool of my childhood. They are simply points of comparison.
The difference between the city then and now is not a matter of civic mythology. It is visible in the buildings, the population and the economy.
A city facing outwards
Liverpool’s relationship with England has long been complicated by geography. The city faces west. Its growth came through the sea and its connections with Ireland, the Americas, Africa and the wider world. Migration, particularly from Ireland, shaped its families, religion, speech, politics and sense of itself. My maternal grandfather, born in Dublin in 1890, was part of that inheritance.
That connection was visible in football. Jack Charlton’s Republic of Ireland teams contained many British-born players who qualified through Irish parents or grandparents. John Aldridge was born in Liverpool and Jason McAteer in Birkenhead, while Ray Houghton, Ronnie Whelan, Steve Staunton and Kevin Sheedy all had strong connections with Liverpool or Everton. Their presence reflected something familiar across Merseyside: people could be born in Britain, live in Britain and still regard an Irish identity as a genuine part of who they were.
At its height Liverpool could plausibly claim to be the second city of the British Empire. Its docks moved people, raw materials and manufactured goods through a trading system that reached across the world. That history cannot be celebrated without confronting what helped create it. Liverpool was a major slaving port. Between 1700 and 1807, ships sailing from Liverpool carried an estimated 1.5 million enslaved Africans across the Atlantic; in the 1790s the city controlled around 80 per cent of the British slave trade. The wealth embedded in Liverpool's institutions and architecture was partly created through profound human suffering. National Museums Liverpool
The evidence remains written into the city’s map. William Brown Street commemorates the merchant who financed the buildings now occupied by Liverpool Central Library and the World Museum. Brown became a major importer of cotton produced by enslaved labour, while his family owned enslaved people on plantations in the United States. Bold Street is named after Jonas Bold, a sugar merchant and banker whose business partners were involved in trafficking enslaved Africans. Parr Street commemorates Thomas Parr, an enslaver and banker who owned a ship built to carry as many as 700 captives. Tarleton Street recalls a family involved in the trade across three generations; Banastre Tarleton later used his position as Liverpool’s MP to oppose abolition.
Yet the street names also preserve the opposition. Roscoe Street is named after William Roscoe, the Liverpool lawyer, writer and MP who supported William Wilberforce’s motion to abolish the trade. His position was so unpopular among many of the city’s commercial interests that he was confronted by a mob when he returned from Parliament. Liverpool’s history was never morally uniform: the trade had powerful defenders, but it also produced people prepared to challenge it from within. Historic England William Brown Street plaque
This matters because the city cannot demand that others confront their history while presenting itself as permanently innocent. Liverpool has been exploited, neglected and misrepresented. It has also benefited from empire and exploitation. Both belong in an honest account.
The port later became critical to Britain's industrial economy and war effort. Liverpool was not on the edge of the national story. It was one of the places through which that story was made.
When the work disappeared
The collapse was not caused by one person or one election. The docks were transformed by containerisation, changing trade and new technology. Companies rationalised production, moved operations or failed. Some industrial losses preceded Margaret Thatcher's government and some would have occurred under any government.
That qualification should not disguise the scale of what happened or the political choices made in response.
Liverpool and the surrounding area once contained a dense ecosystem of recognisable employers. There were the docks and associated warehouses, shipping and repair work; Tate & Lyle's sugar refinery; Dunlop at Speke; British Leyland; Meccano on Binns Road; Plessey and GEC; Crawford's biscuits; Hartley's jam; and Lucas Aerospace.
These were not merely names painted on factory gates. They organised daily life. They provided apprenticeships, skilled and semi-skilled work, social clubs, sports teams, friendships and a credible route from school into adulthood.
