The Beatles: Inspiration or dead weight?

Jon Egan

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There was something profoundly true and desperately sad in University of Liverpool lecturer, Dr David Jeffery's acerbic observation that "Liverpool is a Beatles' shrine with a city attached."

It is the dispiriting obverse to music journalist, Paul Morley's rhapsodic description of Liverpool as "a provincial city plus hinterland with associated metaphysical space as defined by dramatic moments in history, emotional occasions and general restlessness."

Jeffery's comments on Twitter appear to have been inspired or provoked by the recent announcement that Liverpool would be using a £2 million grant from Government to advance the business case for yet another "world-class" and "cutting-edge" Beatles' attraction on our hallowed waterfront. Presumably, it will be sandwiched somewhere between the Beatles statue and The Beatles Experience and conveniently close to The Museum of Liverpool and The British Music Experience with their not inconsiderable collections of Beatles artifacts and memorabilia. The exact nature of this new cultural icon remains a little unclear, however, amidst wildly differing descriptions offered by our City and Metro Mayors.

What is deeply depressing about this announcement is that it suggests that Liverpool is incapable of imagining any kind of cultural proposition that is not predicated on the seemingly inexhaustible allure of the four boys who shook the world.

There is of course a readily available and seemingly plausible justification for the never-ending Beatles' fetish, and that is the claim that they are the anchor for our hugely important tourism economy. Notwithstanding the implication that David Jeffery is right to suspect that the city is consciously morphing into a Fab Four theme park, I suspect that this is not exactly the whole truth. For Liverpool, The Beatles are a crutch, a cherished emblem of identity and importance used to exorcise painful intimations of diminished relevance and prestige.

In the novel, Immortality, Czech writer Milan Kundera tells the story of the man who fell over in the street, who on his way home stumbles on an uneven pavement, falls to the ground and arises dazed, grazed and dishevelled, but after a few moments composes himself, and gets on with his life. But unbeknown to the man, a world famous photographer happens to witness the scene and quickly snaps an image of the bewildered and bloodied pedestrian. He subsequently decides to make this picture the cover image for his new book and the poster for his international exhibition. For the man, a momentary misfortune freeze-framed, replicated and disseminated across the world, becomes the image that will forever define who he is.

The more we conflate the Beatles brand with the city's identity, the less space we have to imagine anything original, contemporary or remarkable.

In a sense, Liverpool is the City that fell over on the street, our external image is in significant part, defined by a succession of misfortunes, afflictions and tragedies that befell the city over two decades at the end of the last century. These events forged images, preconceptions and stereotypes that still blight us today and have never been successfully exorcised or replaced.

The Beatles hark back to a time before this blight, when Liverpool was in Alan Ginsberg's celebrated phrase, "the centre of consciousness of the human universe." They are, I believe, a therapeutic distraction from the task of making a different story or discovering a new identity.

Culturally, our Beatles fixation is unhealthy, debilitating and regressive. In fact, I fear we are reaching a point where The Beatles will become the single biggest impediment to any form of civic progression, or any serious project to make Liverpool important, interesting or relevant in today's world. If we are going to have a civic conversation about what kind of "world class" Beatles attraction should be erected at The Pier Head, my immediate impulse would be to recommend a mausoleum.

But perhaps a more imaginative and original idea was the one offered by the late Tony Wilson. That supreme Mancophile, Factory Records producer, Granada TV reporter and founder of the Hacienda nightclub was never held in particularly high regard in this city, especially following some tongue in cheek words of encouragement he gave to Club Brugge on the eve of their European Cup semi-final with Liverpool in 1977. Scousers may resemble elephants with respect to their prodigious powers of memory, but our skins can sometimes be just a tiny bit thinner. Tragically, Wilson's Mancunian persona and his tendency to lapse into casual profanity whilst presenting his project to civic decision-makers proved the undoing of his brilliant and visionary proposition for POP - the International Museum of Popular Culture. Pitched as the big idea for the European Capital of Culture, and the solution that would provide content for Will Alsop's audacious but otherwise functionless Fourth Grace, POP was a talisman for instant reinvention - a Beatles-inspired attraction without any reference to The Beatles. Alas it never happened.

Wilson had first dreamt of POP as an adornment for his own native city and a fitting celebration of its notable contribution to the history of modern popular music, but he soon realised that it was the right idea for the wrong place. He would often express irritation that when travelling in the US he would frequently have to explain where Manchester was by reference to its proximity to Liverpool - a place that people had actually heard of. And there was also the grudging recognition that at a time when Liverpool was "the centre of the human universe" globalising popular culture - Manchester could only offer us Freddy and The Dreamers. Even the outrageous charisma of Manchester United football god, George Best was derivative as he was often dubbed the 5th Beatle.

POP would not simply have been about popular music, it would encompass every facet of popular culture, every expression of contemporary creativity in film, TV, advertising, games, cars, sport, fashion, digital technology and consumer culture. And it was proposed for Liverpool because this was the place that spawned a phenomenon that reached the four corners of the Earth. It was a moment when the world discovered a common currency and a cultural vernacular intelligible to every ear.

POPs content would be dynamic and ever-changing, a continuous exposition of the new, curated by global creatives, designers and technologists. It would be Liverpool recovering its world city perspective and its capacity to invent and innovate - the pool of life, the birth canal for the extraordinary and the unprecedented. Its ingenious paradox was its implicit assertion that The Beatles did not make Liverpool, but Liverpool made The Beatles.

They monopolise our self-image occluding facets of identity and history now only half-glimpsed in the penumbra of a shadowy scouse dreamtime.

All of which is a million miles from Steve Rotheram's "world-class immersive experience" which he promises us will be more spectacular than a glass cabinet containing John Lennon's underpants. We can hardly wait.

If all we can possibly imagine are The Beatles etherealised into holograms - almost literally spectres from beyond the grave - then David Jeffery is right and Liverpool's once rich and cosmopolitan culture has collapsed into a black hole of redundant clichés. The more we inflate our Beatles offer and conflate their brand with the city's very identity, the less space we have in which to imagine anything original, contemporary or remarkable. Along with football (which at least tells new stories) they have come to monopolise both our external brand and our officially curated self-image, occluding facets of our identity and history that are now forgotten and suppressed, only half-glimpsed in the penumbra of a shadowy scouse dreamtime.

The Beatles have come not only to represent our brand, but have also helped to define our personality, attitude and accent - cheeky, chippy, sassy and defiant. As emblems of the 60s social revolution, they helped to forge and reify the idea of Liverpool as a working class city - or more accurately an exclusively working class city. As rock journalist Paul duNoyer, notes in his book, Wondrous Place, this is both a false and profoundly disabling imposition. Not only, as Tony Wilson asserted, are we the city that globalised popular culture, but we are a city that has contributed massively to every facet of culture, ideas and invention over the last 200 years.

The world's first enclosed dock and inter-city railway, together with the completion of the Transatlantic telegraph cable, are not only stunning achievements in technological innovation, but bolster the credible claim that globalisation began here.

The extent to which we have been willing to squander or disown the breadth of our cultural heritage was brought home to me in the febrile final stages of the European Capital of Culture bidding competition. Having commissioned pop artist, Sir Peter Blake to create a homage to his iconic Sgt Pepper album cover to remind the world, or at least the judging panel, of Liverpool's cultural and intellectual prowess, the task of deciding who exactly was worthy of inclusion was both fraught and enormously revealing. Apart from a few contemporary, and at the time highly topical creatives including the poet Paul Farley, artist Fiona Banner and film-maker Alex Cox, the principal criterion for inclusion appeared to be the directness or intimacy of connection to The Beatles. A lop-sided bias towards musicians, popular entertainers and Sixties icons meant no room for the likes of painters George Stubbs and Augustus John, poets Nathaniel Hawthorne and Wilfred Owen, novelist Nicholas Monsarrat, playwright, Peter Shaffer or even poet and novelist, Malcolm Lowry the author of the celebrated, Under the Volcano. Incredibly, until Bluecoat Artistic Director, Bryan Biggs' finally succeeded in persuading Wirral Council to erect a blue plaque on New Brighton's sea wall, there was virtually no public recognition that one of the 20th century's greatest and most influential novelists had any association with the Liverpool City Region.

Without questioning or diminishing the impact of the Mersey Sound poets (McGough, Henri and Patten) in the 1960s, their literary status is no way comparable to another unsung and forgotten cultural luminary with a significant Liverpool connection - C.P. Cavafy. Now acknowledged as one of the last century's most important and original poetic voices, Cavafy spent much of his childhood at addresses in Toxteth and Fairfield. Greek and gay, his poetry will forever be associated with the city of Alexandria where his family settled after leaving Liverpool. We do not know to what extent his formative years in the city helped nurture Cavafy's creative animus, but transience, up-rootedness and departure are woven into our narrative. Our sense of self and place in the world as Liverpolitans, owe as much to those who moved on, or merely passed through, as they do to those who stayed or settled here.

We are not, and never have been a monochrome canvass or a one trick city. Our culture is dense, deep and multifarious, formed by a hotchpotch of races, creeds and classes. For those tasked with defining a place and communicating its uniqueness to the world, there is always the temptation to reduce and simplify.

Brands, including place brands, are often conceived like Platonic forms - a distilled essence, fixed and immutable. But cities like Liverpool are neither simple nor static, and are thus frustratingly un-brandable. Described by Wilson as a place with "an innate preference for the abstract and the chaotic," our essence is pre-Socratic - unresolved, unpredictable and disconcerting. We know that port cities like Liverpool, Naples, Barcelona and Marseilles have historically been melting pots for ideas, influences and cultures - places where things never quite settled.

But their edginess is not merely a function of a perturbed diversity, it is also literal. It's connected to Marshall McLuhan's philosophical idea of right hemisphere sensitivity and the expanded perspective of what he terms acoustic space. Ports face outwards, they are perched on the precipice of a vast and formless abyss. It's an omnipresent reminder that there are no limits.

For Paul Morley, Liverpool’s character and identity - its ability to charm, entertain, inspire and infuriate - proceed from an inchoate restlessness and fidgety creativity. It's a place "where something happens, most of the time, leading to something else." But it seems like that creative energy and inventiveness have deserted us - or at least our leaders. What was once an animating pulse has been reduced to a piece of hollow rhetoric - a brand attribute.

It's sad that a UNESCO City of Music should have forsaken polyphony, and that we are continually stuck in a repetitive groove, narrowing our identity and stifling our capacity to be original (again). For this reason the very last thing Liverpool needs is yet another Beatles' attraction, even an immersive one.

So, OK, The Beatles were important, are important. They changed the world, but did they change Liverpool? We're still, I hope, the city capable of creating something else.

Jon Egan is a former electoral strategist for the Labour Party and has worked as a public affairs and policy consultant in Liverpool for over 30 years. He helped design the communication strategy for Liverpool’s Capital of Culture bid and advised the city on its post-2008 marketing strategy. He is an associate researcher with think tank, ResPublica.

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Life after Joe: Ditching the Mayor won’t fix our broken democracy

Jon Egan

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When nearly all of Liverpool’s political parties agree on something, you can bet it’s on an issue of mutual self-interest rather than in defence of any cherished principle.

As things stand, Liverpool’s voters will be invited, most likely in 2022, to decide whether to keep or dispense with the office of directly elected city mayor. It promises to be a rather one-sided campaign with the city’s three largest political groups (Labour, Liberal Democrats and Greens) all arguing for abolishing the post and returning to what they collectively describe as the “more accountable” Leader with Cabinet structure.

Even our recently elected incumbent, Mayor Joanne Anderson, is pledging to vote for the abolition of her own job, which begs the question, why she was so anxious to run for office in the first place? But of course, she was not alone. In the 2021 mayoral election, only two candidates - the Independent, Stephen Yip, and the Liberal Party's Steve Radford - were actually standing on a pro-mayor ticket. Indeed, following the unprecedented intervention by Labour's ruling National Executive to disqualify all three of the senior councillors on the original selection shortlist, both the Labour and Liberal Democrat council groups attempted to cancel the election by abolishing the role without recourse to a public referendum, until they were stopped in their tracks by polite reminders from their own legal officers that such a move would be unlawful.

There is an acute danger that we will sleep walk into this referendum without either a campaign or a properly informed debate. Voters will be asked to reflect on the need to learn lessons from euphemistically labelled "recent events" and fed the seemingly plausible line that one mayor is better than two. After all, why do we need a city mayor now that we have a metro mayor?

