Discussion with Dr David Jeffery
‘The idea of Liverpool being a particularly radical city before the 80s isn't really there. It has its moments, but what major city didn’t?’
This is an extract from an interview conducted by Mario Laghos with Dr David Jeffery, lecturer in British politics at the University of Liverpool, author of Whatever happened to Tory Liverpool? Success, decline and irrelevance since 1945, due to be published in April 2023 by Liverpool University Press.
The full interview may be read in our latest print issue, Issue XXXIV released earlier this month, which can be purchased here. Subscribe to receive future print issues.
Mario Laghos: Liverpool is sometimes termed the ‘real capital of Ireland’. What’s the story of Irish Catholic immigration to the city – and can ‘Irish’ and ‘Catholic’ be used interchangeably in that context?
David Jeffery: It started with the famine. Liverpool was, for many Irish, the first step in a multistage process to get somewhere, basically to get to America usually. John Belchem wrote that the Irish who ended up staying in Liverpool were generally either the poorest or the least capable of continuing their journey for whatever reason. So, either for reasons of health or finances. So that's how it began, and then obviously, once you get a large immigrant population, it becomes appealing for other people of that same immigrant group to come over because there are natural ties there.
Generally speaking, proportionately, yes, it is fair to say, Irish Catholic, probably, but there needs to be some care taken around that, because some of the Irish migration was actually Belfast Protestants who were quite evangelical and quite aggressive in their Protestantism. It wasn't just so much that you get - I'm thinking here specifically George Wise - it's not so much that you've got a load of Irish Catholics come to Liverpool and then the locals, kind of Lancastrian Protestants, as they're called in the literature, push back against that. In some ways, you’ve got the Irish Catholics who came over with a sense, a certain way of doing religion and politics, and how those two went hand in hand. But you've also got some Irish Protestants who came over and brought their unique, quite unique for the UK or for England anyway, or for Liverpool, way of doing politics. They kind of, in some ways, radicalised parts of the Protestant community as well, in a way that might not have been the case. So, whilst in terms of numbers, you probably could just use Irish as a shorthand for Catholic, it's probably best not to, because some of the rarer cases of Irish Protestants are quite important, and you lose some of that. But essentially, the ones who came and stayed in Liverpool were those who, for whatever reason, were often or unable to continue.
ML: Does historic Irish Catholic and Protestant immigration divide in the city as we look at it today, in the sense that you might say between Irish Catholics on the eastern seaboard in the US and Irish Protestants in the south, you know, so called hillbillies. Does that divide in Liverpool in a similar way?
DJ: In the old days, I guess. There were areas that were clearly Protestant and clearly Catholic. When we then say, Catholic, we meant Irish Catholic. But the Protestant areas are not necessarily Irish Protestant. That has generally disappeared now, for a range of different processes. And you might get some wards or some streets that are demographically more, that might have an unusual number of Catholics on them, but they wouldn't be considered Catholic areas nowadays. There's a good book, actually, Liverpool Sectarianism, that's got some good context, the historical stuff, it talks about the decline of sectarianism. So there used to be areas that were seen as Protestant, seen as Catholic, that's gone now. I remember there's an example in here, about a street in Liverpool, Saunby Street, which is where my mum grew up. And her mum had lived there her whole life. And I asked her about it and she went, actually, I grew up there in the 60s. I never got the sense that was a Catholic road, because she's not Catholic. So yes, historically. But it's kind of gone now.
ML: Is there a sense of the spirit of Liverpool being not 'English but Scouse', of being anti-establishment, of being pro-Labour in a radical sense - that connects to the Corn Laws and with the story of the migration and with the famine? Or is it completely separate?
DJ: My view is that actually this sense of anti-establishment politics is something that's born out of the 80s. The militant Thatcher conflict, essentially, and then compounded by things like Hillsborough, and in looking for a foundational myth, people who seek to construct this idea, look back to Irish migration and go, ‘this is the Irish strain, the Celtic strain in Liverpool's history that comes to the fore’. But really, the idea of Liverpool being a particularly radical city before the 80s isn't really there. It has its moments, but what major city didn’t? But it wasn't in any way particularly radical, you know, more often than not before 1964 It returned a majority of Conservative MPs, a Conservative run council - there's not much there - not in a way that we call radical.
