Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain
Sam Wetherell
Apollo, £25.00 (cloth)
In 1945 a ship lay in wait on the Mersey River by Liverpool, then Britain’s foremost imperial port. Stripped of its cargo and packed with bunk beds, the ship contained a hundred dazed Chinese dockworkers, who had been hauled from their beds at night and rounded up in police cars to be deported back to Shanghai, their wives and children never to be told what became of them. The seamen had made their way to Liverpool decades ago, on lumbering, lonely cargo ships. During the war years, they had crewed vital shipments of food and weaponry, even as German bombs razed the docks that received their vessels. But for those ordering the deportations, their contributions mattered little.
The decision was the product of Britain’s new welfare state—a decidedly utilitarian, not utopian, project with an infrastructure forged in war (think conscription, nationalization, rationing) and a singular, at times ruthless, goal: full employment and economic modernization for the collective it served. Any population outside of that collective, imagined as the white national community, would be welcomed only so long as it was useful. Seen as obstructing progress, the Chinese dockworkers—who might have themselves unknowingly displaced returning British servicemen from their jobs—were cast aside.
What happens when a whole city gets cast aside? Postwar Liverpool, whose maritime industries declined as imperial trade waned in the era of decolonization, would soon find out. Once a gateway to the Atlantic, the port city’s westerly position now divided it from growing trade with Europe. By the early 1980s, when the combined effects of stagflation and neoliberal economics were reconfiguring Britain’s other northern industrial cities, seven in every eight of Liverpool’s dock jobs had already been lost. Britain’s welfare state was a workers’ state, designed to fit the greatest possible number of the population for productive labor and have their needs met, in the main, by fairly waged employment. Now that work for all was a past horizon, that welfare state could not save Liverpool. As the “productive regimes that had summoned them” ceased to exist, writes Sam Wetherell, the people of Liverpool, like the Chinese seamen before them, became extraneous.
However, rather than a simple story of being “left behind,” the fate of Liverpool and its people can tell us something about the future. The major intervention made by Wetherell’s Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain, a pacy and compassionate ode to Merseyside, is to flip our chronology: Liverpool is not a relic, the book argues, but a prophecy. In the twenty-first century, the processes that rendered Liverpool obsolete in the twentieth—rising prices, falling wages, chronic labor insecurity, homelessness, and health care failure—have become endemic. As more and more are abandoned by the economy and the state, the decline that befell Liverpool threatens to become our collective destiny.
How did it feel to be at the vanguard of Britain’s obsolescence? Standing in the Liverpool Airport on a warm July day in 1964, one might barely have noticed. The Beatles were making their fêted return to their home city, suit-clad and stepping off a shimmering jet, about to be engulfed by fawning, fainting crowds. They would exit the airport, located in the new suburb of Speke. Here, cool water from Capel Celyn, a small Welsh village submerged to create a reservoir’s worth of fresh water for the just-built council estates, flowed from novel indoor taps. From Speke, they would move toward a city center poised on the brink of regeneration, down newly paved roads fit for an era of mass motoring in a city known, briefly, as “Britain’s Detroit”—a fitting moniker for a city that had celebrated the opening of a Ford factory in the suburb of Halewood just a year earlier. The Beatles, boys from Merseyside suburbs importing a version of American swing, encountered a city embracing industrial regeneration at a moment when it seemed to be working.
During the 1960s, the manufacture of cars created 30,000 new jobs in Liverpool, almost half of them at the Halewood Ford factory. Ford bosses were wary about employing former dockworkers, who tended to be highly unionized and used to a level of autonomy afforded by seasonal shift patterns, which placed their labor in high demand. To acculture them to the monotonous rhythms of the factory, with its half-kilometer-long production line, all but the most conservative unions were barred from official negotiations. This mattered little to workers, who simply imported more organic forms of collective action direct from the docks. Wildcat strikes, absenteeism, and a dockers’ practice known as “the welt”—where half the gang would work while the other rested—were used to push back against poor conditions. One group of recently hired workers, yearning for the autonomy of dock work as they kept up with the rapid tempo of the production line, put explosive powder under the peel of an orange that their foreman planned to eat for lunch. However, while the white working class had been temporarily rescued from obsolescence, others had been cast aside: by refusing to hire former seafarers, Ford had introduced a color bar by stealth. With the loss of maritime industry, it was Black men who struggled the most to find new, factory-based employment.