Of course, there is a shadow hanging over this whole discussion – one powerful argument for the case against elected mayors – which comes in the shape of the now under investigation and widely discredited former mayor, Joe Anderson. For some, he has become a walking metaphor and deal-sealing symbol of the dangers of too much power in the hands of one larger than life individual. But this is too important a decision for knee-jerk reactions. Our democracy demands that the subject be properly examined and debated. It’s too easy for us to be seduced by over-simplified and questionable arguments. We should think hard before dispensing with a model, that I would contend, has never been properly embraced or tried by our local politicians.

There is an acute danger that we will sleep walk into this referendum without either a campaign or a properly informed debate.

Before we head off to the ballot box (presuming we get the chance), there are some key questions we have to consider. Are mayors generally a good thing? Can they achieve results that old-style council leaders can't? Is there something specifically about Liverpool and the state of our local governance, our politics and our economic and social predicament that makes having a city mayor here particularly desirable or dangerous? And how are we to make sense of our experience of the mayoral model to date? Are the critics right that the concentration of power has been unhealthy or even corrupting?

But first… a little context. Let’s delve back into the city’s recent history to find out how we ended up in this mess. City mayors were an early prescription for what is now fashionably described as ‘levelling-up.’ The problem of a seriously unbalanced economy and underperforming urban centres was a matter of serious priority for the incoming New Labour government in 1997. The publication of Towards an Urban Renaissance - the report of Lord Rogers' Urban Task Force was a seminal moment in re-prioritising the importance of cities as vital engines for growth, innovation and national prosperity. 

We’ve been here before - Liverpool’s democratic deficit

Harnessing that growth, it was implied, would require a new kind of energised civic governance similar in form and style to the dynamic leadership that had successfully regenerated European and North American cities such as Barcelona and Boston. In contrast, the fragmented committee structure of local government, then dominant in the UK, was seen as a recipe for old-school inefficiency and a failure of imagination. A new Local Government Bill (2000) set out the options to reset civic democracy. There was no coercion; just three choices: Leader and Cabinet (close enough to stay as you are), and two flavours of the big bang option for directly-elected City Mayors. Towns and cities were free to decide for themselves and unsurprisingly, councils overwhelmingly chose the least change option with only a handful willing to embrace the more radical mayoral restructure.   

In Liverpool, however, the idea of a directly elected mayor aroused immediate interest, though admittedly not amongst our politicians. Instead, the city's three universities, its two largest media organisations (BBC Radio Merseyside and the Liverpool Echo) and a collection of faith leaders convened the ground-breaking Liverpool Democracy Commission in 1999. Under the chairmanship of Littlewood's supremo, James Ross, the independent commission brought together politicians, academics, and community and business leaders such as Lord David Alton, Professor of Urban Affairs, Michael Parkinson (now of the Heseltine Institute), radio presenter Roger Phillips, and Claire Dove, a key player in the local social enterprise movement. They took evidence from national and local experts and were shadowed by a Citizen's Jury to widen representation. In turn, the city council made a commitment to consider its recommendations and, if a mayoral model was advocated, to hold a public referendum. 

From its inception it was clear that the commission was not simply evaluating the general merits of the available models, but was considering their applicability to Liverpool’s very particular local circumstances. Those circumstances included a wretched turnout of just 6.3% when a tired and divided Labour administration lost its majority in the crucial Melrose ward council by-election in 1997, the lowest ever poll in British electoral history. A Peer Review of the troubled council at the time by the Independent and Improvement Agency had painted a picture of lethargy, cronyism, an insular town hall culture, and wretchedly poor service delivery. Liverpool was acutely aware that its civic governance required a radical reboot.

Leaders run councils, Mayors run cities

The more general case for a directly elected mayor centred on its ability to reinvigorate local democracy, transferring the focus of civic leadership from the inner minutiae and manoeuvrings of the town hall to the wider city – its communities, businesses and institutions. As local government academic Professor Gerry Stoker put it when giving evidence to the Democracy Commission, “Leaders run councils, mayors govern cities.”

Stoker was by no means alone in advocating this radical change. Evidence from witnesses, community meetings, public surveys and the Citizen’s Jury converged on the same transformational proposition. Mayors could be convenors, able to galvanise civic energy by bringing multiple parties together in partnership. They would change the destiny of places in ways that our stilted and bureaucratic town halls could never hope to emulate.

Against this backdrop, the idea of giving every citizen the opportunity to vote for the city's leader seemed refreshingly progressive. It also offered a tantalising possibility - a radical break with party politics. Theoretically, the elected mayor system provides a level playing field for independent candidates. No longer would political parties with the networks and infrastructure required to support candidates in all of the city's wards be able to monopolise the system. Politics could be open, unpredictable and much more interesting and the talent pool from which to select a city leader was immediately expanded. Clever and experienced people from business and civil society would step forward to offer themselves for election.

But above all, it was the radical simplicity of the democratic contract that commended the mayoral model. No longer would local democracy be transacted behind closed doors, shrouded by arcane traditions and enacted through the inscrutable election-by-thirds voting system that somehow allowed political parties to lose elections but miraculously stay in power. With a directly-elected mayor, there would be visible leadership, clear and simple accountability and a transparent means of returning them or removing them from office.

By blaming the mayoral model for the shameful abuses and failures identified by Caller, our councillors are indulging in a transparently hollow attempt at self-exoneration.

It was for that reason that elected mayors were pitched as the antidote to voter disaffection, not just in Liverpool but across the whole country. Turnouts for local elections were in decline everywhere resulting in a widely acknowledged crisis of legitimacy.

Legitimate or not, one year before the Democracy Commission was founded, Liverpool’s voters had their say, overcoming their most ingrained cultural instincts to throw out what they knew was rotten. Liverpool's Labour administration was swept from power by an almost entirely unpredicted Liberal Democrat landslide.

So it would be a Liberal Democrat administration that would decide whether to adopt the mayoral model and respond to the unequivocal recommendation of The Democracy Commission. But they fluffed their lines, embracing instead the less radical option offered by the New Labour government – a Leader with Cabinet. Not for the first time, our political leaders knew best. Rather than allowing voters to choose their preferred model via the referendum they had promised, the council opted for the one that suited their own ends best.

Paradoxically, Liberal Democrat Council Leader, Mike Storey’s style and swagger were almost mayoral. He set up the UKs first Urban Regeneration Company (Liverpool Vision) and boldly calibrated a vision of the city as a European Capital of Culture. These were heady days, and many will now look back nostalgically on Storey’s early tenure as a time of almost limitless promise. So what went wrong?

Storey was instinctively attracted to the idea of city mayors and thought he could be one without having to navigate this dangerously Blairite and centralising heresy through his notoriously individualistic and anarchic Liberal Democrat Party. But Storey was constrained both by the instincts, prejudices and personal ambitions of his own political group, but perhaps more importantly, by the absence of an independent democratic mandate. His leadership rested on the confidence and acquiescence of his unruly Lib Dem caucus, but also on the compliance and co-operation of his highly ambitious Chief Executive, Sir David Henshaw - a challenging job at the best of times. From the outset, some had feared being left out in the cold by this high profile vote winner and knives were sharpened. Without a personal mandate from the public, it was difficult for Storey to face them down. The image of a beleaguered leader imprisoned and frustrated by an obstructive town hall bureaucracy was painfully and comically exposed in the infamous "Evil Cabal" blog. This was local government reduced to camp farce.

The fact is, Storey’s leadership and authority waned precisely because he was not a mayor. He lacked the clear constitutional and democratic authority to deliver on his mandate and to prevail over vested interests and personal agendas. At the end of the day, he was too much a part of a system that was still instinctively protective and self-serving.

Where power really lies

This may appear to be a subtle and rather academic distinction, but the source of a council leader's authority is always municipal rather than civic. The democratic process is indirect and opaque, and real power rests with councillors, not voters. It is councillors who choose the leader, and it is councillors who can topple them, even outside of the local election cycle. Ultimately, council leaders know who they are answerable to and are inclined to act accordingly.

Eventually Storey was forced to resign and after his nemesis, Henshaw, had departed, the Liberal Democrat regime lapsed into a familiar pattern of failure and chaos, mimicking its Labour predecessor. Before long it was being tagged as the country’s worst performing council, and was dumped out of office by an unlikely Labour revival. The compromise option of The Leader with Cabinet model had not ushered in the promised golden age of civic renewal, but only dismal continuity and an all too familiar story of town hall intrigue and ineptitude.

For the incoming Labour administration, the mayoral option was perceived as a threat, not an opportunity. Liam Fogarty’s Mayor for Liverpool campaign was gathering steam, and its petition heading towards the tipping point where a public referendum would have to be negotiated. For Fogarty, the slow implosion of the previous Liberal Democrat administration was evidence that the problems were systemic. He believed that only a new model which transferred more power to voters could fix Liverpool's dysfunctional municipal culture, and that the authority of leaders must rest on a direct personal mandate from the public.

Fearful that a referendum campaign would be a platform for a powerful independent, and in an act of supreme cynicism, Joe Anderson invoked a hitherto unsuspected provision of the Local Government Act to transform himself into an “unelected” elected mayor. It’s worth remembering that Labour’s adoption of the model was motivated solely by a neurotic phobia of a Phil Redmond (creator of popular TV soap-opera, Brookside) candidacy, rather than any intrinsic attraction to this radical new way of running a city. In truth, Liverpool Labour never believed in elected mayors and the shambles and shame of Anderson’s last days provided it with a perfect opportunity to dispatch the idea once and for all. 

Boss politicians and the school of hard knocks

Anderson's sleight of hand once again deprived Liverpool voters of the opportunity of a referendum where the mayoral model could have been properly debated and explored. The fact that it was adopted without enthusiasm or any thorough consideration of its merits, is perhaps the explanation for what subsequently transpired. Anderson did not rule as a convening mayor - as envisaged by Stoker and advocated by the Democracy Commission - dispersing power, building coalitions, and using soft levers to nurture civic cohesion. He was an old-style Labour “City Boss” – in the style and tradition of Derek Hatton, Jack Braddock, Bill Sefton and a host of less memorable and notorious predecessors. Anderson’s approach was that of a fixer and deal-maker - a pugnacious “school of hard knocks” political operator who once threatened to punch a Tory Minister on the nose for claiming that austerity was over.

If Mike Storey was a council leader masquerading as a mayor, Joe Anderson was a mayor acting out the role of a traditional boss politician. What Storey lacked in terms of authority and mandate, Anderson lacked in terms of subtlety, collegiality and an overarching civic perspective.         

During a mayoral hustings event in 2012 at the Neptune Theatre, an audience member posed the challenge, what is Liverpool for? A tricky question and one that demanded a perspective beyond the familiar horizons of the council budget and Tory assaults on its finances. Anderson seemed utterly dumbfounded. Only Liam Fogarty was able to grasp that existential questions like these cannot even be perceived, let alone resolved, from the myopic vantage point of a town hall bunker. Our politicians were simply incapable of rising to the challenge of a political role that required a radically different set of skills and a civic, rather than a municipal, mindset.

Which brings us to today. In effect, we have had a mayoral model, but we have never had a mayor in the way it was envisaged… as a radical antidote to a broken town hall culture.

It is the supreme irony that the case against elected mayors is now being framed on the record and reputation of Joe Anderson - the very embodiment of old-style Liverpool municipalism with its narrow and insular perspective. The argument that Anderson proves the perils of placing too much power in one person’s hands is a dangerous and misleading sleight of hand; a fallacy designed to obscure both historic truth and the complex considerations that should be informing this hugely important debate about how our city is governed.

The fallacy was set out quite pointedly in the 2021 Max Caller report, with its forensic exposure of Liverpool Council’s systemic municipal failure. In describing the governance structure of the city council, Caller observed:

“although the mayor is an authority’s principal public spokesperson and provides the overall political direction for a council, an elected mayor has no additional local authority powers over and above those found in the leader and cabinet model, or the committee system.” 

Mayors are a dangerous idea. Independent candidate Stephen Yip threatened to end party political hegemony in Liverpool with only the meagrest resources. This is an eventuality that establishment politicians must join forces to thwart once and for all.

In effect, the "Leader with Cabinet" model now favoured by our local politicians, places exactly the same amount of power in precisely the same number of hands as the “discredited” mayoral model. In no way is it inherently more accountable or transparent. We are being sold a false prospectus, and one we know from our own recent history is no panacea. This is the classic ruse of the second-hand car salesman, and we need to look under the bonnet before it's too late.

