Feed The Scousers? The Only Thing This Chant Feeds Is Our Sense Of Superiority

From Manchester to the Alexandra Palace, the dumbarse chant exposes the stupidity of modern Britain

THERE ARE MANY great songs about the city of Liverpool. My favourite is Does This Train Stop On Merseyside by Amsterdam.

Ian Prowse, the brilliant songwriter, captures the essence of the town in a clear-eyed manner. There is no romanticism in this poetic reading of history. The “blood of Africa is on every wall.” That’s true of Liverpool’s grandiose buildings. Go look, see the African faces and animals carved into the walls.

Still, the lyrics are a love letter to an amazing place.

The key to the song – and the culture – comes in this line: “Famine ships anchored in the bay, bringing in the poor and desperate.”

Does This Train Stop On Merseyside. Listen to this. It’s magnificent

Those boats crammed with refugees from starvation in Ireland flooded into the Mersey from 1847 onwards. After that, Liverpool’s status changed. It stopped being an English city. It became a rogue city. The path to Scouse started there.

Where the hell do you think “Feed the Scousers” comes from? Why the fuck would they be singing it at the Alexandra Palace at a session of the World Darts Championship?

Because Liverpool is not an English city. And those who think it is – like the Farage rioters on County Road during the summer – don’t understand their history. Or their present.

Do any other football clubs outside Liverpool, Everton and Tranmere Rovers get serenaded with songs about famine? Yes, Marine fans got the same treatment this weekend at South Shields. There is a deep resentment towards Merseyside across England in particular and it’s rooted in anti-Irishness.

Liverpool was not a rogue city before the famine. Afterwards, it became an alien place, outside the English body politic. From being ‘Torytown,’ it voted in an Irish Nationalist MP, TP O’Connor, from 1885 until 1929. The Labour politicians who succeeded him came from Irish republican backgrounds, too.

Scouse, the term, was an insult aimed at the poorest descendants of immigrants who ate the eponymous cheap stew. Whether they got their food from penny carts in the Scotland Road area or local soup kitchens, Scousers were regarded as the lowest of the low. That was until the word was reappropriated as a point of pride some 100 years ago.

The entire identity is defined by hunger and immigration. It sits deep in the folk memory of Britain. And every year at Christmas – and frequently throughout the football season – the anti-Scouse chants reference starvation.

Of course, poverty and hunger bring with them anger and resistance. The residual Irishness on Merseyside – which many residents don’t recognise, even if it manifests itself in their attitudes and behaviour – is apparent in the booing of the national anthem. Margaret Simey, the great Glaswegian social campaigner, understood her adopted home. “The magic of Liverpool is that it isn’t England,” she said.

Yeah, the knobheads at the darts – and on the terraces across narrow-minded England – understand that too but not consciously. We’re not like them. They fear us.

Feed the Scousers? Nope. Your Thatcherite heroes tried to starve us into submission – managed decline, anyone? But we refused to kneel down or doff our caps. We’ve had to feed ourselves any way we could. But we didn’t forget you.

Fans Supporting Foodbanks started outside Goodison Park and has become a national movement in the era of austerity. Scousers feeding the hungry. Even in cities like Manchester, where the need is most desperate and the poverty chanting strongest.

It’s typical of the children of the empire. They could be chiding Liverpool for its ugliest heritage: slavery. But that would mean confronting their own history, too. Instead, they pick on poverty. Lazy and easy.

These chants say more about England than Liverpool.

Blessed are those who hunger for justice. Google that, you Tory twats.

And listen to what Ian Prowse tells you: “Why don’t you remember?”

Because you don’t want to. But we will.