The problem of Liverpool’s surplus population had always been framed in racial terms. In 1934, eugenicist sociologist David Caradog Jones had warned that there were exactly 74,010 too many people living on the Merseyside and that, because of their idleness and the ongoing mixing between the white working class and foreign seafarers, the “quality of the people” of Liverpool would decline. Long before the deportation of Chinese sailors at the end of the World War II, Liverpool was being made whiter. The waterfront area of Sailortown, a strip of migrant dormitories hosting sailors from across the empire, had been eradicated through rounds of slum clearance and, eventually, German bombs. Liverpool’s Black population (mostly descendants of West African sailors) were pushed inland and out of sight to Toxteth, a neighborhood in Liverpool’s inner city. As white workers were given new work and new homes, discriminatory hiring practices locked minorities out of jobs while racist housing policies kept Black families away from the suburbs. The few who slipped through often returned to Toxteth after facing relentless (and unimaginative) hostility: bricks through windows; dog excrement through letter boxes. Discriminatory police violence, stop-and-search laws, and endemic racism meted out by an almost entirely white police force intensified the containment of Liverpool’s Black population in Toxteth’s crumbling, subdivided former Victorian mansions.
They would not silently endure their treatment forever. 1981 saw the Toxteth Uprising (Wetherell rejects the term “riot” as implicitly delegitimizing), one of a series of violent clashes between the police and minority communities in Liverpool, London, Bristol, and Manchester. During the febrile nights of July, police fired tear gas into crowds, a violent tactic that had only previously been used in overtly imperial contexts (Burma, Malaya, Belfast). Targets of the tear gas included a three-year-old girl, cowering behind her parents in the back seat of a car. For Toxteth’s minorities, the long nights of fighting were a rejection not only of relentless police violence, but the wider structures of governance that had pushed them into an overpoliced, under-resourced area of the city to begin with. For the police, though, they were simply outside the national community: not only surplus, but disposable.
Liverpool’s white community would not have defined themselves as such. In the suburbs, the factories, and the city center (where less than 1 percent of shop workers were Black), whiteness was ubiquitous. Unlike comparable deindustrializing cities in the United States, (we might think of St. Louis, which has had a similar, book-length treatment by historian Walter Johnson), Liverpool had no history of planned segregation and thus no overt white separatist movements. Nonetheless, when threatened, the white community closed ranks. In one of Britain’s most left-wing cities (with a City Council led by Trotskyites for much of the 1980s), a petition circulated by the Young Conservatives in support of police conduct in Toxteth was signed by over 5000 people. Police Chief Kenneth Oxford was never called to account for catalyzing (and then violently quelling) the uprising.
But the sympathies of Liverpool’s white citizens lay in the wrong place. Obsolescence was coming for them, too. A month after the riots, Chancellor of the Exchequer Geoffrey Howe wrote a memo to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, suggesting that “managed decline” might be the best strategy for Liverpool. The economic shocks of the 1970s had obliterated the optimism of the 1960s. Car factories had closed, and the inhabitants of the once-gleaming suburbs were now unemployed too. By the mid-1980s, just 7 percent of sixteen-year-old high-school leavers in Knowsley were finding employment. Wrote one resident, “If they send the career officer to schools, then they should send the dole officer, too.”
Liverpool’s white working class could have seen their own fate prophesied in Toxteth. In 1989, across the Pennines in Sheffield, police responded to chaos at the Hillsborough football stadium, created by their own incompetence, with murderous inaction. Having forced fans to enter the stadium through a few congested turnstiles, the police then failed to allow a heaving crowd out of a closed pen. Ninety-four people were crushed to death in the first minutes of the FA Cup Semi-Final (three more would die of their injuries in the years to come). Fans of Nottingham Forest, the opposing team, looked on in horror; police with contempt. For Wetherell, this defining moment in Liverpool’s history was a “catastrophe made possible by the cheapening of the lives of people deemed to be surplus in a city that was derelict and abandoned.” The tragedy not only happened to Liverpool but was about it. By the 1980s, the tracksuited “scouser” had become an emblem not of a lost Britain, but of its annoying afterlife. A surplus, threatening masculinity, prone to alcoholism, casual violence, and identification with region over nation, incarnated a new tabloid trope: the football hooligan.
Writing this a mere mile from Hillsborough, I wondered if Sheffield’s own obsolescence was also partly to blame for the tragedy that unfolded on a warm spring Saturday afternoon. Sheffield, a steel city, had like Liverpool entered its own terminal decline ahead of the national curve. The rapid growth of sites of steel production in the newly industrializing world meant that British steel ceased to be profitable before British coal did. Sheffield’s working class had been staring down their own obsolescence before Thatcher and Thatcherism, much like Liverpool’s dockworkers had after the decline of imperial trade. The utopianism of Sheffield’s iconic urban housing developments—most famous a Le Corbusier–style development named Park Hill—could not outlast the city’s economic boom. Conditions declined and crime rose from the beginning of the 1970s, and the South Yorkshire Police devoted increasing resources to the problem of white, working-class male “youths.”