By blaming the mayoral model for the shameful abuses and failures identified by Caller, our councillors are indulging in a transparently hollow attempt at self-exoneration. The “few rotten apples” alibi became the recurrent mantra to explain away the systemic dysfunctionalism exposed by the report. It was all down to the Mayor and a system that allowed a few powerful individuals to operate without adequate transparency or scrutiny. Or so the story goes. The solution is simple, get rid of the Mayor and all will be well. 

But there was nothing extraordinary or atypical in Anderson's style, nor anything that was especially mayoral about the municipal culture or the way power was exercised. Caller's report is depressingly redolent of the Peer Review into the previous failed Labour administration and the chaotic end days of the subsequent Liberal Democrat council. This is simply what Liverpool local government looks like.  

Multiple Mayors - other cities seem to manage it

We cannot make the mayoral system a scapegoat for a chronic and systemic failure of governance in our city. If, as its critics allege, mayors necessarily lead to an undesirable and dangerous concentration of power, then logically, wouldn’t we also need to seriously revisit our devolution deal and the post of Metro Mayor? Our politicians can’t have it both ways.

And neither should we be spooked by the “too many mayors confuse the voters” line. If it turns out that mayors are a good thing after all, then why should they be rationed? Mayors and Metro Mayors co-exist happily in London, Greater Manchester, South Yorkshire, the West of England, Tees Valley and North of Tyne. Cities in these areas including Bristol, Middlesbrough and Salford appear to be able to cope with the idea of different mayors exercising different powers over different geographic jurisdictions.

We shouldn't of course be surprised that our politicians are advocating for a return to the Leader with Cabinet system, when its most conspicuous difference to the “disgraced” mayoral model is that it would give them the exclusive power to decide who our City Leader should be. Rather than a direct popular mandate, Liverpool’s leader would be entirely beholden to councillors from within their own political group. Only in the looking-glass world of Liverpool politics can this be presented as more democratic and accountable. As the elected Mayor of Bristol, Marvin Rees recently argued in response to those advocating abolition of the post there. “It doesn't take much understanding of why the old system didn't work. Anonymous and unaccountable leadership, decisions made by faceless people in private rooms, and a total lack of leadership and action. The mayoral model makes the leader accountable - he/she is elected by the people of Bristol directly, not by 30 people in a room as in the old committee structure.”

If Liverpool votes to abolish its elected mayor and reverts to a system that has already proven unfit for purpose, we will weaken local democracy and diminish accountability.

But this is precisely the brave new system that we will be invited to endorse in next year's referendum and one that has already been tried and found wanting.

The lesson is that having an elected mayor is not a sufficient condition to deliver radical civic and political change, but it is a necessary one. The authority, legitimacy and wider perspective of the mayoral office is vitally important in making our municipal edifice work for the city rather than for itself.

Mayors are a good idea because they provide visible, directly accountable leadership. Their mandate enables them to speak up for their locality with authority and influence. We only need to look to London and Greater Manchester to see how mayors have been powerful and effective advocates for their cities and regions. But ultimately we need one who understands and actually believes in the role, which is why it is difficult to believe that Joanne Anderson's tenure is likely to fulfil the potential that the post could still offer to the people of Liverpool.

But as our councillors understand only too well, mayors are a dangerous idea. Independent candidate Stephen Yip threatened to end party political hegemony in Liverpool with only the meagrest resources and virtually no grassroots organisation. This is an eventuality that establishment politicians must join forces to thwart once and for all.

If Liverpool votes to abolish its elected mayor and reverts to a system that has already proven unfit for purpose, we will weaken local democracy and diminish accountability. And we’ll be doing it in the name of its opposite, bamboozled by the Humpty Dumpty logic of Liverpool politics where words mean whatever our politicians choose them to mean. We will also denying ourselves even the faintest possibility of breaking out from the cycle of dysfunctional party politics.

The elected mayoralty is the only chance we have to change the way our city is run. The tragedy is, we could lose this opportunity before ever having really given it a proper go. Someone needs to start a campaign, and soon. 

Jon Egan is a former electoral strategist for the Labour Party and has worked as a public affairs and policy consultant in Liverpool for over 30 years. He helped design the communication strategy for Liverpool’s Capital of Culture bid and advised the city on its post-2008 marketing strategy. He is an associate researcher with think tank, ResPublica.

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Liverpool Bombing: Calls to unite reveal what they really think of us

Paul Bryan

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In the face of a terrorist attack, when much is supposition and information is still filtering in, it’s really important not to rush to judgement. Calm heads should, as in all situations, prevail.

However, following the bomb blast from a home-made device in a taxi outside the Liverpool Women’s Hospital, it seems many are doing the complete opposite, crow-barring their agendas into a story that luckily didn’t appear to kill any innocents.

One of the more curious examples could be found in Spiked Online in an article entitled ‘David Perry and the incredible heroism of ordinary people’. Speedily jumping onto claims that the taxi driver had quick-wittedly locked his passenger, Emad Al Swealmeen inside the car, after spotting suspicious activity, writer Tom Slater warmed to his task. “Time and again it is the public who are our last line of defence against this barbarism,” he concluded. And that may well be true, but the full facts are not yet clear in this case and Perry’s heroism is yet to be established conclusively. All that we do know at the time of writing, is that the video of the incident clearly shows that the explosion took place before the car had come to a stop. Why don’t we just wait and see and let the police piece it together?

The commentaries that swirl around these events reveal so much about the pre-occupations of those who would form the nation’s opinions. Liverpool’s Metro Mayor, Steve Rotheram was quick to set the tone, issuing a statement which said, “it would seem this was an attempt to sow discord and divisions within our communities. But our area is much stronger than that. We are known for our solidarity and resilience. Our diversity remains one of our greatest strengths. We will never let those who seek to divide us win.” 

Merseyside Police Commissioner, Emily Spurrell, obviously had the same briefing sheet, ‘our region is known for its solidarity and resilience,’ she tweeted. Meanwhile, in the Liverpool Echo, Liverpool Mayor, Joanne Anderson was reported to have said, “For all of us who know that Liverpool is a tolerant and inclusive city – this will be hard to come to terms with. Over the next few days, as we learn more about what happened, we must all support each other and unite, as we always do, when times are tough."

Just in case anyone might point the finger, the Liverpool Region Mosque Network issued a statement too, appealing for “calm and vigilance”.

Take note of the consistent themes – tolerance, inclusivity, diversity, solidarity. They’ll be important.

But it was perhaps Liam Thorp of the Liverpool Echo who crystalised the thinking better than most. His article, ‘Terror won’t divide Liverpool, this city will be more united than ever’ drew praise from his own publishing team, with David Higgerson, Chief Audience Officer at Reach Plc using it to champion the newspaper as ‘a beacon of accurate, reliable information’. Some of their regular readers might beg to differ.  

When you hear somebody say, ‘scousers do this, or scousers do that’ they’re really saying, ‘you must do this, you must do that.’

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Liam was really on fire, sounding almost Churchillian. “It is in times of great adversity that the true colours of people and places shine through and it will come as no surprise to anyone who knows Liverpool well that the people of this city have stood up, united and pulled each other up again.” 

Examples were given - an elderly man was provided with a wheelchair as he was evacuated from Rutland Avenue; over £60,000 and climbing has been raised on GoFundMe and Facebook for the driver – to pay for what exactly? They are aiming for £100,000 by the way.  His wife Rachel described David’s condition as ‘extremely sore’. And of course, there was also this gem, “Or the brave bystanders who didn't think twice before running towards David as he fled that terrifying fireball - desperate to help him in any way they could.” I must have watched a different video. It all seemed a bit casual to me.

But Liam was only getting started, “Scousers look after each other - and when others try to jump on a crisis in this city to push their own divisive agenda, that will simply be rejected.”

It almost sounded like he was hinting at something else. I wonder what? But he had one final beat of the drum, “The Women's hospital represents the best of this diverse, inclusive, brave and brilliant city and each and every person here will have been horrified to see it targeted in this way.” 

So there you go, just in case you are unsure. A bombing at a hospital, let alone a ‘women’s hospital’ is a bad thing. Are we all on the same page with that? Thanks Liam.

So what might we conclude from these very similar themed statements? Why do so many of the leading figures in the city feel the need to talk about diversity and inclusion and solidarity in the face of a terrorist attack? It’s not like that is the only option. You could just express your sympathy, appeal for calm and release the facts as they arise. Why go the extra mile?

What their spin on the Liverpool bombing reveals is their real concern. The more we hear the talk of scousers sticking together, of terror not dividing us, of our diversity being our strength, the more it reveals they don’t believe it. These sentiments hide a deep pessimism about their fellow citizens, about the unwashed and unruly. Why else would we need to hear their urgings for peace and a respect for difference? For some commentators, this desperate act of terrorism is the match in the hay bale. The trigger that they believe could ignite an orgy of violence. That civilisation is but skin-deep and we must be saved from our own worst instincts by their pious sermons. But history doesn’t support their view. Most people are decent. Most people strive to be fair. Most people do not resort to violence. When you hear somebody say, ‘scousers do this, or scousers do that’ they’re really saying, ‘you must do this, you must do that.’ We don’t need their advice to do the right thing. We’ve already figured it out for ourselves.

Truth is, leaders or those who want to be leaders like to look like leaders. And there’s nothing quite like a terrorist incident to summon up all that statesman or stateswoman-like pomposity. Don’t give them the chance. Turn off social media for the evening. Enjoy time with your family and friends. You won’t be missing anything important. Just blah, blah blah.

Paul Bryan is the Editor and Co-Founder of Liverpolitan. He is also a freelance content writer, script editor, communications strategist and creative coach.

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Vanished. The city that disappeared from the map

Jon Egan

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When I was a young child my parents bought me a truly wondrous gift ‐ an illuminated globe of the world. It was a magical object with the power to inspire and enrapture, but it also taught me two important, but hitherto unknown, facts about the world.

The first was that my country, Britain, was very small. So small in fact that it was only possible to fit the names of two cities onto this tiny morsel of irradiated pinkness. The second lesson, that followed ineluctably from the first, was that my city clearly was important. As far as the world was concerned Britain could be adequately represented by only two places – London, its capital, and Liverpool, its global gateway. We were on the map, or at least we were then.

A few years ago, when passing through the John Lewis department store, I stopped to browse at a selection of highly impressive (but sadly not illuminated) globes. Britain remained within its familiar miniscule dimensions, but the cartographers had skilfully managed to inscribe on its terrain the names of not two, but five significant British cities – London, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and Glasgow. It merely confirmed what I had long suspected ‐ we were no longer important.

There is of course a serious point to this parable, and it is that we are not simply absent from physical maps, but also from the conceptual and metaphorical maps that shape policy and influence important decision‐making. Despite the incessant hype to the contrary, data from the Centre For Cities suggests we are making little progress in closing the performance gap with competing and emerging economic centres.

A well‐placed insider described Liverpool as “the city that has forgotten how to conjugate in the future tense.”

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We have become peripheral ‐ largely outside the thought processes and priorities of political decision‐makers, investors, media commentators and influencers. Addressing and reversing this process – or putting Liverpool ‘back on the map’ ‐ has been, or certainly should have been, a guiding principle for our political and civic leaders over the last four decades. With a City Council mired in crisis and multiple criminal investigations, and the most recent State of The City Region (2015) report presenting a picture of chronic levels of ill‐health, worklessness and deprivation, it’s clear we still have a very long way to go.

For anyone wondering if the economic picture has improved since that last report was published, check out the tale of woe in the new Shaping Futures report, The Demographics and Educational Disadvantage in the Liverpool City Region (2021).

My own involvement with efforts to reposition and rehabilitate Liverpool’s external image has been deeply frustrating and depressingly circular. When in 2002 Liverpool was bidding to become European Capital of Culture, bid supremo, Bob Scott, suffered a heart attack in the closing stages of the process. City Council CEO, Sir David Henshaw took control of the bid, and invited myself as director of the agency that had devised the bid’s World in One City branding, and the Lib Dem’s political strategist, Bill le Breton, to review the campaign and communication messaging. This was an interesting and instructive exercise. Talking to people very close to the then Culture Minister, Tessa Jowell, and contacts equally close to the leading members of the judging panel, the feedback on Liverpool’s campaign pitch was not entirely encouraging. One of the most memorable comments from a very well‐placed insider described Liverpool as “the city that has forgotten how to conjugate in the future tense.” In a competitive process that was supposedly about regeneration and the role of culture in stimulating economic transformation, Liverpool had, until that point, focused almost entirely on showcasing its “great cultural heritage” and waxing nostalgically about its past glories as the Second City of Empire.