My father worked at Lucas and my mother worked part-time at Crawford's. In 1978 Lucas Aerospace employed 1,780 people in Liverpool. Its Victor Works was subsequently closed, with some work transferred and a much smaller operation established at Huyton. The new factory was expected to employ at least 500 people. Hansard
Crawford's enormous Fairfield Works on Binns Road had produced biscuits including custard creams, Penguins and 54321 bars. United Biscuits closed it in 1983. Tate & Lyle announced the closure of its Liverpool refinery in 1981 with approximately 1,800 direct jobs at risk, in addition to the wider effects on the docks and connected food industries. Hansard
The dates matter. British Leyland's Speke plant closed in 1978 and Dunlop's closure was being debated in Parliament in March 1979, before Thatcher entered Downing Street. During that Dunlop debate, MPs listed closures and redundancies affecting Plessey, Western Ship Repairers, GEC, Lucas, British Leyland and Rank Hovis. One Liverpool constituency was said to have lost about 8,000 jobs in two years. Hansard
Thatcher did not begin every process that damaged Liverpool. What changed under her government was the governing philosophy applied to that damage.
Thatcherism was not one woman
"Thatcher did it" is historically inadequate, even though Thatcher led the government, selected its direction and authorised its policies. Thatcherism was a collective political project.
Keith Joseph supplied much of the intellectual assault on the post-war settlement. He and Thatcher founded the Centre for Policy Studies in 1974, helping to develop the programme of monetarism, privatisation and reduced trade-union power that would later bear her name. Geoffrey Howe, Thatcher's first chancellor, translated much of that thinking into economic policy.
Norman Tebbit gave its view of unemployment its most memorable expression. Recalling his unemployed father, he said: "He didn't riot. He got on his bike and looked for work." It became remembered as an instruction to the unemployed to "get on your bike".
To communities watching factories close, it sounded less like encouragement than an insult. Government policy had helped dismantle the economic geography around which their lives had been built; they were then told that geography was their personal problem. A worker might leave in search of employment, but a family, a house, a school, a community and an entire city could not simply get on a bicycle and follow.
Liverpudlians did move. The city's population fell from approximately 595,000 in 1971 to 492,000 in 1981, following decades of slum clearance, planned overspill and outward migration. Families moved to places including Kirkby, Huyton, Skelmersdale and Runcorn; many remained culturally Liverpudlian while disappearing from the City Council's population count. Others left the region because work had disappeared.
By 2001, Liverpool's population had fallen to approximately 439,000, little more than half its interwar peak. "Get on your bike" therefore failed even on its own terms. People moved, but their departure did not replace the factories, sustain the communities they left behind or create work for those who remained.
The ideology converted structural decisions into tests of personal character. Those able to relocate were adaptable. Those left behind were too often portrayed as dependent, obstinate or deficient.
Managed decline and the minister who rejected it
The phrase "managed decline" is commonly attributed to Thatcher herself. The history is more precise and more revealing.
Following the 1981 disturbances in Toxteth, it was Geoffrey Howe who warned against committing scarce resources to Liverpool and argued that managed decline should not be forgotten as an option. The language confirmed the city's darkest suspicion: that people in Westminster could discuss its abandonment as an administrative calculation.
But the government was not intellectually uniform. Michael Heseltine reached a markedly different conclusion. He argued that government could not simply withdraw and wait for market forces to repair the damage. As the unofficial "Minister for Merseyside", he drove the creation of the Merseyside Development Corporation and supported the reclamation and redevelopment of derelict dockland, including the revival of the Albert Dock.
Heseltine deserves explicit credit. Thatcher authorised his intervention, and the work complicates any account in which her government pursued only one approach to Liverpool. The city was simultaneously being discussed as ground from which the state might retreat and treated as a place in which intervention could create a different future.
One of Heseltine's most conspicuous projects was the 1984 International Garden Festival. Its purpose was to reclaim polluted and derelict land, attract visitors, improve Liverpool's national image and demonstrate that abandoned industrial ground could have a post-industrial use. Around 3.4 million people attended. National Museums Liverpool
The festival was a genuine achievement, but not an economic replacement for the docks and factories. Much of its employment was temporary and the site later struggled to find a sustainable use, with large areas falling into neglect before the restored gardens reopened in 2012. It demonstrated both the possibilities and the limitations of the emerging regeneration model: government could reclaim land, change appearances and attract visitors, but it could not recreate permanent employment on the scale that had disappeared.
