Cities of Empire
Page 47
To which could then be added the effects of deindustrialization. The postwar expansion into light industry and car production had focused heavily on attracting foreign direct investment by the likes of Ford and Kodak, which meant that when the business cycle sagged strategic decisions about future capacity were rarely taken with the interests of Liverpool in mind. Too often, Merseyside resembled a branch-plant economy, and multinational corporations increasingly saw the merits of shifting production into cheap-labour, non-unionized developing nations and out of the old industrial centres. Absentee employers had little compulsion in closing plants and rationalizing production: between 1966 and 1977 nearly 350 factories in Liverpool closed, causing 40,000 job losses and a collapse in employment in the city by one-third.51 In the words of Liverpool historian Stuart Wilks-Heeg, ‘There can be no more dramatic a case of a city that had been a key driver of globalisation subsequently becoming one of its most significant victims.’52
Accompanying the flight of both trade and industry was the abdication of Liverpool’s civic elites. The historian A. J. P. Taylor had once described his anguish at the decline of industrial Manchester and the postwar gentrification of its urban patriciate. ‘The merchant princes have departed,’ he mournfully noted in the 1950s. ‘They are playing at country life in Cheshire or trying to forget Manchester in Bournemouth or Torquay. There are no more dinner-parties, no more bustle of social occasions.’53 So too with Liverpool, as a series of amalgamations, take-overs and consolidations concentrated finance, management and legal services in London and threatened to turn Liverpool itself into a distant branch office. In 1969 Barclays Bank bought out the Bank of Liverpool and Martins Ltd, and the only major British bank with a head office outside London was gone. The great Merseyside businesses which had been built up around the shipping industry – its insurance, mergers and acquisitions, stock exchange – similarly sailed south. With the flight of white-collar work and the decline of regional financial systems, much of the upper-middle-class leadership evaporated. ‘In Toxteth, the boarded-up properties, the empty, derelict, rubbish-strewn sites and the pervading street-corner atmosphere of hopelessness were proof of the long-term decline of the wider city,’ concluded Michael Heseltine. ‘The middle and professional classes, who had once inhabited this part of Liverpool, had long moved out to a more salubrious suburbia.’54 Liverpool’s tight civic circle of the exchange and the bank, town hall and chapel, lodge and liberal club was swapped for villas in the Wirral and the metropolitan power centres of Westminster and the City. As governor-generals lowered the Union flag across the capitals of the decolonizing British Empire, Merseyside’s great commercial dynasties decamped from Liverpool.
Equally in danger was the city’s proud heritage of multicultural equanimity. In truth, it had been under pressure since the early 1900s, when Liverpool’s more assertive imperial identity started to crowd out the mid-nineteenth-century cosmopolitanism. Fears of mass Jewish migration, the rhetoric of the 1905 Aliens Act (restricting immigrants from outside the Empire), concerns about drugs and prostitution in Chinatown and dockside brawling by ‘coloured seamen’ tempered all that self-congratulation about Liverpool men being ‘citizens of the world’. Instead, the Liverpool Courier ran prurient, fear-mongering features about Lascars and negroes ‘Where East meets West’, around St James’s Place. ‘You glimpse black figures beneath the gas lamps, and somehow you think of pimps, and bullies, and women, and birds of ill-omen generally, as now and again you notice a certain watchful callousness that seems to hint of nefarious trades and drunkenness in dark rooms.’55 The expansiveness of Liverpool’s horizon as a fulcrum of global trade and culture, the ‘New York of Europe’, was progressively challenged by a fear of migrants, ethnicity and miscegenation.