A radical rethink was needed, and fast if the city was to be ready in time for the judges’ second visit. We’d need a whole new bid narrative, rigorously disciplined messaging and a tightly scripted programme to change hearts and minds. The new story would be about the future ‐ a city applying its creative energies to embrace cutting‐edge culture, commerce and technology – and it worked. The only problem was that having won, we quickly abandoned the brave, new language and future‐focused vision. 2008 became, as Phil Redmond, Capital of Culture’s, last‐minute appointee as Creative Director, once testified, the proverbial “Big Scouse wedding” with Uncle Ringo on the karaoke.

Consigned to the second tier of UK cities, Liverpool had somehow become pigeon‐holed as economically and maybe even culturally irrelevant.

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Fast forward to 2010 and the festival’s former marketing supremo, Kris Donaldson, arrives back in Liverpool to take up a new position as the city’s Destination Manager, only to discover that the promise of Capital of Culture as a platform to radically re‐position Liverpool had largely been squandered. Research commissioned by economic regeneration company, Liverpool Vision had suggested the city was perceived as quirky and entertaining, but news of its “regeneration miracle” was still a dimly perceived rumour amongst the nation’s influencers and decision‐makers. Without any significant expectation of success, I joined forces with journalist, political campaigner and former BBC Radio Merseyside broadcaster, Liam Fogarty and two local creatives (Jon Barraclough and Chris Blackhurst) to pitch for the city re‐branding brief that emerged from Kris’s sobering discovery. Our proposal was less of a pitch and more an indulgent exercise in provocation. Having initially been sifted out of the process by a dutiful underling at Liverpool Vision, Kris reinstated us onto the shortlist for interview. Our presentation began with a miscellany of quotes from ministerial speeches, broadsheet Op‐Eds and the authoritative musings of a polyglot of professional commentators. They were all opining on the need for economic re‐balancing and the incipient promise of that great new hope, the Northern Powerhouse. But amongst their mountain of words, one city was consistently and depressingly absent, and it was of course, Liverpool.

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Permanently consigned to the second tier of UK cities, Liverpool had somehow become pigeon‐holed as economically and maybe even culturally irrelevant. The bold promise of 2008 had been replaced by fatalistic resignation, punctuated by occasional blasts of delusional bombast and mawkish nostalgia. As a result, Liverpool ceased to be discussed when the adults were in the room.

Winning the brief, with an ominous feeling of déjà vu and an almost Sisyphean sense of futility, we set out to equip the city once again with a future tense vocabulary and a story that would surprise and challenge the preconceptions of those we most needed to convince and convert. But like an aging soap star struggling with new scripts and plot lines, the city inevitably lapsed into its well‐worn phrases and crowd‐pleasing clichés. The It’s Liverpool campaign became less of a device to “package surprises” and orientate future ambition, but more an excuse to recycle familiar messages and tell the world what they already knew.

Fast forward another seven years to 2017 and I am sitting in the campaign HQ of the man bidding to become the first Liverpool City Region Mayor, the Labour MP for Walton, Steve Rotheram. We are discussing how to frame a transformational narrative for his soon to be launched election campaign. I find myself agreeing with him that devolution is the last chance saloon for a city (or City Region) being left behind by its competitors and too often ignored by those whose judgments and decisions shape its future. I think we may even have used the phrase “putting Liverpool back on the map” as shorthand for a project to reassert the city’s status as a Premier League player (forgive the clumsy football cliché) ensuring it once again became an integral component in the national economic narrative. I was increasingly hopeful that Steve’s refreshingly insightful analysis of the city’s deficiencies could be the prequal to a visionary devolution project. Four years on, and the consensus is that our Metro Mayor has yet to reset Liverpool’s trajectory or restore our status as an important economic or creative asset for the UK. If devolution was the last chance saloon, then the barman, with one eye on the clock, appears to be reaching ominously for the towels.

Four years on, and the consensus is that our Metro Mayor has yet to reset Liverpool’s trajectory or restore our status as an important economic or creative asset for the UK.

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The initial stimulus for this article was the then imminent launch of Rotheram’s re‐election campaign in March 2020, before, of course, normality was put on hold by Covid and what we imagined were urgent political challenges dissolved into irrelevancy in the face of a global human tragedy. That earlier, never published version of this article, drafted in the format of an open letter to the Metro Mayor‐elect, was triggered by a series of events that acted as timely reminders of our reduced circumstances. Former Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne had used his resignation as Chair of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership to restate his vision of a rebalanced Britain where the “great cities of the north” (predictably we weren’t name‐checked) counterbalanced the wealth and prestige of London. But the tipping point for me, however, came on a day when Rotheram launched the latest phase of the Mersey Tidal Energy study, part of his big plan to recast the Liverpool City Region as an exemplar for sustainability and innovation. He might as well as not have bothered for all the attention it got. Instead, on that same day, a Simon Jenkins’ Guardian Op‐Ed calling for economic rebalancing, once again seemed to have been drafted with a map of Northern England where Liverpool was inexplicably absent. Twelve years after Capital of Culture and four years after devolution, the sad fact is that we are still not on the map.

The constructive, and at the time topical, section of the article was a positively motivated attempt to offer some suggestions for Rotheram’s critically important second term. Not that I thought I was especially qualified to provide such advice, but more to help stimulate a bigger, smarter and more diverse political conversation – in fact, the kind of energised democracy that devolution was designed to foster.

In a strange way Covid has given us more time, and an even more urgent imperative to take stock of where our City Region is heading. We need to be more radical, more imaginative and more willing to challenge the myths and shibboleths that have constrained thinking, blighted ambition and stunted potential.

So, in that spirit, here are five ideas about how we might help to remake and re‐position our city.

1. Appoint smart people – preferably from places more successful than Liverpool

Scouse exceptionalism and insularity are tragically compounded by a debilitating public sector culture. As the employer of last resort, our public institutions have evolved a defensive protectionist mindset that all too often fosters inertia and promotes mediocrity. I’m not necessarily advocating a Dominic Cummings‐style cull of staff and an invitation to assorted geeks, weirdos and misfits to replace them, but for devolution to make a difference it needs to be delivered by different people with higher levels of ambition, achievement and creativity. The kind of people capable of imagining possibilities beyond the recently launched hotchpotch of reheated pet projects and lame platitudes which masquerade as the city’s “transformational vision” for a post‐Covid future. What we need more than anything are people with a track record of delivery in a city or City Region that is palpably more successful than Liverpool. To extend the football analogy, we need a Klopp rather than a Hodgson; an Ancelotti or Benitez, not a Big Sam.

Rather than a being a dynamic galvanising body with a transformational agenda, our post‐devolution governance has somehow coalesced into an unhappy amalgam of Merseytravel and the Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) – a stifling bureaucracy with a highly developed aversion to any form of risk or innovation. For the next term to be successful, our Metro Mayor needs to transform the calibre, capacity and orientation of the Combined Authority. It remains to be seen whether the new Head of Paid Service can create a different dynamic and organisational culture or can inculcate the expansive perspective that has thus far been absent from our devolution project.

2. Have a story that makes sense, and then stick to it

Liverpool’s tragedy is that it is famous but no longer important. It means people already have an idea about who we are, what we’re good at and what we’re not so good at – like having an economy. The Combined Authority issued a brief to create a new City Region narrative, but the process seemed to be firmly in the hands of people who were too deeply immersed in the old dispensation, and too easily seduced by trite PR‐speak and marketing gobbledygook. So, here’s a radical suggestion – and one in the spirit of recommendation 1 – let’s appoint a world‐class creative with an international reputation to help us frame and articulate what this City Region is about. There are extraordinary flowerings of innovation and excellence here, but they currently look more like an advent calendar than a big picture. Rather than designing another procurement process and issuing yet another brief, why don’t we appoint somebody of the calibre of Bruce Mau, the Canadian branding and design genius? Let’s get a fresh set of eyes to re‐imagine the planet’s first “World City” and the place that globalised popular culture. Unless we can answer the existential question – what is Liverpool for? – we cannot hope to persuade people that we are still relevant today.

3. Get out there and spread the message

OK, I understand the electoral context and the reason why it was attractive for Steve Rotheram to launch the Tidal Energy study ‐ and a raft of more recent policy announcements ‐ in his own back yard, but guess what? No‐one east of Newton‐le‐Willows is taking any notice. The world is not watching or listening to Liverpool, so we need to get out there and tell them. That means doing the big announcements in London or wherever they’ll get noticed. It means having a Metro Mayor who is prepared and confident to do the awkward, challenging and high‐risk national media gigs. It means being willing to get on planes and fly to the four corners of the earth to spread the Liverpool (City Region) message. The great thing about not being weighed down with a plethora of statutory and service delivery responsibilities, is that a Metro Mayor can be our foreign minister, our ambassador – the kind of advocate and propagandist that this place has lacked and still so badly needs.

4. Find the causes and campaigns that make the story sticky and believable

As Boris Johnson so ruthlessly demonstrated in the Brexit and General Election campaigns, the world, the media ‐ and especially social media ‐ abhor complexity. Messages need to be sharp, self‐explanatory and sticky. They need to reveal and illuminate the bigger picture, and have the power to vanquish the myths, clichés and stereotypes that continue to blight perceptions of the City Region. We need to be able to definitively answer some key questions. What are the three most important ideas that can be the foundation of a new economic identity that gives our City Region a competitive edge and compelling new story? How do they connect? Who will they effect and why is it absolutely vital and non‐negotiable that we deliver on them? Whatever these ideas prove to be, underpinning them is a very simple ambition; to make Liverpool not just relevant, but also important – somewhere that is vital to the vision of a rebalanced, prosperous and successful UK.

5. Look for short cuts – if necessary, borrow someone else’s reputation and influence

It’s possibly the quickest win and the hardest pill to swallow, but we do have one big asset on our doorstep that could and should be mobilised to our advantage. George Osborne once observed that Manchester and Leeds city centres are closer to each other than the two ends of London’s Central tube line. Perhaps, from the distant vantage point of the Evening Standard editor’s office, he is unable to see the inconveniently positioned mountains or the fact that Liverpool and Manchester are even closer together! We even share two centuries of economic interdependence, and between us possess all of the attributes that sociologist, Saskia Sassen identifies as the defining characteristics of a global city. Abandoning football terrace rivalry to position Liverpool City Region closer to its burgeoning neighbour is both logical and necessary. An integrated transport authority, a shared policy unit and a merged LEP are all ways in which Liverpool City Region could begin to reposition itself within an expanded urban economy with the scale and asset base to counter‐balance London. Let’s not be constrained by redundant mindsets or arbitrary administrative boundaries. Liverpool – and Birkenhead – more than anywhere else can claim to have invented the template for modern civic governance in Britain, so why not pioneer new and liberating models designed to deliver the levelling‐up economic agenda, that will otherwise remain pious rhetoric?

Of course, these suggestions were offered in the confident expectation that the Metro Mayoral election was a mere procedural formality. Not even the implosion of Mayor Joe Anderson’s city mayoralty, the Caller Report and the national party investigation into Liverpool Labour were able to dent Rotheram’s majority. Labour’s almost Belarussian control of the City Region, and the fatalistic impotence of a fractured opposition, leaves us with a hollowed‐out politics where, notwithstanding the heroic efforts of Independent candidate Stephen Yip, the impetus for an inclusive civic discourse is blunted by establishment complacency and partisan insularity. A competitive electoral democracy, intelligent media scrutiny and strong independent civic voices (rather than meek subservience to the local state) are the prerequisites for energised politics and the possibility of a visionary civic project. So maybe the big question isn’t simply about what Steve Rotheram and Joanne Anderson need to do next, but how do we make space for genuinely transformational alternatives that might help Liverpool regain its former economic prestige and put us back on the map.

Jon Egan is a former electoral strategist for the Labour Party and has worked as a public affairs and policy consultant in Liverpool for over 30 years. He helped design the communication strategy for Liverpool’s Capital of Culture bid and advised the city on its post-2008 marketing strategy. He is an associate researcher with think tank, ResPublica.