One of the festival's more curious legacies now stands outside Liverpool John Lennon Airport. The Yellow Submarine was constructed by approximately 80 apprentices from Cammell Laird. It connects three versions of the city in one object: the industrial skills of Merseyside shipbuilding, the cultural power of the Beatles and the international visitor economy that followed.
The airport tells a similar story. Today's Liverpool John Lennon Airport developed from the old Speke Airport rather than simply replacing it. A new runway opened in 1966, a modern terminal replaced the original 1930s building in 1986, and the airport was renamed after Lennon in 2001. The Art Deco terminal from which I flew in 1976 survives as a hotel. The infrastructure changed, but the previous city was not entirely erased.
Liverpool was not always right
Balance requires more than admitting that deindustrialisation had several causes. Liverpool's political leadership also made decisions that damaged the city.
The Militant-influenced Labour council of the 1980s arose from a real conflict over central-government funding and imposed spending limits. It built houses and defended services in a city of severe need. It also pursued a confrontation that brought the council close to insolvency and issued redundancy notices to its workforce as a financial tactic. Even supporters later acknowledged that this was a serious error.
National coverage frequently stripped away the funding dispute, the housing programme and the conditions producing the conflict. Liverpool became a convenient representation of municipal extremism and disorder. But it would be equally misleading to pretend that every damaging image was invented in London. The council handed its opponents material they could use.
The same honesty is required in football.
At Heysel in 1985, 39 people - mostly Juventus supporters - were killed after Liverpool supporters charged towards them and a wall collapsed amid a wider failure of stadium organisation, segregation and policing. Fourteen Liverpool supporters were subsequently convicted of manslaughter. The tragedy cannot be reduced to prejudice against Liverpool. Liverpool supporters played a direct and shameful part in what happened.
All English clubs were then excluded from European competition for five seasons, with Liverpool excluded for six. The collective ban was imposed in the context of a much wider English hooliganism problem, but Liverpool became its immediate cause and symbol. Other clubs and their supporters paid a price, most painfully Everton, who had just won the league and the European Cup Winners' Cup and were denied the opportunity to compete for the European Cup at their peak. The resentment was understandable. In a city already divided by football, it left another grievance that has never completely disappeared.
Acknowledging Heysel does not weaken the case over Hillsborough. It establishes the principle on which the Hillsborough campaign itself depended: responsibility must be assigned according to evidence, not tribal loyalty.
Hillsborough and the destruction of trust
The Hillsborough disaster on 15 April 1989 ultimately claimed the lives of 97 Liverpool supporters. In 2016, an inquest jury concluded that the 96 people then recognised as victims had been unlawfully killed. Andrew Devine, who suffered catastrophic injuries at Hillsborough and died in 2021, was subsequently ruled to have been unlawfully killed and became recognised as the disaster’s 97th victim.
The disaster was followed by a sustained attempt to direct responsibility towards the supporters themselves. Police accounts were altered. Claims about drunkenness and ticketless fans were circulated. The Sun printed the most notorious allegations under the headline "The Truth".
For people outside Liverpool, Hillsborough could initially appear to confirm an existing story about football disorder and a troublesome city. For Liverpool, the response demonstrated how readily institutions, politicians and sections of the press could use that story to protect themselves.
The Hillsborough Independent Panel reported in 2012 that supporters were not responsible and confirmed the central failure of police control. In 2016, new inquests concluded that those who died had been unlawfully killed. Andrew Devine, who died in 2021 from the injuries he sustained, was subsequently recognised as the 97th victim. Independent Office for Police Conduct Government statement on the inquests
The importance of Hillsborough extends beyond the findings. Families had to fight for decades to establish facts that public bodies possessed from the beginning. The experience did not create Liverpool's distrust of Westminster and national institutions, but it gave that distrust evidence of extraordinary force.
For almost everyone born from 1980 onwards, Hillsborough and its aftermath have occupied most or all of their conscious understanding of Liverpool. Someone born in 1980 was only nine when the disaster occurred; everyone now aged 37 or younger was born after it. They grew up while families were still fighting to overturn the original verdicts, expose the alteration of statements and establish that the supporters had been unlawfully killed.