By 1984, when the northernmost outskirts of the city were losing mining jobs as Thatcher’s government tried to shed the financial burden of nationalized coal production, the most violent clash of Britain’s two-year standoff between the state miners fighting for their profession and the South Yorkshire Police, the “Battle of Orgreave,” erupted. Mounted officers charged their horses into an unarmed crowd, displaying a contempt for working-class life honed across a decade of economic decline in Sheffield. Just five years later, many of the same officers watched coolly as the bodies of the ninety-seven dead were laid out across the floor of an adjacent gym, even taking blood samples from the corpses of children in an attempt to establish that they had been drinking, that the dead had been culpable.
The historiography of modern Britain lacks its own Ruth Wilson Gilmore, whose Golden Gulag showed how in California, rises in policing and incarceration were a response to both labor surplus and the privatization of state security. Neoliberal economics, she shows, entailed not simply the shrinkage of the state but the expansion of its penal functions. In Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain, increasingly violent policing, as it came for the Black community and then the white working class, figures merely as regrettable overreach on the part of the local and national government. Wetherell’s analysis, while it gestures toward the ways working-class obsolescence conditioned policing (and incarceration), stops short of drawing the conclusion it points toward: that the violence was not simply born of an excess of contempt on the part of the police but was legitimated and even encouraged by a state that had designated particular populations as surplus.
Obsolescence enables not only chronic neglect, but active harm: this is the vital connective tissue between the clinical dispassion of neoliberal cuts in the last century and the intentional damage wrought by austerity in this one. Thatcherite economics were never disavowed in British politics, despite thirteen years of Labor rule beginning in 1997. What arrived in 2010 was a new austerity conservatism, committed to reducing national debt by cutting public services. Austerity was an international economic phenomenon, a response to the 2008 financial crisis that gave rise to regimes of similar scenes across Europe and the Americas.
In Britain, it had a particular class and cultural politics. It unevenly targeted the post-industrial working class by cutting revenues sent by central governments to local councils, which otherwise relied on the rates paid by local people. Because local council income matched local population wealth, wealth gaps between white-collar and blue-collar towns, between the North and South of England, became chasms. Liverpool, the third-poorest city council in the country, lost 35 percent of its local council budget between 2010 and 2023, and in the process racked up almost £600 million in debt. As inequality widened, a cultural campaign against the unemployed intensified, epitomized by Benefits Street, a sneering, fly-on-the-wall style reality series about the lives of unemployed council estate dwellers in Northern former industrial towns. The condition of labor surpluses—of obsolescence—was once again regarded as a moral failing. David Caradog Jones—who had written of idleness as inherently degrading as he travelled Liverpool’s slums in the 1930s—found his acolytes in the twenty-first century tabloid press. The very brief social-democratic window, during which unemployment was a collective problem demanding state solutions, had closed.
Every April 15, Liverpool “Remembers the Ninety-Seven” who lost their lives at Hillsborough. But even before the fateful semifinal match, social murder—that is, facilitating and hastening the death of particular groups through chronic neglect—was taking place on a scale both grander and more quotidian. In Britain, the life expectancy of working-class people decreased from the mid-1980s, most quickly in Liverpool. Chronic poverty, unemployment, and the neglect of housing stock created “deaths of despair” through suicide, substance abuse, and, more perniciously, unusually high rates of heart disease and cancer. Merseyside doctors began to talk about “shit life syndrome,” a diagnosis that, in its mix of sympathy and pessimism, proved deadly: the large doses of opioids and benzodiazepines they prescribed paved the way for a heroin addiction crisis.
In Wetherell’s formulation, Liverpool is “unmade,” tossed aside by the state and capital when no longer useful. But there’s a bit more to the story. It is not only that Liverpool’s communities have been abandoned wholesale; they’ve been recycled and repurposed. After ceasing to be producers of private wealth, a working class left with the physical legacies of their labor become consumers of health care. Gabriel Winant has shown how in Pittsburgh, as factories closed, hospitals grew, adding more beds and more caretaking jobs to mend the broken bodies left behind. The same has happened in Liverpool. Though the National Health Service remains publicly funded, many of its functions are now outsourced to private companies. Health and social care—mostly, that is, care for the disabled and the elderly subcontracted to private providers—now accounts for 70 percent of local council spending. The bodies of the longshoreman and factory workers cast aside by deindustrialization now generate revenue for these private equity firms, many of which are headquartered in tax havens beyond Britain’s shores. Liverpool, once a node through which wealth flowed into the United Kingdom, has become its exit point.
