Bill Shankly was a socialist (Liverpool
FC)You may think they aren’t mature enough for this but Jon-Paul Gilhooley, the youngest of the Hillsborough
dead, was old enough for his body to be tested for alcohol. He was just 10.
Yet none of this explains fully why we try to drown out the national anthem. That’s been going on for a long
time, especially in the 1980s. Even before the booing many Liverpool fans sang ‘God Save Our Team,’ as
they did at the 1965 FA Cup final, rather than laud the monarch. It’s because of the peculiar nature of the
place.
The city is different. Many of its residents do not consider themselves English. There’s a reason for that.
Liverpool is a town of immigrants – it has Britain’s oldest African and Chinese communities and the port
attracted people from across the globe.
The most distinctive influence has been Irishness. The Potato Famine had a massive impact on Merseyside.
Dispossessed and starving Irish flooded across the sea in the mid-19th century and became the dominant
community. They suffered the same anti-immigrant rhetoric that we’ve seen in recent years (despite Ireland
being part of the United Kingdom at the time). For decades, many Englishmen did not regard large sections
of Liverpool’s society to be their countrymen. It worked both ways: the constituency in the poorest area
returned an Irish Nationalist MP until 1929. Scouse was an identity that grew out of Irishness and many of
the stereotypes that remain today are rooted in anti-Celtic preconceptions. If you trawl through the
newspapers of the past 180 years you can see the patterns and the way they are repeated against other
communities today. Nigel Farage merely echoes the cliches of the past.
Liverpool fans booed the national anthem at
Wembley (Action Images via Reuters)