Curiously, my own impression is that much of the audible booing now comes from younger supporters. I cannot demonstrate that statistically, and crowd noise is an unreliable demographic survey. But the observation is worth considering. For a younger generation, Hillsborough was not simply inherited history. The Independent Panel reported and the unlawful-killing verdicts were returned during their own lives. They watched the struggle for truth continue without equivalent individual accountability.
They have also grown up in a more confident Liverpool. They may have no memory of the blackened Liver Building, the silted Albert Dock or the factory closures, but they have inherited the account of what happened. The generation with the least direct memory of the city's humiliation may be the most willing to give voice to its accumulated defiance.
The stereotype survives the evidence
Economic decline and football tragedy became entangled with a national caricature. Liverpool was represented as criminal, sentimental, aggressive, workshy and permanently convinced of its own victimhood.
Comedy helped make the image familiar. Harry Enfield's shell-suited Scousers shouting "calm down" were fictional characters, not a political conspiracy, and many Liverpudlians found them funny. But comedy does not exist outside culture. Repetition can turn exaggeration into the mental picture through which real people are interpreted.
Accent is part of that process. During the ugly press conference before the 2023 fight between Liam Smith and Chris Eubank Jr, both men crossed lines: Smith made homophobic remarks, while Eubank responded with insults about Liverpool, Smith's social class and the way he spoke. Neither man's conduct needs defending. What interested me was how naturally a Liverpool identity, including its accent, could be used as a shorthand for poverty or inferiority. Sky Sports
I suspect some readers may respond differently to these arguments on the page than they would if they were sitting in a room listening to me make them. Accent and origin affect how credibility is assigned, often without anyone consciously deciding that they should. Written words temporarily remove one of the cues by which class and regional identity are judged.
I have experienced that judgement directly. As I described in The Myth of Meritocracy: Who Is Allowed to Succeed?, I have stood in rooms with people from more privileged backgrounds and been made to feel that I did not quite belong. “Watch out for your tyres,” someone remarked, an apparently casual joke carrying the assumption that being Liverpudlian meant being connected with theft. The comment may have seemed trivial to the person making it. Its message was not. My background and accent had entered the room before anything I might say or achieve could be considered.
That prejudice was particularly aggressive among some people of my own generation. It was not confined to London or the south. Other cities and communities experiencing industrial decline could resent Liverpool for protesting too loudly or appearing to claim a unique suffering. Standing up to government did not always produce solidarity; sometimes it produced the accusation that Liverpool considered itself special.
Manchester became one focus for that tension, intensified by history, football, music, media and competition for investment. On the one or two occasions I visited during the late 1980s and early 1990s, I felt distinctly uncomfortable. That is a personal recollection, not a judgement on an entire city. I now travel to Manchester regularly for concerts and sporting events and have never felt threatened. Cities change, relationships change and inherited impressions should be tested against present experience.
A European city rebuilt
Liverpool's recovery had no single author. Heseltine's interventions mattered. So did local government, national funding, private investment, the universities, cultural institutions, community organisations and the people who continued building businesses and lives in the city.
European funding also mattered enormously. Merseyside received Objective One status, reserved for regions whose economic output was below 75 per cent of the European average. Approximately £700 million was allocated for the 1994–99 programme, followed by roughly £900 million for 2000–06. The money supported business development, training, transport, environmental improvements and physical regeneration. It did not single-handedly rebuild Liverpool, but it supplied long-term investment at a scale that Westminster had often appeared unwilling or unable to sustain. House of Commons
The population figures show the turn. After reaching a low of about 439,000 in 2001, Liverpool grew to 466,400 in 2011 and 486,100 in 2021. The latest official estimate, for 2025, is 507,915. Population is not a complete measure of prosperity, and serious deprivation remains, but people returning to a city, or choosing it for the first time, is evidence that something material has changed. Office for National Statistics Liverpool City Council
The city became European Capital of Culture in 2008. The waterfront, museums, music, football and architecture drew visitors in numbers unimaginable during the worst years of decline. Liverpool is now among the five British cities most visited by international overnight visitors, behind London, Edinburgh, Manchester and Birmingham in VisitBritain's latest town-level figures. VisitBritain
This history helps explain Liverpool's 2016 referendum result. The United Kingdom voted narrowly to leave the European Union; Liverpool voted 58.2 per cent to remain. That vote had many causes, including age, education and the city's younger population. But it also reflected visible experience. Europe was not an abstraction to Liverpool. Its contribution could be seen in buildings, infrastructure, training schemes and a regenerated city.