For all the lofty rhetoric of equal imperial citizenship behind the 1948 British Nationality Act, the Gateway of Empire now seemed to resent human remnants of Empire arriving on its shores. Notions of ‘Britannic Nationalism’ and the imperial family didn’t extend to the hundreds of demobilized black British soldiers milling around Merseyside in the aftermath of the First World War. Having fought for the mother country during the war, they were then stranded in Liverpool with some waiting for the Colonial Office to repatriate them and others deciding to stay. In the summer of 1919, postwar unemployment, poverty and scarce resources in the city saw racial tension tip over into violence with an ‘anti-black reign of terror’ gripping dockside Liverpool on the nights of 9 and 10 June. Black seamen and sailors barricaded themselves into the Ethiopian Hall in the face of 5,000-strong white mobs chasing, beating, stabbing and even drowning any African they cornered – such as twenty-four-year-old Charles Wootton. D. T. Aleifasakure Toummanah, secretary of the Ethiopian Hall, couched his demands for protection and support in the traditional language of colonial righteousness. ‘Some of us have been wounded, and lost limbs and eyes fighting for the Empire of which we have the honour to belong … We ask for British justice, to be treated as true and loyal sons of Great Britain.’56 Unfortunately, the officers in charge of administering that justice had a rather different perspective. ‘The negroes would not have been touched but for their relations with white women. This has caused the entire trouble,’ was the police response.57 As a result, fifteen ‘coloured men’ found themselves at Liverpool Assizes in November 1919 on charges of ‘riotous assembly and assault’.58
History repeated itself in 1948, when postwar demobilization of colonial soldiers led to more racial tension and rioting in Liverpool. Hostels for black seamen were attacked, Indian restaurants smashed up, and more random violence was inflicted on Africans and West Indians. Once again, the forces of law and order proved much keener on arresting black men than on protecting them from attack. Indeed, allegations of police brutality and racism towards Liverpool’s black residents would be a long-running sore in the city, resurfacing with deadly anger in the Toxteth riots of 1981. By then, the cosmopolitanism of Liverpool was seen as much as a problem as a virtue, and a disaffected, alienated and unemployed black youth blamed for much of the disturbances. It was the second-generation offspring of Empire who were now blamed for bringing the Second City of Empire to its knees.
A TALE OF TWO TATES
By the time Liverpool 8 was alight and the Rialto Ballroom in flames, the decaying, declining Merseyside had become a postcolonial city. The coup de grâce had been delivered in 1968 when the Labour Party prime minister Harold Wilson announced the withdrawal of Britain’s military commitments east of Suez. The winding-down of British bases in Singapore, Aden, Bahrain and Borneo signalled a final, clinical abandonment of Britain’s Empire ambitions. Famously, the postwar American secretary of state Dean Acheson once remarked that Britain had lost an empire but was yet to find a role on the world stage. Three years after Wilson’s announcement, in 1971, the Conservative prime minister Edward Heath sought to resolve any lingering confusions about the UK’s post-imperial identity when he secured terms for Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community. The Commonwealth and the old colonial order, it was announced, could no longer offer Britain ‘comparable opportunities to membership of the European Community’. It was an unsentimental but acute reflection of commercial reality: in 1948 Britain sent 17.9 per cent of its visible exports to what would become EEC trading partners; by 1983 the EEC accounted for 43.4 per cent. Meanwhile, exports to the White Dominions and former colonies had declined from around 25 per cent of visible exports to more like 6 per cent over the same period. It was unavoidably apparent that the European Community was to fill the hole left by the dismemberment of Empire. None of this was good news for Liverpool.59
In 1747 the German scientist Andreas Sigismund Marggraf had discovered that sucrose could be isolated from beetroot, and a new crop entered into European agricultural production: sugar beet. The British blockade of France during the Napoleonic Wars, cutting off traditional supplies of sugar cane from her West Indian colonies, forced a much wider planting of the crop and, over the next 200
years, it became a staple part of northern European farming, until by the latter half of the twentieth century it was a cheaper alternative to African and Caribbean cane. Only Britain, led by Tate & Lyle, kept up decent trade connections with their former colonial cane exporters. Joining the European Economic Community on 1 January 1973 changed all that. In an instant, the big refineries switched from sugar cane to sugar beet: British farmers started to grow it, continental producers flooded the market with it, and European quotas ensured a steady supply. Though quietly investing in beet sugar processing plants in France, the colonially minded Tate & Lyle loudly bemoaned the impact of ‘unfair’ competition from Common Market sugar producers. By the late 1970s, the move to sugar beet was hammering the company’s finances as it confronted falling profits, overcapacity and, in Liverpool, an increasingly uncompetitive refinery that cost £1.8 million a year to run. A child of Empire not Europe, facing westward not southerly, the beleaguered Love Lane sugar plant was a reluctant symbol of the desperate economic challenge Liverpool now faced.60