Wetherell is less interested in these dynamics, choosing instead to trace a more starkly visible history: how the workless working class became a product for consumption. In 1982, an editorial in the tabloid Daily Mirror had commented that—so fascinating was the speed of Liverpool’s decline—its council should “put a fence around and charge for admission.” Just over two decades later, in 2004, Liverpool became a UNESCO world heritage site (ironically, the designation was stripped in 2021 on the grounds that the waterfront’s historical character had been compromised), and its fastest growing economic sector was, and remains, tourism. At the heart of the redeveloped Albert Dock, once the arrival point of brandy, cotton, silk, and tobacco, stands the Museum of Liverpool, a slanting low-rise concrete structure designed to mimic trading ships. Opened in 2011, the Museum memorializes a lost working-class way of life. Cobbled terraces made of fiberglass, black-and-white films displaying the Blitz spirit of the 1940s, exhibitions dedicated to an aseptic “resistance” against an unspecified foe—all conjure an authentic but unthreatening lost way of life which, alongside the legacy of The Beatles, attracts 60 million visitors each year.
Tourism brought revenue, retail, and service work to Britain’s third-poorest city. It also brought white middle-class university graduates with cultural sector aspirations. Slightly north of the Museum of Liverpool, young professionals can visit an outdoor sauna or drink cocktails on the banks of the Mersey. Affluent urban life thrums beneath the shadow of Liverpool’s iconic Liver Building, once one of the tallest buildings in Europe and an icon of the city’s former maritime wealth. But, Wetherell writes, beyond a gleaming veneer of prosperity, there is no return to the past. The rising river will see the Albert Dock underwater within the lifetimes of Liverpool’s youngest citizens. But even before environmental catastrophe arrives, he warns: obsolescence “might be coming for us all.”
Hasn’t it already arrived? Liverpool’s white working class have been living with their own obsolescence since the 1970s; its Black community since the 1940s. Is the “us all” simply the middle classes—the white-collar cultural-sector and education professionals now facing the existential threat of zero-hours contracts, AI, and, in Britain, a “left” government with no plans to reverse the fifteen years of austerity that preceded it? Still, if a once-insulated middle class are the next to be rendered obsolete, what might they learn from those who went before? Can they outrun the complacency of Liverpool’s white working class, who themselves failed to see their own futures prophesied in the degradation of their Black neighbors? Could they—could we—resist?
If there is a resistance, Wetherell argues, it lies in mutual care. From the 1980s, Liverpool might have had the highest incidence of “deaths of despair” in England, but it did not become an epicenter for the AIDS pandemic, as public-health officials had expected for a city with a heroin problem. This was because the people of Liverpool refused to neglect all the city’s most precarious “surplus” citizens. Founding the first large-scale needle exchange in Britain, a quiet collective of activists ensured the safety of drug users and sex workers alike. Meanwhile, for the predominantly gay men already infected with the disease, the Merseyside AIDS Support Group refused to consign the dying to lonely, frightened deaths. They organized buddy systems, yoga classes, and a retreat on the west coast of Ireland, where daily swims with dolphins served as a kind of “natural therapist.” These forms of care were a radical refusal of obsolescence. Even the addicted, even the dying, deserved to live.
Before we refuse our mutual obsolescence, we must accept it. There is a freedom in this. Locating our value in work or, when that fails, the state, was always precarious. Even in, the imagined golden age after the war and before Thatcherism, welfare was only for the chosen. New houses, new jobs, new schools were unevenly distributed, and white workers were favored. When social democracy gave way to neoliberal economics, the white working class were abandoned first by their employers and then the state, too. People’s value cannot lie in the value they produce; if our value is vested in anything but our shared humanity, it is ultimately unstable. Read hopefully, Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain provides a deeply humanist, universalist prescription to collective obsolescence: if none of us matter, all of us do.
In Liverpool, this lesson has never been more urgent. Before a baby born on the Merseyside today has seen floodwaters lapping at the foundations of the Liverpool Museum, it will face more imminent threats. One third of children in Liverpool live in poverty. A senior pediatrician at Liverpool’s Alder Hey Children’s Hospital estimated that between 2015-2017, 500 children in England died from preventable, poverty-related conditions. There is no memorial quilt unfurled for these infants in Liverpool’s cathedrals as there was for the AIDS dead in 1992; no annual minute of silence for them as for the ninety-seven who died at Hillsborough. But all these deaths are produced by the same twin forces of contempt and neglect.
A new universalism might propel us forward, but only so far. For to spend any time in Liverpool is to see that remembering has a politics, too. As the Albert Dock disappears, like the Welsh village of Capel Celyn before it, Liverpool both reveals the future and uncovers a past where all was not as it seemed. Even in Britain’s boom years, parts of the nation were already being unmade. Even as plans were being drawn to rebuild Liverpool from the rubble of German bombs, Chinese seamen were being deported silently by night.
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