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“Better to break the law, than cause a war” - Arms Fair demonstrators in their own words

Paul Bryan

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As political controversy erupts over October’s planned AOC Europe Electronic Warfare Convention, peace campaigners have hit the streets of Liverpool.

Determined to force the Council to cancel the event and prevent the ‘merchants of death’ from using the ACC Liverpool Exhibition Centre to sell their weapons and defence technologies, around 1000 demonstrators joined a rally on 11th September 2021 to pile on the pressure.

As the Campaign Against The Arms Trade demonstrators marched from Princes Park to the city centre, accompanied by Labour stalwarts Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, Liverpolitan columnist Paul Bryan, joined the throng, microphone in hand to hear what they had to say.

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WAH! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing

Paul Bryan

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Are the Stop the Liverpool Arms Fair protests just a form of NIMBYISM?

If all it took to solve the world’s problems was a deep well of sincerity, then there can be no doubt that the latest demonstration in Liverpool against October’s planned AOC Europe 2021 Electronic Warfare Convention must be considered a stunning success.

Banners pleaded for ‘No more bloody wars’(is there any other kind?), ‘Nurses not Nukes’ (a reasonable-sounding request), and my personal favourite ‘Make scouse not war’. Although, it must be questioned whether vats of lamb stew, no matter how delicious, could form the basis of an effective defence strategy.

Of course, that sounds incredibly flippant and I don’t mean to be. There’s nothing wrong with wanting a better, kinder world. And anyone on the wrong end of a drone strike or a tyrannous regime could testify to the destructive power of modern armaments. That is, if they were still alive. But as I marched with and spoke to the demonstrators, I couldn’t help feeling a little confused. What is it exactly that they are asking for? That may seem like a stupid question. After all, the answer is found in the name of the campaign – Stop the Liverpool Arms Fair. And if I was in any more doubt the noisy protestor with the megaphone did her best to clear things up - the “What do we want? Stop the Arms Fair. When do we want it ? Now!” chant filled the air all day long. But to what end? If their pressure forced the ACC Liverpool Exhibition Centre to cancel the event, would one less piece of military hardware be sold in the world? Would the total weight of human misery be lightened in some way? If so, how?

Surely, the answer to those last questions would be “no” and “we’ve no idea”. Deep-down, I suspect the protestors know that too. To uncomfortably borrow an argument from the National Rifle Association for one moment, it’s people who kill people. The weapons are just the medium. And you can buy them in a lot of places. So if your actions won’t actually reduce violence in the places you protest to care about – Palestine, South Yemen, Syria – then what’s left? ‘NOT IN MY LIVERPOOL’ as one of the speakers shouted from the makeshift fire engine-come-stage, seemed to sum up the real limit of the aspirations for many. Not in my backyard.

The “What do we want? Stop the Arms Fair. When do we want it ? Now!” chant filled the air all day long. But to what end?

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Which I suppose makes you wonder whether this is a futile cry in the Mersey wind – a posture to salve the conscience. Isn’t that the definition of virtue signalling?

In fairness, talking to people on the ground and listening to the speakers did reveal a whole poker hand of additional desires. Stopping arms sales to tyrannous regimes seemed to be a popular demand, while many (most) seemed to want to end all overseas arms sales full stop. I met a fair few who wanted to unilaterally dismantle the UKs armed forces and adopt a smile and hope strategy to international relations. Of course, given the profile of the crowd, plenty had their eyes on an even bigger prize. Nothing but the end of capitalism which they blame for all conflict, casually forgetting that the Romans and the Vikings were at it long before private enterprise became the de rigueur method of allocating society’s resources. I dare say the cave men were knocking each other on the head too.

My main sympathies are with those who argue for an end to foreign interventions. They hardly ever seem to make things better. Iraq, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan is quite the toll of failure. While the argument that it’s always about money and oil seem basic and vaguely ludicrous, surely the lesson from modern times is that you just can’t impose liberal values at the barrel of a gun in societies that don’t want them. More campaigning around that issue would, in my book at least, offer a far greater chance of easing the burden of war.

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I met lots of wonderful people at the rally – union leaders, students, pensioners, a Sunday vicar, a veteran pilot of the Vietnam war, activists of different hues, and many more besides who had just come out for the day. But I didn’t for a minute think this was a typical cross-section of Liverpool society and I can honestly say, I have never met so many avowed pacificists in my life. Perhaps, this shouldn’t come as a total surprise. The Campaign Against The Arms Trade, which helped organise the event, has at least some of its origins in the Quaker movement – which has always taken the moral position that there is no justification for violence. Their’s is a utopian world where the lion lays down with the lamb. Where there is always room for talk. Where all it takes is an act of will to be better. “There is no place for war, only peace,” said an earnest Anya from Liverpool. And you can respect that view even if it feels counter to the sum weight of human history. She said there was no profit in war. Putting aside the obvious fact that there is, the forever outbreaks in conflict clearly show that someone benefits and it’s not always the obvious capitalist bogeymen.

While for many their pacifism seemed to be a point of idealistic principle, for others it was founded on personal experience, such as Anita from Wigan. I could really relate to her story. Her father served in the navy in WW2 and took part in the Battle of the Atlantic. He lost his youngest brother in the battle of Arnhem, while his two eldest brothers were captured and became Prisoners of War (P.O.W.) under the Japanese, which was generally not a pleasant experience. As a result, her father she said, “suffered from horrendous mental issues all his life and that is why I am anti-war.”

For Anita, being anti-war means laying down all of our nation’s weapons and refusing to fight. She wasn’t the only one who had this view. Far from it. Sadly, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The answers to life’s questions are seldom as simple as taking a firm moral position, and laying yourself at the mercy of others can often have undesirable consequences. For every Gandhi espousing nonviolent protest, there are at least three murderous Pol Pots. Besides, in the 1980s, Labour’s flirtation with unilateral nuclear disarmament was electoral poison. Instinctively, most people are just comfortable with the idea that they need to be able to defend themselves. Barring the desperate, the zealots and those of pathological tendencies, nobody likes the idea of risking life and limb in bloody, brutal conflict. It really doesn’t have much to recommend it. But most of us know, that sometimes it’s inevitable. Sometimes you have to fight for what you believe in. Or be crushed. And I’d sooner go into a knife fight with a gun.

Labour’s flirtation with unilateral nuclear disarmament was electoral poison. Instinctively, most people are just comfortable with the idea that they need to be able to defend themselves.

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While you could accuse the pacifists of naivety, they weren’t the only ones at the rally. In fact, they were almost certainly outweighed by the Left wing anti-war activists and their opposition to the arms fair appears to be far more tactical than moral, even if they wear all the accoutrements of offended outrage. In reality, they are seeking an altogether different type of utopia. The stars of the show included former Leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, Labour MP Dan Carden, influential Liverpool Labour activist, Audrey White, and TV Actress, Maxine Peake. Unions such as the RMT were there too, and the Young Communist League and, of course, the Socialist Workers Party, who have more fronts than there are stars in the sky but whose banners are always recognisable by the use of that same give-away font. The list goes on – Black Lives Matter, CND, the Liverpool Friends of Palestine, and even a smattering of (although by no means all) local councillors. Liverpool Mayor, Joanne Anderson was notable by her absence.

Are these people pacifists? Well, some of them are certainly. The Left has a long tradition of being anti-war after all. But mostly they’re class warriors and their true beef is with the capitalist state. For them, the military is but an arm of the state and joining a campaign against an arms fair is an opportunity to turn the focus on imperialist warmongers, the profit motive and the racist ideologies that they believe underpin foreign adventurism. Hamstringing or completely eradicating the military and defence contractors is all part of the revolutionary playbook. It’s also a too-good-to-be-missed chance to prosecute their continuing and unhealthy obsession with Palestine. For them the campaign against the arms fair is but a proxy war, and that’s language they’d understand.

You can say what you want about Lenin, but at least he had some kind of plan. Granted it didn’t work out too well, but he did have the courage of his convictions. He was going to create a dictatorship of the proletariat, whatever it took. He didn’t hide his light under a bushel. But if Saturday was anything to go by, you can’t really say the same about the left wing demonstrators. Activist Audrey White may protest from the podium about the removing of the Labour Whip from the man who ‘still carries our (socialist) hopes and dreams’ (no I’m not talking about Keir Starmer), but the main focus of the rally was less about tackling the real causes of conflict and more about plugging into people’s innate sense of humanity. If Jeremy Corbyn was to be believed the weapons sold at the arms fair would be very targeted in the people they killed … “children in Gaza, children in Yemen, children in Somalia, children in Myannmar, children in so many places.” That really is some advanced technology. But is an exploitative pulling at heart strings any kind of argument?

Is this politics without the politics? Or is it lowest common denominator stuff, fetishizing on the weapons. Forget the context, feel the hurt.

One speaker, Haneen Awaad, 24 was introduced as a Palestinian Scouser – which feels like some kind of genetic super-breed of the oppressed

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Corbyn was by no means the only one playing that game. One speaker, Haneen Awaad, 24 was introduced as a Palestinian Scouser – which feels like some kind of genetic super-breed of the oppressed. While describing herself as ‘born and bred in Liverpool’ she went on to say that all she’d ever known was ‘rockets, bombs, planes, tanks’. While the lives of Haneen’s grandparents have undoubtedly been touched by conflict (true of almost everyone of that generation in Europe) it seems unlikely that Haneen herself has had cause to fear military attacks in the streets of Anfield. Another speaker, Sarah Ashaika – a Syrian poet from Liverpool, who it was reported, has never been to Syria, regaled the audience with a poem that consisted of the names of dead Syrian children. Their involvement pointed to something hollow and performative about the rally in which people with no experience of the effects of weaponry gave testimony to the horrors of war.

Haneen excelled herself though. After telling the crowd how appalled she was at these ‘merchants of death’ visiting Liverpool, she then went on to evoke tropes about the Hillsborough disaster and the long-dead Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, to wrap up the (seemingly whole city’s) opposition to the arms fair as a typical scouse fight-back against injustice - which shows the way the region’s politicos continue to weave their own narrative of David and Goliath to forge a socially cohering, but ultimately toxic brand of localist exceptionalism. But more than that. Laying claim to Hillsborough to support your political campaign just felt ugly. But we shouldn’t be surprised – the idea that Liverpool is a continually oppressed city with a single socialist view of the world is the line we hear over and over again.

It was notable how often demonstrators talked in the royal ‘we’ to describe what they felt Liverpool did and didn’t want. Many seemed convinced they spoke for the wider community, one which was presented as uniformly ‘socialist’. When I asked Michael who lived in Liverpool city centre how he could be so sure his views were representative of the wider region, he seemed a little irked – “I know the temperature of the city,” he replied. Maybe. But there were, at a very generous count, 1000 people at the demo (most probably less) and it had been widely advertised. Maybe the Council should actually consult with the people before presuming on their opinions and bowing to the vocal outpourings of pressure groups. The local media don’t help in this regard, tending to treat the campaign with kid-gloves. Google it and try and find anything critical. It’s almost as if they are afraid that raising a sceptical eyebrow might invoke a storm upon their own heads.

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The strongest argument I heard at the rally was the one that pushed beyond a mere repulsion at bloodshed. It goes along the lines that, we the UK, should not sell or assist the sale of arms to tyrannous regimes with a history of using those weapons on civilians. Saudi Arabia is in the dock for its military raids in the poverty stricken land of South Yemen. Israel attracts considerable ire for the overwhelming force it meets out to the Palestinians (although of course, many go much further than this in their criticism of the Israeli state), and there are other regions of concern too from the Turks treatment of the Kurds to the cruel power of the Syrian government in its suppression of internal opponents. What are we to make of this?

I’m a little torn. I am no friend of the anti-democratic Saudis and I find the concrete wall that separates communities in Israel to be offensive to every humanitarian instinct I can muster. There surely has to be some limits on who we sell weapons to – some minimum standards. But it’s most probably quite a complex calculation. Saudi Arabia is the regional counter weight to Iran, and Iran are a big part of the reason there is war in Yemen. So pick your poison. One thing I would say, is that for anti-imperialists, there seems to be a whiff of old school imperial attitudes in the presumption that it is up to the UK to determine who can and cannot be trusted with the weapons that we are content to arm ourselves with.

Regardless, countries like Turkey and Saudi Arabia are investing heavily in their own indigenous armaments manufacturing capabilities as Turkey’s development of bomber drones proves. And if not us, then the Russians, Chinese, Americans, French and more will only be happy to step in. Talk of the moral obligations of the ‘West’ is starting to sound increasingly redundant.

