Scouse Xenophobia

Note: Before I begin this post, I want to make sure that anybody reading it knows that, I do refer to myself as a Scouser, I have no problem with anybody else referring to me as a Scouser, there are even people who only refer to me as a Scouser because they have heard, or seen, me refer to myself as a Scouser. Personally, I’m not offended by the name Scouser, I believe the majority of people from Liverpool also aren’t offended by it, and currently it is what we are most commonly known as.

However, if a person from Liverpool was to request that you do not refer to them as a Scouser, or even went as far to ask you not to use the word around them, it is my honest opinion, that it is a valid request, that they are both entitled to make, and have met by you, unless of course you enjoy upsetting other people just because you can.

There’s this weird phenomenon that I face a lot, as a suffer out of pseudo psychosis, which happens when I request people don’t use the word psycho, that I know happens whenever you request people stop using any word that is offensive, demonising, or stigmatising, et cetera, this is where the person being offensive, gets offended, then is defensive, because you have asked them nicely not to be offensive. Then they try to explain to you why are you being offended is wrong and therefore the problem. After which they then go off to ask other people, that they know will agree with them that it’s not offensive, why it is offensive.

This behaviour is not only bizarre, it’s a huge problem.

Can we stop telling people who we offend that them being offended is the problem, rather than our offensive behaviour. If somebody has taken offence or something you have said, there’s a very good reason for that. If you aren’t aware of what that reason is, then you clearly don’t understand, in this case, why the word you’re using, or the way in which you are using it, is offensive, and not knowing those things doesn’t entitle you to be offensive.

If you don’t understand why something might be offensive, the best person to ask about why it’s offensive is the person it’s offending. Nobody else can explain why that person, who is personally offended by it, is offended by it.

So, with that said, let’s get started with this post.

Xenophobia against people from Liverpool still is today, and has been a huge issue for at least my entire lifetime, and possibly anybody who is alive today’s entire lifetime, and it is an issue that according to the headlines of several articles, I chose not to read, we’re so tired of now that we are finally fighting back against it.

If you’re from the UK, you probably understand what I mean by xenophobia against people from Liverpool.

However, as most of my readers are not from the UK, I’m going to write a small post, this post, explaining briefly what Scouse xenophobia looks like, in general, on the milder the end of the scale. Then I am going to follow up with a couple of small blog post, each as a separate post, so that I can add to them if I remember any more examples, of how it effected me as a Scouser living outside of Liverpool, in general, on the milder end of the scale, before I go into how it effected me more seriously in specific situations, as I talk about those situations in the future.

As I have faced Scouse xenophobia my entire life, and it’s such a multilayered and complicated prejudice, I am only going to be skimming the surface of what it is here, and won’t be going into massive amounts of detail on it, or what causes it, as my aim is to give you enough information to understand my social disadvantage due to the specific type of prejudice during this particular time in my life, meaning my time at university, without going too far off topic.

The word Scouser itself could be considered derogatory, as Scouse was, in the past, “a poor man’s stew,” and the reason we are referred to as Scousers is because people started using it to imply everybody in Liverpool ate Scouse for every meal, because we were so impoverished we couldn’t afford food. Insert eye roll emoji here. According to historians, Scouse is a relatively new, meaning created in the last hundredish years or so, name for people from Liverpool, therefore when it was created, not everyone in Liverpool would have been so severely impoverished nobody in the city was eating.

Yet, I don’t know a single person who considers it to be derogatory, but I am aware that some people do.

You could argue this is due to people not being aware of the origin of the name, if you had never met a person from Liverpool ever. Trust me, we all know what Scouse is. I believe our lack of offence over the name shows our attitude towards petty hate, and that we are capable of differentiating between what is petty hate, and what a serious hate. We don’t care that nasty people feel the need to be nasty just because they can, as it says nothing about us and everything about them, so we embraced it, and we have in doing so, taken away the power and stigma attached to the word. We also know what issues are important, and we spend our time and energy working on trying to change those things.

This is not to say we shouldn’t care, maybe we should, especially if we really do intend on eradicating Scouse xenophobia once and for all.

In a nutshell, Scouse xenophobia is the creation of, and belief in, the derogatory stereotypes of people from Liverpool, by people who are not from Liverpool. These stereotypes include, but are not limited to, the ideas that people from Liverpool are – dirty, disrespectful, evil, thieving, alcoholic, drug addict, scumbags, who are loud, and fight and argue for the sake of fighting and arguing, and don’t work simply because we don’t want to.