Its closure in 1981 marked the beginning of one of the bleakest decades in Liverpool’s long history. During the riots, spiralling unemployment, strikes and urban flight that followed, Liverpool’s population crashed from over 840,000 in the 1930s to some 500,000 in the early 1980s (settling, in 2011, at a figure of 466,400). ‘They should build a fence around [Liverpool] and charge admission,’ sighed the Daily Mirror. ‘For sadly, it has become a “showcase” of everything that has gone wrong in Britain’s major cities.’61 Amid the economic meltdown, political extremism flourished. Liverpool had a long history of radical, progressive politics stretching back to the Independent Labour Party of the 1890s, the 1926 General Strike and continuing struggles over organized labour on the docks. But the city’s dependence upon casual labour meant that a powerful, moderate trade union movement had never fully developed in the city (in contrast to, say, Manchester) and left the local Labour Party vulnerable to exploitation by Trotskyists. Under the banner of ‘Militant Tendency’, a powerful clique led by the charismatic Derek Hatton managed to gain control of the city council and systematically scare off any prospective investment, wreck the municipal finances and destroy the city’s reputation. In Westminster, Cabinet ministers thought Liverpool almost beyond redemption. Worried about the heavy public cost of refloating the city, the chancellor of the exchequer, Sir Geoffrey Howe, urged instead a policy of strategic withdrawal. ‘It would be regrettable if some of the brighter ideas for renewing economic activity were to be sown only on relatively stony ground on the banks of the Mersey,’ he explained in a secret memorandum to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. ‘I cannot help feeling that the option of managed decline is one which we should not forget altogether. We must not expend all our limited resources in trying to make water flow uphill.’62
Even worse than the government’s policy of ‘managed decline’ was the way in which terrible events such as the 1989 Hillsborough disaster – when ninety-six football fans were crushed to death because of serious overcrowding at a match between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest at the Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield – were turned against Merseyside, as another example of the ‘self-pity city’, a lost civilization of welfare-dependent Scousers who refused to take responsibility for their lives. In the words of the Spectator magazine, it was part and parcel of the ‘mawkish sentimentality’, ‘vicarious victimhood’ and ‘flawed psychological state’ the entire city suffered from.63 ‘At the lowest point of its decline in the early 1990s, Liverpool descended into mass redundancy, failed strikes, depopulation, the anarchy of gang, gun and drug culture, the bottom of the league tables in all the indices of poverty and social exclusion,’ recalled the Liverpool novelist Linda Grant. But what was worse was the ‘venomous derision’ for Liverpudlians, ‘a form of racism’ which condemned them all as ‘thieves and scallies, rob-dogs and whiners’. ‘You felt as if the rest of the country wanted Liverpool drowned just off the coast of Ireland with all its whingeing population. Liverpool was Britain’s Detroit, a city that had died through its own irrelevance to the modern economy.’64
Eventually, assistance arrived – from the most unlikely of sources. The European Community might have pushed Liverpool to the brink of irrelevance, but now its Structural Funds Programme was set to return a pride and belief in the shattered city through a welcome wave of investment. Bullied by the European Commissioner for Regional Policy and ex-Glasgow MP Bruce Millan, the bureaucrats of Brussels, whose Common Agricultural Policy and Single Market had gutted the Liverpool economy, now poured tens of millions of pounds back into Merseyside. In 1993, the shocking state of Liverpool’s post-industrial, post-imperial decline secured the city a much coveted Objective One status, triggering a cascade of Euro-cash for infrastructure, training and regeneration. The waterfront was beautified; the Rope Walks rebuilt; new galleries, museums and offices opened. In Jesse Hartley’s Albert Dock, where sugar cane from the Caribbean had once sailed in, been warehoused and then transferred to the refineries, an altogether different branch of Tate now opened. In the mid-1980s the Tate Gallery (itself the product of sugar philanthropy) had decided to establish a regional outpost and, in the aftermath of the Toxteth riots, committed itself to Liverpool with a refitted site in the Albert Dock. In the north-west corner of Hartley’s masterpiece, architects James Stirling and then Michael Wilford carved out a light, spacious, simple gallery for modern art that proved vital in anchoring the city’s incremental, dockside regeneration. Soon, cafés, smart shops and TV studios lined the neo-classical arcades, and the Merseyside Maritime Museum became the most visible remaining link to the city’s old shipping economy. The city which had once been the site of Tate’s Love Lane refinery, now played host to Tate Liverpool, a media rather than manufacturing hub, underpinned by European rather than imperial riches.