One thing I heard over and over again was the view that war and violence had no place in a socialist city. Yet anybody with a passing knowledge of the 20th century will know that socialism does not have a clean bill of health when it comes to oppressive violence. It has been estimated that up to 20 million Russian citizens died under Stalin’s Soviet reign of terror, possibly even more under the auspices of red China’s tyrannical Mau. Today, modern China has come under fierce criticism for forcing over a million Uyghur Muslims into euphemistically named ‘retraining’ camps. Of course, there would be a long queue of people lining up to absolve these societies as ‘not socialist’. But you can draw a line between the foundations of these states and the horrors that followed. Can we really afford to be so blasé and one-eyed about these crimes when we wrap ourselves in anti-war banners?

Besides, as I raised with a number of protestors in my interviews with them, Liverpool as a city does have a military history. Not only was it the headquarters for the crucial WW2 Battle of the Atlantic in which electronic radar technologies played a crucial role; not only does it provide significant numbers of soldiers, sailors and airmen to the British Armed Forces, but its shipyards at Cammell Lairds to this day service and manufacture navy vessels under Ministry of Defence contracts – something many locals seem to take great pride in. When the 65,000 tonne aircraft carrier, HMS Prince of Wales docked in Liverpool in February 2020, there was no shortage of visitors scrambling for tickets for the right to board. The truth is, Socialist Liverpool has a nuanced relationship with the military, but many of the anti-war demonstrators seemed keen to airbrush that fact.

I wonder what you think about all of this if you work in the local defence supply chain? According to Ministry of Defence data for 2019/20, the MOD spent £2.2bn in North West England supporting 15,000 direct jobs and many more indirectly across the whole industry. These are not small numbers and they provide some interesting context to a conversation I had at the demonstration with Dave Walsh, the President of the Liverpool Trades Council and Daren Ireland, an RMT Union Regional Organiser. They admitted that their organisations have been burning the midnight oil for years trying to figure out what to do about the thorny issue of those union members working in the defence industry. How could they square the circle of supporting their members while fighting militarism? Dave admitted that they’d finally arrived at a position. They recognised these were skilled jobs and recommended that those skills be turned away from defence to ‘socially useful’ sectors such as healthcare or for fighting climate change. I wonder what it’s like to be represented by a union that is ashamed of your existence?

Idealism can be like a drug. It makes you feel good – you’re a good person. You’re on the right side of history. But all the while history is going on about its business without you because you’ve stopped engaging with the world as is, in favour of that quick hit of righteousness. I don’t doubt that it would feel good to kick the Electronic Arms Fair out of Liverpool. But it would be a victory of dubious benefits in favour of principled naivety and leftist entryism. Not one less weapon would be sold in this world. But at least the protesters would be able to say, ‘Not in my Liverpool’. Not in my back yard.

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The Stop The Liverpool Arms Fair demonstration took place on Saturday 11th September 2021. To hear what the protesters had to say in their own words, listen to this special podcast, Better To Break The Law Than Cause A War.

Paul Bryan is the Editor and Co-Founder of Liverpolitan. He is also a freelance content writer, script editor, communications strategist and creative coach.

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Fear, tribalism and lies: the woman fighting Liverpool’s anti-Tory vote

Katie Burgess

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Katie Burgess wanted to smash Liverpool’s red wall. Standing as the Conservative candidate in the Liverpool Mayoral election in May 2021, she secured 4.14% of the vote. But as any political blue will tell you, our city is the toughest of nuts to crack. This is her account of life on the (mostly virtual) campaign trail.

It was a rainy night on Zoom and we were a year into the pandemic. Words like ‘lockdown’, ‘furlough’ and ‘bubble’ were now in daily use (as was Zoom) and social distancing, face masks and homeworking were the new ‘normals’. I’d spent the majority of the year in my own four walls, ‘keeping safe’, not least because I am one of England’s estimated 3.7m shielders or to use the latest fancy title, the ‘clinically extremely vulnerable’. That means I cannot have the Covid vaccine due to medical contraindications. With no end to the pandemic in sight, people like me have had to take extra precautions to reduce the risk to our lives. But hiding away from civilisation is not really my style and no special title was going to stop me doing what I knew needed to be done. Besides, I was about to gain a new title – one chosen by the members of the Conservative Party. That’s right, I was to be their candidate for the Liverpool City Mayor Election in May 2021. On my very small laptop screen, I watched as the vote had passed in my favour. I accepted with just a few words. The fun starts here I thought…

I’m no stranger to a challenge. I grew up in a working class, Labour-voting household in Crosby. My dad worked, my mum stayed at home. Life was comfortable but not luxurious. We lived as we could afford and I could have no complaints. Then at 12, I had to learn to walk again after a car accident left me with serious injuries, three years of reconstructive surgery and the need to do a lot of growing up, very quickly. Even now, I still battle ill health on a daily basis. I started my first business in catering at the age of 17 and it was a challenge. Luckily, I wasn’t old enough to drink at the time, and thankfully never started, but I’d have understood the temptation. As a fledgling entrepreneur, I had to learn the rules of commerce the hard way. Now, call it bravery or insanity, I was set to become the face of the Conservative Party in its most hostile political battleground, and boy does this city need new leadership.

Call it bravery or insanity, I was set to become the face of the Conservative Party in its most hostile political battleground.

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Most of the same issues that faced Liverpool in the 2016 election are of course unaddressed – unemployment, high crime, lack of affordable housing, the need to raise skills and educational attainment, and deliver better quality jobs, not to mention a council delivering poor value for money for taxpayers. For that reason my manifesto shared many of the policies from earlier campaigns. But two more urgent issues had appeared since then – the corruption at the heart of our local government and the need for post-Covid recovery – a perfect opportunity for the city to excel. They became central to my campaign and are still the issues I believe are the biggest facing the city right now. The protection of our city's cultural heritage was also a huge issue for me, from preventing the erasure of our street names and statues and everything in-between and this was reflected in the opinions of those who took the time to contact me and discuss their concerns. And of course, just weeks ago the city lost its UNESCO World Heritage Status, which I believe could have been avoided. It’s more than possible for the city to progress and prosper without losing its past identity.

Back to life at the beginning of the Mayoral race and that nomination. Outside of the Conservative Party, my social groups contain very few blue voters, but while my red-voting friends and colleagues weren’t exactly supportive of my candidacy, there was no real vitriol or broken friendships. There was the odd comment like “but your such a lovely, generous person. How come you’re a Tory?” and a family member once advised me that my grandparents “must be spinning in their graves”. “Perhaps,” I told her, “if you’d not had them cremated, that might have been true, but as I remember it, they were proud that I had my own mind and fought for what I believed in, just like they’d always encouraged me to.”

Apparently fortune favours the brave but there’s an exception to every rule and I was under no illusions. A win was at best extremely unlikely and realistically, nigh on impossible. Liverpool was living under heavier Covid restrictions than most of the country and had been for some time. The Conservative government had made the city region a special case and thrown lots of positives at it such as piloting the first attempt at mass city-wide Covid testing, and green-lighting the first trial night club event for 6,000 party goers. However, such is the electorate, negative factors were more likely to be remembered when they headed for the ballot box. In any case, had I woken on polling day to the news that Prime Minister, Boris Johnson had awarded every city resident a £1m tax-free Liverpool Personal Covid Relief Payment, I’d have still suggested those fancying a bet nip to their nearest bookmakers to place their money on a Labour victory.

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Feelings within the Conservative Party were that we were likely to lose some ground in this election. We were staring into the abyss of a campaign under Covid restrictions meaning it was harder than ever to get face-to-face with the voters. Travelling was restricted even in local areas, so our volunteers could not hit the streets in the way we’d all prefer.

Support from the party, both locally and nationally, tended to be found more at the end of the telephone line and by email rather than in person. And as a Covid shielder, I faced even more restrictions than most. So why was I doing this? Why would anybody take on this role in these circumstances? Democracy, I believe, only survives when other voices shout too and I will fight for democracy until my dying breath. I consider it imperative that every voter has the opportunity to vote Conservative. I believe in those policies and values (most of them at least) and what’s more, I can tell you why I do, a trait that seems to be lacking in the average voter. I’ve had many conversations with people who agree with every Conservative word I preach, then usually say something like “you’re right, but we have to vote Labour here don’t we?” often with a tone of regret. I generally resort to one of my favourite words in reply: “Why?” and it’s not uncommon to be greeted with a deafening silence. I have no need or desire to impress the Tory hierarchy or CCHQ as it’s known and I’m not going to trade on my identity as a woman. I don’t think we “need more females” in such positions or indeed any more diversity boxes ticked. You can see I’m female and a lot of other things too; I didn’t feel the need to spout about it during the campaign and never have. I firmly believe that what we need are the right people in the right places doing the right things. Meritocracy is not a dirty word. Discrimination whether standard or positive is abhorrent and I’ll stand against it at every turn. I stood because I needed to. Because Liverpool needed me to.

So my ‘Covid-time’ campaign was unrecognisable from what it would have been in normal times. There could be no door knocking, leafleting was limited, hustings went online and were generally plagued with technology issues. Those hustings that were held in person I was excluded from because of my Shielder status, but I provided statements to them all to get across that Conservative message. Whether they were read out or not, I will never know of course, except for one, on BBC TV, where my contributions were used to start each round of debate. I was disappointed for missing at least the opportunity to call out the other candidates on their claims and accusations. It seems the Tories are always to blame at a city council where there is not one Tory anything or anyone. The same applies to the five parliamentary constituencies of Liverpool it seems, despite all being occupied by Labour MPs too. I wonder who they would blame if there was a Labour government in Westminster? One of my opponents even questioned on Twitter if I existed. Quite concerning for a man who I’ve met on several occasions and who holds such a high position at the disgraced council already. Perhaps a short memory is required to hold those roles.

Campaign material had to be created and so written pieces and photographs were needed quickly, with numerous requests and deadlines generally short. As a shielder, unable to venture out in public, the usual options for photo opportunities were impossible. As one who generally stands behind a camera rather than in front, finding current pictures was a real challenge and taking new ones was not an option owing to the unfortunate timing of minor eye surgery which had left me looking like a mugging victim. So a desperate call went out to friends and family for anything they may have which could be forwarded onto the Conservative press department. What we were left with was not ideal.

Social media, an alien concept to me and a virtual cesspit, became a daily presence in my life. Messages, letters and emails were plentiful ranging from the sweet to the sour to downright hateful, X-rated suggestions with pictures provided to illustrate the point, just in case I misunderstood. I also received dinner date invitations and even marriage proposals - all of the above politely refused. A break from campaigning was called by order of the party, quite correctly in respect to the sad loss of the Duke of Edinburgh. The Queen as ever provided a wonderful example of dignity to us all.

Labour Councillor, Nick Small, took to Twitter to comment that my party had to go “all the way to Crosby for a candidate” proving there are no limits to small-minded parochialism.

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Plenty wanted to tell me “you’re not even a Scouser” and indeed they did most days. I’ve never claimed to be. I was born in the city centre and raised in Sefton. I’m proud of both facts. Who one defines as a Scouser is, like most things, up for debate and I support everybody’s right to their own opinion. I also stood in Liverpool Central ward as a local council candidate against (sitting) Labour opponent, Christine Banks. Her fellow Labour Councillor, Nick Small, also of the same constituency, took to Twitter to comment, negatively it seemed, that my party had had to go “all the way to Crosby to find a candidate”. All 6.7 miles of it no less, proving there are no limits to small-minded parochialism.

I received an enquiry from a journalist asking why I hadn’t attended a hustings hosted by Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Extinction Rebellion. I provided the simple and honest answer that I was undergoing a scan at the time, which I’d waited 11 months for. Nothing was ever published.

