"The magic of Liverpool is that it isn't England", said Margaret Simey in 1999.
The quote from the former Granby councillor, who moved to Liverpool from her native Glasgow at the age of 18, is engraved into a wall of the Museum of Liverpool at the Pier Head. It is a sentiment shared by many across Liverpool, who reject the English national identity and view the city as a separate entity.
There are many reasons for this.
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Nestled on England's west coast, where the River Mersey falls into the Irish Sea, the port city of Liverpool has always been outward-looking, welcoming arrivals from all corners of the globe - most eminently Ireland. This feeling of internationalism is one of the factors why the city may have never quite felt at one with an English identity.
Being let down by the country's establishment is also central to such a notion - with the betrayal over the Hillsborough disaster at its heart. Additionally, the suggestion of Liverpool's "managed decline" from Geoffrey Howe to Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s remains a sore point, while the city's continued Labour-voting tradition marks it apart from the majority of England.
With the sentiment of 'Scouse, not English' often seen on social media and emblazoned on banners at the city's football grounds, we have looked at the factors that contribute to a lack of patriotism in Liverpool and fuel the city's independent identity.
Migration from Ireland
Oft-referred to as the "second capital of Ireland", Liverpool's connection with the Emerald Isle is felt strongly. Walking through the city, you would not get far without bumping into someone with Irish heritage.
Though there had been many Irish people in Liverpool beforehand, Ireland's Great Famine, which occurred between 1845 and 1852, saw many more move across the Irish Sea. In order to escape starvation, around 1.5m people passed through the Port of Liverpool - the closest major British port to Dublin - during the years of famine.
Many then made an onward journey to Australia or North America, but plenty stayed in Liverpool. Census returns from the time show the Irish-born population in Liverpool, boosted by Famine migration, rose from 17.3% of the total population in 1841 to 22.3% in 1851.
Jon Tonge is a Professor of British and Irish Politics at the University of Liverpool. He spoke to the ECHO last year about the effect that 19th century migration from Ireland had on Liverpool's identity.
He said: "The sheer scale of immigration into Liverpool from Ireland made Liverpool distinctive. There was a huge amount of Irish immigration in other places too, but Liverpool was off the scale.
"The volume and the speed of it almost overwhelmed the city and that created the problems because some of the local population felt overwhelmed. People had to put up with a lot of squalor here, with the density of the housing in the city - and those problems took a long time to sort out, the slum clearance programmes carried on into the 60s and 70s and a lot of those involved the descendants of Irish immigrants."
In Liverpool in 1847 there were 35,000 people, mainly Irish, living in cellars in the Vauxhall and Scotland Road areas, while some 5,341 inhabited cellars described as 'wells of stagnant water'. Typhus, dysentery and cholera were rife. During this time, Dr William Henry Duncan, the city’s first public health officer, estimated 60,000 people had caught typhus and 40,000 contracted dysentery.
As well as problems with living conditions during this time, Liverpool faced sectarian and political problems. Tensions between Catholics and Protestants simmered, leading to violence in 1909. The 19th century also saw the constituency Liverpool Scotland, which was centred on Scotland Road and had a very large Irish population, elect an MP from the Irish Nationalist party. Thomas Power O'Connor served Liverpool Scotland from 1885 to 1929.
Professor Tonge explained that, though it was a contentious issue at one time, Liverpool is now "very, very proud" of its links with Ireland, adding the "sense of the Irish rebel" has become part of the Scouser's identity. He said: "Some people would see it as a chippiness, but I see it as an anti-authoritarianism and rebelliousness.
"It's pretty sceptical, it's sceptical of most people in power or authority and that extends to a lack of interest in support for the monarchy, through to contempt for governments. It did take Liverpool a long time to become a Labour city because of those divisions between protestant and Catholic Irish within the same city.
"Whereas once upon a time Irishness was controversial in the city, now it's a much-loved feature and it fed into that modern day culture of Scouseness, which is very distinctive."
Professor Tonge added an anti-Irish sentiment directed at large swathes of Liverpool's population could have led to a 'us against them' psychology with regard to the rest of England, which may have been passed down to new generations. He said: "It's interesting to think about when the Scouse identity became this united thing, when did the city overcome its political divisions, big social class divisions and the Catholic and Protestant problems?
"I think it was in the 1980s that this really happened, when the city was on its uppers. The Tories had been losing ground from the 1960s but obviously Margaret Thatcher accelerated that process, so in the 1980s the city became very united."
The 1980s and the threat of 'managed decline'
That brings us to the 1980s - a very difficult decade for Liverpool and one which may have broken many people in the city's relationship with England beyond repair.
Liverpool suffered industrial decline during the 1970s, as the city's docks and manufacturing industries waned and were no longer able to provide widespread employment. By 1985, unemployment in Liverpool was above 20% - which was around twice the national average.
Margaret Thatcher's government was in power for the entire 1980s, as Liverpool faced many difficult times.
The 1981 Toxteth riots came as unemployment in England was at a 50-year high, with Liverpool and Toxteth in particular hit very hard. The relationship between the L8 community and Merseyside Police had completely broken down, with the latter being accused of racism and gaining a reputation for frequent stop and search, hard-line tactics and heavy-handedness.
Nine days of disorder focussed on the so-called so-called Granby Triangle followed the arrest of a young local man, Leroy Cooper. After the riots, Mrs Thatcher's government had conflicting views on how to assist Liverpool - or not.