As a person who has lived in both Liverpool and London, I’m going to use the two cities, as comparisons, based on my personal experiences

Liverpool overall is much cleaner city, when it comes to things like public spaces and transport, and I am very sorry Londoners, I know that most of you are clean, but some of you are so dirty in yourself and/or your habits that I don’t know, how combined with the stickiness, and grubbiness of the city, there isn’t an outbreak of the Ye Olde plague there every couple of weeks.

Theft seems like a much bigger issue in London than in Liverpool, as off the top of my head I can remember being robbed twice in London. Sam was also robbed in London.

Here we normally don’t even take advantage of stuff. If money is left on a self serve till, or a card in a chip and pin machine, we hand it in. Just last week I found a mobile phone on a checkout in the pharmacy and handed it in. This wasn’t even the first time something similar has happened. That’s who we are.

If I had to guess, I’d guess that the loud, aggressive portrayal of us comes from how outspoken and prepared to fight injustice and inequality we are (this statement shows just how complex multilayered, and far back in history the prejudice against us is, and goes, as not even I, a person who has not only being subjected to Scouse xenophobia my entire life, and makes it my business to educate myself, can say without guessing or doing actual research, where some of the most infamous and harmful stereotypes about us come from, and because I want this post to be about my own experiences, and knowledge, up until at least this point, I have not, and don’t intend to, do any actual research on the subject) though the majority of us fight this through legal and governmental processes, rather than with aggression or violence.

If you don’t believe any of my last paragraph, do a quick Google search on both the Hillsborough disaster, and the 2015, I think, neo-Nazi March, when the Nazis decided to hold an event in Liverpool.

Liverpool is a multicultural, multi diverse, city. I believe our non-white communities have existed here for centuries, and I believe we have the largest LGBTQ+ community in England.

The people of Liverpool are still fighting for justice over what happened both at, and after, that football match, decades ago.

The people of Liverpool said no to the Nazis, and when they ignored us and came anyway, a lot of us protested, a small few physically fought and rioted (I did neither, as I was both at work that day, and so out of touch with what was going on in the world I had no idea they were even coming to Liverpool) yet the riots in lime Street station became infamous online, particularly on YouTube, of which the majority of the videos about it seem to have been taken down since.

Either way, the government and the police have learned that we are not afraid of them.

The nazis learned the only people protecting them were diversely cultured police officers, who were being paid to do so. The very people they hate, were the only people standing between them and the rioters, and there were no streets to hold their event on, because we were filling the streets with our protest march against them.

When it comes to drug and alcohol dependency, which while we’re on the subject we need to address better as a society, due to the fact that many addicts use as a result of being let down by governmental systems, such as the NHS (national health service) I can’t say whether we do have more addicts than anywhere else, what I can say, from firsthand experience, is that our healthcare system in Liverpool is appallingly bad, especially when it comes to how it deals with mental health.

The same could be said for the unemployment here. As a working class city, the majority of people here work either heavily manual labour jobs, or heavily mentally taxing jobs, and there are very minimal disability support requirements that these companies need to adhere to, and nobody that holds them accountable when they discriminate against the disabled. Employers are allowed to use and abuse their staff to the point of physical and/or mental breakdown, then throw them away. Then there is the pressure being working class puts on people to not only choose to work long hours, but to allow them selves to be used and abuse by employers. Once ill you find out that the systems apparently put in place to help you, particularly when it comes to illness recovery, are just empty boxes we have paid a fortune for. This is something I also know from firsthand experience.

Over the decades, Scouse xenophobia has changed.

Although I do think common sense must have played a role in the change, I personally think it wasn’t a significant role. Of course not everybody in Liverpool isn’t unemployed, we have shops and other businesses here, therefore some of us must work, so a weird form of societal split thinking has happened, Scouse has become a label for the “bad” Liverpool people, and Liverpudlian has become a word used for the “good” Liverpool people, and if this idea wasn’t ridiculous enough, I’ve heard Liverpudlian could also be considered a derogatory name, but nobody has ever said this to me directly, and I don’t know the origins of the word Liverpudlian or care enough to Google the origins, what I do now is that historians believe the correct name for a person from Liverpool is liverpolitan or something similar.

Which brings us full circle back to where we started this post, and to its end.