“Another day, another threat” became a regular joke in our house, as the abusive messages rolled in, sometimes multiple times a day. They say the pen is mightier than the sword but the keyboard is rather weak in my experience. I wondered how many of the trolls would have bothered if they’d had to go to the expense of a stamp? While taking my milk in, I was doorstepped one day, late in the campaign by a journalist who seemed to think that I was unvaccinated due to pregnancy (the truth was far less exciting). She wanted to know how I planned to undertake the job of Mayor when surely I would have to go on maternity leave at some point. While I was amused to think that she thought I had a hope of winning, I sadly had to confirm that there had been no immaculate conception during my now 13 months of social distancing and shielding in singledom. Mind you, I said, if she thought giving birth to the new Messiah would aid my campaign, I’d certainly be willing to give it a try. She looked blankly at me and promptly left. I’m not sure she understood the reference to Christian doctrine. The local media on the whole though were OK to me – reactions ranged all the way from sympathetic and polite but neutral, to disinterested and some were a little aggressive. Pretty much as expected. Many articles covering the election, especially in the left-wing press simply failed to mention that I was running at all. Others quoting most, if not all of the other candidates simply added something on the lines of “also standing is Conservative, Katie Burgess”, usually when I hadn’t even been approached for comment. Manners cost nothing though and every request, message and note to our campaign team was answered one way or another and regardless of tone or context, with a little help from those Conservative friends.

As a candidate I was invited to an online meeting to hear what Max Caller had to say, straight from the horse’s mouth, about his investigation into the city council. The report itself made for sickening reading, but to hear Mr Caller, an out-of-towner, describe his dreadful experiences of my home town council was soul-destroying, causing me to shed tears of anger and sorrow in equal measure. Some of his revelations sounded more akin to North Korea than North John Street. My own laptop camera wasn’t working that day, I suspect an act of God, but I watched on the screen the faces of the other candidates, some of whom were already prominent members of that condemned council, and hoped for signs of remorse. I’m still hoping.

The hardest day of the campaign didn’t start well and got worse. I awoke that morning with breathing difficulties and a fever that the American singer, Peggy Lee would have been proud of. I’d contracted a virus, though thankfully, not Covid-19 – I prefer not to follow the latest trends. No sooner had I opened my eyes, when the news reached me that somebody had thrown a brick through the window of my admin office. While I’ll never know for sure if it was targeted at my campaign, I’ll always have my suspicions. I’d not even seen inside that office for quite some time, but adorning the main wall is a framed copy of the poem ‘No Enemies’ by Charles Mackay – “If you have none, small is the work that you have done”, he wrote. Life imitating art in the mayoral election. The day continued with the news that at the last minute a planned “on the street” campaigning event would have to move online meaning we reached far less people and did it in a far more impersonable way. Covid throws up obstacles at every turn but I’m eternally grateful for the efforts of all the volunteers. Then the really bad news reached us that a family friend had passed away and I found myself, not for the first time, unable to run, open-armed to the aid of a grieving friend as I normally would have. All this and it was not even lunchtime! At least a local emergency glazier did well that day. I do love to champion small business.

Liverpool’s Labour vote is actually an anti-Tory vote created out of fear, tribalism and downright lies, handed from one generation to the next like a dominant gene.

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Polling day dawned. Normally, this would be the opportunity for one last push - taking to the streets with activists, meeting voters, making visits to polling stations. None of that happened. Instead, it consisted of Covid testing, a hospital appointment, discussions with the police about the numerous threats I’d received, and fielding more telephone calls than a switchboard operator. One of which came from Amanda Milling, Conservative Party Co-Chairman. She wished me well, thanked me on behalf of the party and informed me that Boris Johnson had been in Hartlepool. I told her that out of the two, it was certainly the ‘pool’ with the much better chance and seeing that go blue too would make my day.

After much debate and medical advice, I was able to attend the socially distanced, Covid-safe election count, which took place the day after the election. The winner was announced and the collective Conservative hope for a new start for Liverpool was dashed. I listened to Joanne Anderson, the newly elected Labour Mayor, make her victory speech, but it seemed her gender and ethnicity were more important for us to hear about than her policies, and of course she laid the blame for everything that her Conservative-less, Labour council had done, at the door of the Tories. To my ears, there was no condemnation for the administration of which she was already a part, no level of shame and no indication of any comprehension of the challenge awaiting her. It seemed to me that this Mayor Anderson had certainly learned from the previous one, though sadly in all the wrong ways. It’s been four months since the election and the disappointments are still vast. Mayor Anderson herself has certainly not said or done anything to inspire any confidence in me and I’ve not heard anything positive from the rest of her cabinet either. The city deserves and should demand much better and much more. It can only do so at the ballot box. A prime opportunity, wasted. Nothing has changed.

So how does one pull a city, as mighty and stoical as Liverpool out of the political wilderness? By starting with an unpopular truth. You may not like it, but it’s hard to argue with. Liverpool’s Labour vote is actually an anti-Tory vote created out of fear, tribalism and downright lies, handed down from one generation to the next like a dominant gene from a Labour Party intent on perpetuating the fallacy (for their own ends) that Conservatives hate Liverpool. They do not.

The voters are suffering under an illusion, their very own Scouse Stockholm Syndrome, while the remainder suffer from disillusion, those being the almost 70% (the silent majority) who don’t even turn up to vote. Such is the feeling of repression and indifference. Where else on earth would the voters democratically re-elect a regime who’s heinous abuse of them had been exposed just weeks before? The Conservative Party have a lot to offer Liverpool and would turn this city into the behemoth that it should be. Convincing the electorate of this message, when the word is… ‘Conservatives are bad news’, is a daunting task but an essential one. In the right hands, this city has huge potential with acres and acres of undeveloped, brownfield plots and incomplete, abandoned developments. It could attract and draw-in more people wanting to raise families and start businesses, and do a better job of appealing to inward investors, but it fails to attract them because of the regional economy’s stagnant state and the lack of promise of anything different.

The voters had other options besides Labour and Conservative of course - five of them to be precise, including Stephen Yip, who did better than any previous Independent, likely thanks to rebellious Labour voters who’d finally had enough. But still the old unfaithful hung on. I’d have been shocked if they hadn’t, but it was certainly progress to see this election go to the second vote, a first for the city. But it’s progress that needs to go much further, much faster. Liverpool is a Labour city on paper but when one considers the poor turnout in the mayoral election (30.51%) and the Labour candidate’s share of the vote in the first round (38.51%) that equates to just 11.8% of the Liverpool electorate who want them in office. And that’s assuming that every one of those voters actually knows what they are voting for and has made an informed decision. I often play the “rule of three” and find it a good marker in most things. I give people three chances in various circumstances and call it on the outcome. When in conversation with a typical Liverpool Labour voter I ask them to name me their 3 favourite Labour policies. I can’t recall a single time any of them could.

Much like my beliefs were formed at a young age, I believe the answer to a political revolution lies with educating future generations. Political allegiance should not be inherited but formed with an open mind, free will and access to the facts. People need to hear the grim truth of life under Labour, not the Grimms’ Fairytale fiction of Tories as playground bogeymen. I don’t want people to take my word for it. I want them to seek the truth for themselves. The truth of Liverpool is right in front of everybody’s eyes. It seems there really is none so blind as those who cannot or perhaps will not see. In July the new regime at the council voted unanimously to accept the findings of the Caller Report and implement all of the recommendations made. This is at a cost of £2.5m to the Liverpool taxpayer. A huge bill just to start putting right the wrongs of those, still gifted positions of power. One can only hope that the city council, now under commissioner control for the next three years, will be forced to bring about long term change.

I’ve said before and I’ll say it again, likely many times - I love Liverpool, but politically at least, I find it very difficult to like. But it’s worth remembering, that it’s just a small minority holding the city captive. We need to engage with the current non-voters, listen to their concerns and encourage them to use their vote with conviction to elicit the change that the city’s long-term survival depends upon.

As for my result? 4.14% (up from 3.62% the last time around) - actually an increase so against expectations, ground gained and all things considered, a bit of a triumph. Meanwhile, upon hearing the result, my predecessor as Conservative Mayoral candidate, Tony Caldeira, standing loyally there at my socially-distanced side for support, had smiling eyes for me atop his Covid face mask, and so all was well. Our end-of-campaign hugs, however, would still have to wait…

So the race for the future of Liverpool goes on. With my fellow Conservatives we’ll keep on running, never hiding, in every election, in every seat, in every ward, every time. No fear.

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Is profit a dirty word in Liverpool?

Paul Bryan

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Liverpool is, as the oft-told story goes, famously a socialist city. From the powerful campaigning firebrand, Bessie Braddock in the 1950s, through Derek Hatton and The Boys from the Black Stuff all the way to union-supremo Len McCluskey, and the huge, open-air campaign rallies which treated Jeremy Corbyn as saviour. Bar the occasional intermission from the Liberals, Labour has pretty much had its own way since the Beatles broke up.

One common thread through the politics of all those years is a strong dose of what I’d call working class patrician moralism – with the leaders of the movement strongly convinced they know what’s good for the rest of us. As Steve Fielding noted in The Spectator, for better or worse, Labour has always been on a moral crusade, with its core supporters convinced they are on the right side of history, particularly in the fights against inequality, and for social justice. Occasionally, this has taken a semi-religious turn such as when ex-Prime Minister, Tony Blair declared himself ‘my brother’s keeper’, though this moral high-handedness may also have played its part in Labour’s last historic general election defeat under Corbyn – with Blair himself urging the party to stop ‘deluding ourselves that belief in our own righteousness is enough’. In Liverpool though, this ‘Labour knows best’ quality appears to be a home banker for success at the ballot box, even in the face of some quite outrageous revelations from the recent Caller Report into the workings of Liverpool City Council and the office of ex-Major Joe Anderson.

Aspiration, anyone?

“Why are people buying yachts? What do you need a yacht for, for heaven sake?”, exclaimed Liverpool City Council’s now Deputy Major and economic lead, Jane Corbett in a public debate hosted by The Royal Society of the Arts on one of those glorious pre-Covid days of 2018. ‘Because you might want one’ didn’t seem like the kind of answer, Councillor Corbett would give the time of day. Clearly there are some things one just shouldn’t spend your money on. The moralistic tone remains alive and kicking.

A deep ideological failure lies at the heart of the city region

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Quibbles about the advisability of ocean-going luxuries aside (from a councillor representing a maritime city), there was something else notable in that discussion. Leading a debate on ‘How not to run an unfair business’, was a certain, Charles Wookey, CEO of charity, A Blueprint for a Better Business (BBB). You may not have heard of them, but Liverpool City Council certainly have. Their ethical business pitch has been adopted wholesale by the city’s leadership in both the pre-and post Joe Anderson days. Liverpool’s ‘Inclusive Growth Plan for a Stronger, Fairer City’, published in 2018 along with their Council Procurement Policy, and Fair City Policy were straight out of the BBB playbook; as is the just published 2021 City Plan by Team Liverpool, a collection of the city’s leading lights in the public and third sectors. The adoption of these principles which coalesce around the idea of ‘fairness’ is likely having a profound effect on the city’s approach to attracting investment and its hopes for post-Covid recovery. From informing the overall meta-diagnosis of Liverpool’s economic problems and its preferred solutions, to the instigation of new restrictions on the terms under which the Council is prepared to issue contracts of work, ‘fairness’ is the lens through which the city’s future opportunities will be filtered. Or at least, that is the stated intention. Moonlighting as a member of Blueprint’s Advisory Council, it’s likely Councillor Corbett has played the key role in drawing Liverpool’s leaders into BBBs way of thinking and their (albeit free) management coaching services.

The high priests of purpose-driven business

Quite how this adoption of fairness may affect Liverpool’s economic future, is something I’ll get to later, but first it’s worth asking, is there anything sinister about this relationship between Liverpool’s leaders and Blueprint? No. There’s no conspiracy here. But is it something we should be worried about? Perhaps. After all, if Blueprint have the ear of those responsible for driving much needed investment into the region, it’s important to understand what is being advocated and what effects it’s likely to have on the ground. Especially because BBB have a somewhat pessimistic view on the traditional role of the private sector and are keen to change the way it works. In essence, they believe the world needs a ‘system change’ in which businesses are driven, not by profit, but by a ‘purpose’ that benefits society. They want to see our economic system “optimised for human wellbeing and a sustainable eco-system”, rather than for growth. As Wookey goes on to explain, they are out to displace two dominant ideas – “one, that the purpose of business is to maximise profit, and the other, that people are self-interested and motivated simply by money, status and power.”

For Blueprint For A Better Business, the search for profit, allied to that pesky desire to want more (growth) is put in the dock, tried and found guilty of crimes against society. You’ll be familiar with the narrative because these days it passes for common sense. The sins of business or at least large corporations, we’re told, are legion. Hooked on short-term profits and thinking of nothing but shareholder value at the expense of everything and everyone else, large businesses are seen as the fox in the henhouse, in need of some serious therapy to get over their compulsion to be a destroyer of worlds. If you are haunted by nightmares about the excesses of capitalism – from the oil spills of Deep Water Horizon to the sweat shops of Thailand, this sentiment will strike a chord. Closer to home – zero-hours contracts, glass-ceilings and the peddling of sugary drinks to the obese are just the tip of a well-rounded rap sheet of sin.