Then-environment secretary Michael Heseltine argued in favour of ambitious regeneration plans, but then-Chancellor Geoffrey Howe urged the Prime Minister to abandon Liverpool and place the city through "managed decline". He wrote to the Prime Minister, telling her "not to over commit scarce resources to Liverpool".
He wrote: "We do not want to find ourselves concentrating all the limited cash that may have to be made available into Liverpool and having nothing left for possibly more promising areas such as the West Midlands or, even, the North East.
"It would be even more 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. 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."
Lord Howe, who was previously MP for Bebington, said the letter has been misunderstood, claiming he wished for the city's decline to be managed until progress was an option. Though Thatcher did not follow the suggestions in Howe's note, its phrasing and the struggles faced by Liverpool under her government have become synonymous.
The Hillsborough disaster
The unlawful killing of 97 Liverpool fans at the 1989 FA Cup semi-final at Hillsborough was followed by those very fans being besmirched by a national newspaper, while a police cover up tried to hide the truth for decades. Many across Liverpool felt the establishment had turned against the city once again.
Four days after the tragic events at the match, The S*n ran a front-page with the headline of 'The Truth'. It claimed that fans, many of whom were injured themselves and were seen ferrying the injured to ambulances, had: picked the pockets of the dead, assaulted police involved in resuscitation attempts, urinated on police involved in the rescue effort and made offensive and lewd comments about female casualties.
This was not the case. The S*n's untruthful and repugnant accusations led to the newspaper being boycotted across Merseyside.
After 23 years of waiting, the Hillsborough Independent Panel review found in 2012 that the fans were "unlawfully killed". The panel exonerated fans of all blame and instead found evidence of an extensive cover-up by police to smear the reputation of fans.
It found the police had made "substantive amendments" to statements that showed criticism of police management and the response to the unfolding disaster. Documents showed senior officers had discussed the "animalistic behaviour of drunken marauding fans".
The report also blamed Sheffield-based White's News Agency for being the originators of the false press reports including The S*n's shameful front page. White's reporting was based on briefings from four South Yorkshire Police officers.
The Hillsborough inquests, which took place four years after the panel report, found by majority verdict that the Liverpool fans were unlawfully killed, due to gross negligence from police and ambulance services.
Those fans were failed by the police, before lies were spread about them by a newspaper that remains among the country's best selling. To this day, Liverpool fans face chants mocking the events at Hillsborough from some football supporters.
Government cuts, Boris Johnson and the modern day
Unlike in Mrs Thatcher's government, the threat of "managed decline" in Liverpool was not on the agenda of the European Union, which pumped money into Liverpool and surrounding areas in the 1990s and 2000s. Funding from Brussels began in 1994 when £700m was allocated under the Objective One programme, before another £928m arrived in 2000.
Additionally, between 2007 and 2013, the North West shared £700m. European money - and being awarded the European Capital of Culture for 2008 - helped Liverpool recover from the struggles of the 1980s and inspire its development into the modern city we see today.
Across Liverpool, the funding was used to transform Queen Square, to revamp Liverpool John Lennon Airport, to cover part of the construction costs for the M&S Bank Arena, and to restore St George's Hall.
However, what followed the spell of European funding was a brutal spell of cuts from central government - beginning when the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government removed Labour from power in 2010.
As the country elected a series of Conservative administrations, Liverpool kept voting Labour. The city has suffered the funding consequences of that.
Under several Conservative governments, the people of Liverpool faced the equivalent of an £816 per head fall in day-to-day public spending from 2010 to 2019. Austerity hit the council with more than £450m of funding cuts since 2010. Liverpool has been hit as hard by austerity as anywhere across the country.
It is no surprise then, that after years of investment from Europe, followed by cuts from central government, Liverpool bucked the national trend in the 2016 European Union referendum. As Britain voted to leave the European Union by 52% to 48%, Liverpool voted to remain by 58%.
Away from Brexit, there is the matter of the previous Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Mr Johnson was editor of The Spectator when it published an article about the 2004 murder of Scouse engineer Ken Bigley.
Writer Simon Heffer and his editor Johnson produced an article which read: "A combination of economic misfortune — its docks were, fundamentally, on the wrong side of England when Britain entered what is now the European Union — and an excessive predilection for welfarism have created a peculiar, and deeply unattractive, psyche among many Liverpudlians.
"They see themselves whenever possible as victims, and resent their victim status; yet at the same time they wallow in it.”
Johnson has since apologised for this - being forced to do so by then-party leader Michael Howard. He refused to do so again when Garston and Halewood MP Maria Eagle asked him to in parliament, shortly after he became Prime Minister.
Such mocking and dismissive impressions of Liverpool and its people remain commonplace. Fans at Anfield and Goodison Park have to endure chants about poverty in the city - "Feed the Scousers" gets an airing as soon as Christmas approaches - while some opposition fans still direct slurs at Reds fans about the Hillsborough disaster. As a result, many football fans in the city don't much feel like supporting England after such treatment from those who should be their fellow supporters.
The phrase 'Scouse, not English' not only encapsulates Liverpool's civic pride and a healthy rebellious spirit, but expresses a feeling that the city has been so often let down by the establishment of this country. It should come as no shock that large swathes of this Labour-voting, outward-looking, and heavily-Irish city do not feel like they have much in common with the rest of England.
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