Merseyside’s assumption of its Continental identity was completed in 2008, when the city won the title of European ‘Capital of Culture’. Its successful bid was built around the slogan ‘The World in One City’, a very conscious throw-back to the global, cosmopolitan Liverpool of the mid-nineteenth century. It was convincing enough to induce the Duke of Westminster, one of Britain’s richest landowners, to sink £920 million into the Liverpool One shopping precinct close by the old docks. This was Liverpool as the Bilbao of northern England, with a regeneration strategy built around retail, the creative arts and an inclusive, trans-European identity. Suppressing a colonial past which had ended only a few decades previously, this increasingly prosperous, rebranded and better-governed Liverpool had no desire to point to its heritage as Queen of the Mersey, the Gateway of Empire. The memories of that recent past, which had taken the city to such heights of wealth and then plunged her into such despair, were too raw.
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And yet, and yet, is there something in the spirit of Liverpool, with that taste of sea and sail in the air, the skeleton of docks and quays, the Liver Building and Nelson Monument, which still draws the city back to Empire? For all the European Union’s Objective One generosity, Liverpool remains a port city, an outward-looking city, ineluctably attracted back to the rhythms of trade and power that encircle great empires. And in the twenty-first century, power has shifted from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from West to East. So, it is no surprise that Liverpool, more than any other British city, has decided its future fortunes lie with the largesse of a rising China.
This study of imperial cities began in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, with British tai-pans of the Hong Kong Association paying court to the Chinese ambassador. The luncheon was a potent acknowledgement that Hong Kong – which for centuries had symbolized the aggressive, acquisitive, lucrative colonialism of the British abroad – had now itself become a symbol of Beijing’s geo-political dominance. The handover was a passing of the baton from one power to another, readily traceable through the governance and culture of the ‘Pearl of the Orient’. Now we have reached the end of the British Empire, this history ends in the city o
f Liverpool with the same forces at work. Just as those shifting ideologies and financial interests driving British colonialism had reshaped the civic fabric, economies, material culture and infrastructure of Bridgetown, Calcutta and Cape Town, so the concerns of China and India are reshaping our own cities.
For, as European funds decline, Liverpool’s civic leaders have concluded that regeneration lies with the renminbi: the city has ‘twinned’ with Shanghai (whose celebrated pedestrian promontory, the Bund, was inspired by elements of the Liverpool waterfront), despatched Everton Football Club on a series of ‘soft-power’ friendlies, spruced up its own ‘Chinatown’, and opened the Liverpool Vision investment fund to lever-in Chinese resources. In a calculated display of ‘win-win’ harmony-building, the new Liverpool Museum has a special Liverpool/Shanghai Exhibition, sponsored by Barclays Wealth, exploring the historic trading connection between Merseyside and ‘The Paris of the Orient’.
Driving this Sino-Scouse collaboration is the Peel Group, which is hoping to revive the region’s entrepôt economy with its £10 billion Liverpool Waters and Wirral Waters redevelopment scheme. This property fund-cum-investment vehicle is aiming at nothing less than rebuilding Liverpool as the Gateway of Empire with a £300 million port enlargement, centred on a deepwater quay on the Mersey to accommodate larger container ships (some coming from an expanded Panama Canal) and relieve docking congestion in the south-east. The ‘Liverpool 2’ terminal extension, set to open in 2015 with a 854-metre-long quay, will double the port’s capacity and mean that container ships no longer have to pass through a series of restrictive locks.