Young Liverpudlians who grew up in that post-investment city had every reason to feel European, outward-looking and confident. Brexit therefore reinforced an old suspicion: decisions of enormous consequence could again be made nationally against the city’s clearly expressed preference.
If your impression of Liverpool was formed by the headlines of the 1980s, Harry Enfield’s sketches or inherited warnings about watching your car tyres, I invite you to visit. Walk along William Brown Street, down towards the river and around the Royal Albert Dock. Take the ferry across the Mersey and look back at the waterfront. Speak to us rather than relying upon characters others have created for us. We are not perfect, and this article has made no attempt to pretend otherwise. But you may discover a city very different from the one you were taught to expect.
Why the anthem is booed
The national anthem compresses all these histories into less than a minute.
For many people it is simply a familiar expression of national belonging. For some Liverpool supporters it represents the Monarchy, Westminster, the State and a version of Englishness from which they feel excluded. The booing can contain republicanism, class politics, football performance, inherited terrace culture and genuine anger. Different people in the same crowd may be making different statements with the same sound.
That does not make the act admirable. It makes it explicable.
Nor should every grievance be treated as proof that Liverpool is uniquely mistreated. Many British cities lost industries. Many communities were damaged by policy, market change and institutional failure. Liverpool's experience is distinctive in its particular combination of port decline, political confrontation, football, media representation and Hillsborough - not because suffering occurred nowhere else.
As I stated at the beginning of this article, I do not like the anthem being booed. Understanding the history behind the reaction has not required me to approve of it. But neither condemnation nor stereotyping will make the estrangement disappear. If the rest of the country genuinely wants to understand why the sound continues, it must be willing to examine what preceded it.
Justice for all
The Hillsborough campaign may finally produce a legacy extending far beyond Liverpool.
The Public Office (Accountability) Bill—commonly called the Hillsborough Law—has passed the House of Commons unanimously and is proceeding through the House of Lords. At the time of writing it has not yet received Royal Assent. It would impose a legal duty of candour, transparency and frankness on public authorities and officials; create offences for serious deception; and provide publicly funded representation for bereaved families at inquests. UK Parliament
The legislation bears Hillsborough’s name, but it addresses a national problem: what happens when institutions become more concerned with protecting themselves than establishing the truth. The same pattern can be seen in the Post Office Horizon scandal, infected blood, Grenfell and Windrush. Warnings were dismissed, victims were treated as unreliable or troublesome, and the organisations being challenged retained control of the evidence and the official account. In each case, the truth emerged only because ordinary people refused to accept what they were being told. The proposed Hillsborough Law is intended to reverse that imbalance by making candour a legal duty rather than something citizens must spend decades trying to extract from the state.
No law can guarantee that institutions will never abuse their power. This bill cannot undo what happened to the 97. It could make concealment harder, attach consequences to serious dishonesty and give citizens a more equal position when challenging the state.
Perhaps, after everything, some good may finally come from it. The Hillsborough families were bereaved, disbelieved and forced to spend decades establishing truths that the authorities should have admitted from the beginning. Yet their persistence may leave every citizen better protected when confronted by an institution more powerful than themselves. The city so often accused of setting itself apart may ultimately have helped make the British state more accountable to everyone.
We may say Scouse, not English. But it is justice for all. I am proud of that, and I am proud to be from Liverpool.
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About the author
Paul Clark is the author of The GOOD Book: A Behavioural Operating System for Escaping Debt and Rebuilding Control and the creator of The GOOD Method. If you enjoyed this article, explore more of his writing in GOOD Thoughts, listen to The GOOD Conversation podcast, or join the GOOD Community to receive new articles, podcast episodes, resources and forthcoming videos by email. If there is a subject you would like Paul to investigate or write about, get in touch.