What is the most left-wing European city?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

What does it even mean to be 'left-wing' in 2020? You could have asked this question in 1920 or 1960, even, and I think everyone would have agreed on definitions, even if they might have chosen slightly different answers. But now?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Perhaps Liverpool, not only due to its Labour margins, but due to the extent that socialism/anti-Toryism is wrapped up with the city’s identity.

There is a widespread distrust and dislike of the Conservative Party that is deeper and wider than found anywhere else, that is true. Partially, I think, because it is entirely reciprocated. But I would have to dispute that socialism (whatever that means these days) is any more embedded into the culture of Liverpool than any other English industrial city. The city council was controlled until a decade ago by a pretty right-wing LibDem administration, one that had a large majority until its last few years.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

And the Liverpool LibDems certainly weren't *all* right wing when they ran the council.

Oh, their individual councillors were all over the place! A hilarious crew of misfits and oddballs; don't think you could really categorise them if you tried. But the administration itself was very much an officer-dominated centre-right one - as was typical of LibDem city administrations in the 90s and 00s - and its electoral appeal was based on anti-Liverpool Labour sentiment and little else.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The thing is, most football fan cultures in Britain are not remotely political. Originally, people supported their local club (and often that was a pretty broad definition of local - c.f. all those Liverpool, Everton and Manchester City fans in North Wales - and often that was local clubs plural: almost all bitter local rivalries date to no earlier than the 1970s), and as the twentieth century wore on and the nineteenth century social geography that this was based on began to fade away, this started shifting towards family tradition.* Political considerations were (and are) basically never a factor, with the famous Glaswegian exception, which had rather more to do with 1690 than 1917.

Ultras culture is a different thing, but a) it is tiny and not representative of anything other than itself and b) frankly they're all just a bunch of tiresome, middle class LARPers and I would take their so-called 'politics' about as seriously as their protestations to be in any sense 'working class' or their knowledge of football as, you know, an actual sport. It is a consumer identity that they've bought and paid for, no more, no less. Of course, the maliciously-minded could note that this is increasingly true of a lot of our inherited political labels.

_{*I was not born in Co. Durham, but nevertheless have been a Sunderland supporter since childhood. A statement that increasingly comes across as a plea for sympathy and understanding, I admit.}

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Yes the last point is significant and often understated, in large parts of NI the SDLP were basically (and sometimes almost literally) the continuation of the old Nationalist Party - whose infrastructure generally varied between rudimentary and non-existent. Which helps explain the latter's rapid eclipse come Civil Rights agitation (and final disappearance in the 1970s)

On his first visit to an SDLP meeting west of the Bann, Gerry Fitt audibly muttered 'where are all the fucking socialists?'