Liverpool Is Famously Leftwing. How Did the Far Right Gain a Foothold?

It’s Wednesday evening in Liverpool’s south end, and hundreds of people are milling outside a boarded-up church centre. They’re here in spite of a request not to be. Mid afternoon, Liverpool Region Mosque Network sent out a flyer asking all those planning to gather to stay at home. 

“We are calling on all anti-racism demonstrators to stand down,” the leaflet read. “Leave it to the police to handle.”

But people wouldn’t be deterred. Days earlier, Liverpool – and the wider Merseyside area – had been caught on the backfoot. 

First, far-right violence erupted in Southport, hijacking a vigil for three murdered children in the seaside town. Then, on 3 August, it spread to Liverpool. Rioters clashed with police and anti-racists in the city centre, menacing a mosque and any lone people they could find who looked a bit brown. As the night wore on, the havoc concentrated in Walton, north Liverpool. There was widespread damage, including a torched library.

As residents began to pick up the pieces in the following days, a list circulated on far-right Telegram channels promising more “protests” across England on the evening of Wednesday 7 August. More than 30 locations linked to asylum support services were spotlighted. While these potential mobilisations appear to have been the fantasy of one lone, anonymous actor rather than a fresh wave of more organised attacks, England braced itself.

In Liverpool, a city that boasts of its reputation as a multi-ethnic, welcoming and progressive stronghold, residents wanted to make a point, whether the far right appeared or not. As the sun waned, the crowd outside St Anne’s Church – where Asylum Link Merseyside is housed in an adjoining building – swelled further. But the question remains: how did the far right gain a foothold in one of England’s leftwing cities?

No surprises.

For Tom, who’s turned up to make sure “those prats don’t do anything”, Saturday’s violence didn’t come as a surprise.

“Casual racism is really common,” he explains, noting that Liverpool has the oldest Black and Islamic communities in England thanks to the city’s past as a major port, built on slaving money. “Comments in pubs – I’ve had many, many altercations with people where someone’s said something and I’ve called it out.”

Tom explains that there’s a lot of denial about racism in Liverpool.

“A lot of people like to think that Liverpool is this socialist utopia,” he says. “In some senses, historically, yeah, maybe it is. But they have their heads in the sand when it comes to this kind of thing.”

Liverpool, he adds, is full of people who says “f**k the Tories” but in the same breath parrot rightwing talking points about immigration and “looking after our own”.

As for Saturday’s offenders, Tom thinks both poverty and age are playing a part. Many of the people I speak to in Liverpool note the youthful nature of the rioters who rampaged through the city.

“County Road [in Walton] is one of the most deprived areas in terms of young people,” says Tom. “They’re feeling the effects of austerity as much as anybody else. Nothing’s working for them. And they’re being fed lies via TikTok about why immigration is the reason why they have all these problems.”

Plus, north Liverpool is “really white”, Tom says. “It’s been associated with bigotry for a long time. Trying to break through that is going to be quite difficult.”

Payback.

The next day, I head to Toxteth, Liverpool’s most ethnically diverse area. Or, as some put it, a former ghetto for Black and brown people in the city. We’re here on the invitation of Fans Supporting Foodbanks (FSF), a joint venture between Everton and Liverpool supporters that now helps feed 2,500 people a week in Merseyside via its mobile market pantries – a model that’s been adopted by football clubs across the UK. 

Ian Byrne, now Labour MP for West Derby Liverpool, is one of its three founders. Byrne isn’t here today, but co-founders Robby Daniels and Dave Kelly are, watching over pantry proceedings. Daniels observes that footfall is down by a good 30 to 40 people. 

“This is usually one of the most vibrant streets in Toxteth,” he says, gesturing towards the shuttered Turkish barbers and Middle Eastern restaurants. “If [the riots] have had an effect, that’s tragic. 

“People could be sitting at home with a couple of kids, without food, and they’re too scared to come out.” 

Long-time trade unionist Kelly says the racist violence that hit Liverpool has little to do with actual ‘English’ patriotism. “There wasn’t one single St George’s Cross or Union Jack in the troubles on County Road on Saturday night,” he notes. Instead, Kelly subscribes to the theory about the young and disenfranchised of Liverpool, seduced by rightwing messaging on social media and using ethno-nationalist ideology as a vehicle for “payback”. 

Kelly also pushes back on the idea that Liverpool is leftwing, citing a declining Labour vote share as a bellwether of the city’s changing political character. He thinks that the answer to the rise of the far right is re-engaging the disaffected in electoral politics. 

“If you look at all the people who get arrested over the coming days, weeks, months, I will be convinced that 90% of them haven’t taken part in the democratic process,” he says. 

“We need to instil in people that you don’t go on the streets and smash your shops to bits because you’ve got a grievance. You get to the ballot box. Democracy is the way, not anarchy on the streets.”

Speaking to Vincent, a 64-year-old FSF volunteer with short, greying dreads and classic Scouse heritage (Sierra Leonean and Irish), it seems clear that Liverpool will also have to grapple with enduring informal racial segregation that predates Facebook.  

“If you’re Black and you’re going to the north end, you’re going to get racism,” he says. “I’ve been in the north end walking, a car’s gone past and I’ve heard ‘n****r’. My son’s had the same.” 

The only novelty of this latest outbreak of racism is the organisation, and national spread, Vincent says. But he stresses that he’s proud to be a Scouser and the city is still welcoming in many regards. 

“I’ve been to places like London […], and I haven’t felt welcome because of the way they are,” he recalls. “You can stand by a bus stop here and they’ll talk to you, whether you’re white or Black, that’s just a Scouse mentality. They’re more friendly people in that sense.” 

Does friendly equal leftwing or progressive, I want to know. This is the Red Fortress, the city that banned the Sun, where “Scouse not English” reigns supreme. Does Scouse exceptionalism still hold? 

“What does it mean when we say ‘left’?” says Vincent. These labels have little relevance to him. “Scousers are just people.” 

‘People don’t know their history.’

Liverpool’s history shows that economic pressure has often resulted in heightened racist violence against the city’s ethnic minority communities, says historian Laurence Westgaph, pointing to race riots in 1919, 1948 and 1972. 

But radical left tradition has always found a home in Liverpool, he says, and the character of the city is “undoubtedly leftwing”; the first recorded instance of the red flag being raised as a symbol of working-class solidarity took place during the city’s 1775 Seamen’s Strike.

The thing is, “you can still be leftwing and racist,” Westgaph argues. 

“Trade unions have always had an issue with racism in this city,” he explains. “So many of these institutions, supposedly set up to improve worker solidarity, have always excluded Black people.”

Liverpool is a city of immigrants, Westgaph adds, but sometimes it’s the descendants of those immigrants perpetrating today’s violence. 

“One of the individuals who’s been sentenced, his name’s O’Malley,” he says. “You know, this was somebody who, when his family came here two, three generations ago, they would have witnessed the same type of discrimination that people are seeing today.”

“I think people don’t know their history.”

So what now? Westgaph says the answers are there, but the momentum to organise beyond one or two evenings is missing. 

“I’m always worried about knee-jerk reactions,” he says, remembering the promises made after the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. “If those 9,000 people who were on the steps [of St George’s Hall] in 2020 had been willing to organise, you could have changed this city.

“When it comes to the hard work of engaging in serious activism, people disappear. Call me a cynic. I don’t believe showing up on one night is going to really change things.”