“The results indicate to me that these shifts in political attitudes began during the boycott.”
The decades-long boycott of the Sun in Liverpool has long been seen as a moral and cultural protest, but has it also changed the city’s political views?
That was the question Lucas Paulo da Silva of Trinity College Dublin set out to explore in a recent study, with the findings published in the Conversation. Drawing on data spanning two decades and over 12,000 respondents, da Silva examined how the boycott of the Sun, dubbed “the Scum” by many locals, may have influenced the city’s political attitudes over time.
The boycott began in the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster on April 15, 1989, when a fatal crush at the FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool FC and Nottingham Forest led to the deaths of 97 people and injuries to hundreds more. The Murdoch-owned Sun published a series of false and inflammatory claims blaming Liverpool fans for the tragedy. Four days after the disaster, it ran a front-page splash, headlined ‘The Truth’, based on allegations from unnamed South Yorkshire police sources that were later disproved. The report laid the blame on Liverpool supporters, claiming they had forced their way into the stand, stole from the dead and urinated on bodies.
In response, many Merseyside residents and local newsagents initiated a boycott of the paper that continues to this day. Despite official apologies in 2004, 2012, and 2016, the Sun’s circulation in Liverpool has remained a fraction of what it once was.
According to Da Silva’s study, the boycott had a measurable political impact. His findings suggest that former Sun readers in Liverpool began shifting leftward, increasing their support for the Labour Party. The paper was often replaced by more left-leaning or neutral titles, particularly the Daily Mirror.
Da Silva’s research focused on the period between 1983 and 2004, a time also marked by other major political and economic shifts, most notably the Thatcher-era policies of de-industrialisation and cuts to public services. Liverpool, already struggling with poverty and unemployment, became a stronghold for the Labour Party’s Militant faction, which controlled the city council from 1983 to 1986.
“For many in Liverpool those policies of that era were to blame for extremes of poverty and deprivation in the area,” writes Da Silva.
To isolate the specific impact of the Sun boycott, da Silva compared political attitudes among the paper’s former core readership in Liverpool (those directly affected by the boycott) with attitudes among non-Sun readers in the city and in comparable northern regions. He also examined whether political shifts had already begun before the boycott, which would have pointed to other causes.
“The results indicate to me that these shifts in political attitudes began during the boycott,” he writes, adding:
“The period also saw those former Sun readers in the city adopt more opinions traditionally regarded as left-wing, including being in favour of increasing the power of trade unions.”
Notably, support for the Labour Party increased significantly among the Sun’s former core audience in Liverpool, even as it slightly declined among others in the city and among those not exposed to the boycott. These changes persisted from the start of the boycott in 1989 until 1996, before the Sun famously endorsed Labour, and continued until at least 2004, when Da Silva’s dataset ends.
He concludes by pointing to a broader implication of his findings.
“The Sun famously ran the 1992 headline “It’s The Sun Wot Won It”, claiming credit for the Conservative general election victory. Clearly, newspaper publishers then felt they could influence political views.
“But perhaps a more interesting finding from my study is how this may happen. My results suggest to me that media influences how people perceive party positions. This is something that governments, publishers, and critically voters should take into account if they want to address the effects of media on elections.”
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