You could be forgiven for thinking these ideas sound kind of socialist or green-socialist and you can understand why these sentiments might appeal to those of a left-wing persuasion - the Left have been hankering for a system change since, well, forever. But and this is interesting, behind BBB lies not an activist fringe group, but a team of hardened senior business professionals. Blueprint count amongst their number former executives from organisations such as Unilever, M&S, UNESCO, Goldman Sachs and the TUC. And they were founded by an Archbishop (of Westminster). If anything, their roots lie in Christian morality and the belief that everybody should be treated with dignity and that we are never more fulfilled than when in service to others.

An unlikely moral alliance

So, what you find is two things coming together that can comfortably live in an accommodation. A moral desire to be and do ‘good’ in business circles and a deep-felt criticism of the failings of the market on the Left. From both angles, they feel the need for something new. But, and here’s a bit of a kicker – outside of the odd Extinction Rebellion march and the extremes of Momentum, nobody is really asking to completely up-end capitalism (let’s face it, not even the Chinese). Partly, because we’ve seen some of the alternatives and they weren’t great. But also, because well … we need business and everyone knows it – especially those who work in one. Or buy products from one. Or who have the good fortune to spend the money raised from taxing them. Money makes the world go round. So, with a deep breath, the conclusion is reached - what we need, it seems, is a Faustian pact.

And that’s where Blueprint For A Better Business comes in. They take the high moral ground and try to translate it into some kind of actionable programme for business leaders and the politicians who regulate them. And the price of the ticket is simply accepting that making a profit is not enough. Or even a worthy pursuit. It’s something that is allowed but only as a reward for achieving a definable social purpose as part of a renewed social contract between business and society. Even then profits are only acceptable if they are ‘fair’.

As a result, for businesses, dealing with the local authority becomes more challenging. If you want their ear and their help, increasingly you need to show you’re hitting or at least on a journey to hit Blueprint’s five core principles – that you’re honest and fair; a good citizen; have a social purpose, are a responsible employer and are a guardian for future generations. Sure, some of those translate to perfectly decent goals such as welcoming more scrutiny, achieving the Real Living Wage or paying your taxes on time. But many others are just plain subjective. Who gets to decide what is ‘fair’? And what qualifies those who sit in judgement?

It’s so tempting for public authorities to create a wall of additional requirements that make it harder for businesses to focus on their core task – and these are additionally burdensome for smaller organisations who just don’t have the bandwidth to keep up. What’s more, because fairness (whether outcomes or in process) is so subjective, prejudices can be projected onto the process of deciding who is and isn’t a worthy business partner, which can have disastrous unintended consequences.

Monetising social value

How’s that for a ‘pro-investment environment’? Can you imagine the Google’s and Apple’s of this world knocking down the city’s door, with those kinds of trade-offs? How about Amazon? You know, maybe they would. After all, we live in the age of the activist CEO. Of IKEA and Grolsch suspending their adverts from the new TV broadcaster, GB News, because the station didn’t match their ‘humanistic values’; while in the light of the Black Lives Matter protests, racial equality is now used to sell sausages. I doubt there’s a single business school that isn’t running modules on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). The mantra that ‘Being Good is Good for Business’ is somewhat of an unchallengeable tenant of acceptable belief – even if the data is less convincing.

Of course, it does raise the question, if you are being good to be seen to do good so that you can personally benefit, are you still doing ‘good’? For anyone who has seen the documentary, The Corporation (2003) or read the book, you’ll know that big business has been described as psychopathic for this very reason. They have a tendency to reflect back what they think you want to hear, so that you will do what they want you to do (buy their products). But to be sceptical for one minute, the morals and values to which business attaches itself, tend to be fluid. As writer, Nick Asbury writes in his incredibly insightful article for The Creative Review, when brands like Dove, Pepsi and McDonalds mix social issues with a sales message, not only does it come across as crass, but “Whenever you see a brand adopt a cause – whether it’s Andrex doing Clean or Dove doing Feminism – it’s always with the zeal of a recent convert. They are going to be the one to lead the conversation…because brands always have to cast themselves as the hero.” Damn right!

Can councils avoid being gamed?

Of course, councils like Liverpool know that when they are encouraging employers to act fair and be enlightened and ethical in their dealings, those businesses (especially the big ones who have more budget and resource) are more than capable of gaming the system. For example, paying for trees to be planted to counter-act emissions is generally seen as ‘greenwash’. Donating to a foodbank when you are squeezing the life out of farmers would likely go in the same category. All it takes, is a small charitable donation, a glossy video and social media campaign and hey presto, you are on the right side of the moral maze. Even better if you managed to cut your plastic use by 10% or start a conversation about body shape. This does point to a certain naivety in BBBs position and that of our elected local representatives. Who really wants to be taking moral lessons from a business? Did anyone vote for them? What is it about their constitution that makes us believe, that when the chips are down – their ‘purpose’ is anything other than to do the thing that allows them to continue to exist – making a profit?

I should point out that the purpose of this article is not to attack business – but to defend it from those who would wrap it up in unnecessary restrictions sourced from their own Instagramable prejudices. There are a host of dangers hidden under that appealing label of ‘fairness’.

CEOs – pack in the inferiority complex

But first, business leaders need to remember that their companies do already have a ‘social purpose’ and it’s one they don’t have to apologise for. Successful businesses provide products and services that customers want. And those outputs make people’s lives better – saving them time, bringing pleasure, opening up new opportunities and experiences. They innovate new technologies and processes transforming productivity and delivering progress across society. They create wealth – investing in jobs which transform lives, because there is one thing you can know for certain – if you want to give your life some purpose and you haven’t got a job, the first thing you should do, as psychologist Jordan Peterson recommends in his book, 12 Rules for Life – is get a job. No matter how crummy the job, you’ll feel better about yourself and ready to make the next step. The profits of business also fund every social programme in existence - from educating the next generation, to the safety net of social care. Maybe our CEOs should spend less time worrying about their lack of purpose or signalling their virtue and more time remembering that their core profit-making mission is one that delivers more benefits to society than any social state-funded programme. They do a magnificent job of making billions of lives better. And they do it, by tapping into the core human motivation to improve your lot. Is it time to resuscitate Gordon Gekko?

Some investors not welcome in Liverpool

“If Amazon isn’t on a journey (of improvement), no, I wouldn’t want them anywhere near us.” Back to Liverpool’s Deputy Major, Jane Corbett and that public debate. She was asked if Liverpool would follow New York’s lead and reject a big business like Amazon if they were looking to invest. She’d already said she takes a tick list of the 5 core Blueprint For A Better Business values around with her when she visits local companies. “We’d sit down and have a talk… Are they going to benefit the city? Are they going to pay us proper business rates? Why are they coming to Liverpool? Because we’ve got people so desperate, they might work for them?”

Let that sink in. Some people might be so desperate that they’d choose to take a job. The Councillor would save them from that misery. BBB values being used to turn away investment.

Leaving with a pocket full of dreams and returning with the same.

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Corbett talks about commerce in very moral terms – good investors, good money, good businesses - presumably in contrast to bad investors, bad money and bad businesses. Perhaps this is not entirely surprising in a region still reeling from revelations about alleged cronyism, property deals gone wrong and lack of accountability under ex-Major Joe Anderson. But, given Corbett’s background in the Labour movement, it seems plausible that her moral qualms are founded at least in part by a generalised feeling of antipathy towards the dirty business of business. An instinct that at best, sees private enterprise as an unfortunate price to be paid in return for a state-funded shopping list of social provision. Back to that Faustian pact. If you’re going to sup with the devil, use a long spoon. Or in this case, an obligation for business to be purpose-led, not profit-led. I wonder what the Dragons Den presenters would make of that? Maybe they’d agree? The plan, according to Corbett is to show BBB definitions of what makes a good business to the next generation of young people so that “hopefully it becomes embedded in the city.”

But what does it mean in the here and now?

In one aspect, Liverpool is very far from unique. In 2013, central government introduced the Public Services (Social Value) Act, which requires all those responsible for commissioning public services to think about how they can derive wider social, economic and environmental benefits from any contract. Public servants keep a keen eye on additional benefits for their area or stakeholders – be it jobs and apprenticeships, green initiatives, equality and inclusivity drives and so on. The public procurement process has become more complex as a result and more subjective as businesses applying for work need to provide evidence for a raft of measures that fall outside their core mission to provide a good quality service or product at the right price. The government freely admits councils have sometimes struggled to implement it, and issued an updated Social Value Model in December 2020, which for now will be used by central government departments only.

The findings of the recent damning Caller Report into Liverpool City Council however, showed how good intentions can deliver poor outcomes. The report, led by an independent inspector, found “multiple apparent failures” in the council’s highways, regeneration and property management functions. Plots of land worth over £1m were sold for £1 plus overage – a share in future value increases. Sixty-five property deals negotiated by the council were examined by the inspector and problems were found with all of them.

What starts in the head - An economic misdiagnosis?

As reported in PlaceNorthWest, Caller questioned how social value had been interpreted under Joe Anderson’s administration - “the mayor’s…concept of social value was best achieved by employing contractors with a Liverpool postcode base” – which resulted in deals that failed to reach the council’s statutory duty to achieve best value. There you have it. Decisions founded in a moral position to extract social value (by choosing Liverpool-based suppliers) resulted in less value for local taxpayers. The ideas in your head shape the reality on the ground. Attempts to pass off the administration’s inadequacies as merely an embodiment of the ‘bad apple’ theory – where all the faults are caused by the actions of a few rogue individuals, seem unpersuasive as a complete explanation.

What if some of the biggest flaws in the Joe Anderson administration were ideological, rather than just managerial? What if their understanding of what’s ailing the Liverpool economy and what it needs led them to make bad decisions? What if those flaws are still present today under the Mayorship of his replacement – Joanne Anderson (no relation)? After all, though she may have changed the makeup of the cabinet – many of the councillors were elected under both leaders. What if Liverpool Labour is the problem? And what if the council’s relationship with Blueprint For A Better Business is the clearest indication yet of what’s going wrong?

Snubbing the PM, for the people

"I can never respect somebody who won't apologise for what he said…And he won't do that and until he does that, I've refused to shake his hand when it was offered to me last year and I'll continue to do that." So said Steve Rotherham, the recently re-elected Liverpool City Region Metro Mayor talking about his relationship with the country’s most powerful man, Boris Johnson, the UK Prime Minister. As he explained on the BBC’s Political Thinking Podcast, the bad blood dated back to the 2004 Spectator article about the Hillsborough disaster that was published (but not written) by Johnson when he was the magazine’s editor.

The piece had wrongly claimed the city was in denial about the role "drunken" fans had played in the 1989 tragedy and had a tendency to "wallow in victim status". Understandably, the article caused wide-spread offence throughout Liverpool.

Talking about the work Steve had done with Boris over implementing Covid testing trials in Liverpool, Steve concluded, "it was really difficult for me to do business with somebody I had no respect whatsoever for, but I had to do the right thing... for the people in the Liverpool City region."

Did Steve do the right thing? Putting aside the question of whether Boris has already apologised (possibly repeatedly), the primary responsibility of a Regional Mayor is to put the interests of their constituents first. Steve comes across as a moral and decent man but on this occasion, he may have put his personal feelings ahead of his duty. Alienating the Prime Minister, who as prize-giver-in-chief has more influence over the direction of government investment than anyone else, doesn’t feel like the pragmatic move. So far, the UK government’s ‘Levelling Up’ agenda, which has seen government departments relocating from London to other parts of the country, has by-passed Liverpool. It is certainly not the first time the city region has missed out on big-ticket investments. From High Speed 2 to the relocation of the C4 headquarters to the north, or even the new UK Infrastructure Bank, Liverpool remains off the map.

Sticking it to the Tories was also a favoured pastime of Joe Anderson, who bitterly and publicly complained about the effect of Tory cuts to the council’s budget. Many times, he took to the airwaves to gripe; sometimes coloured with doom-laden predictions about the inevitability of riots. Even on the occasions when he had the then Prime Minister, David Cameron’s attention (for once) he quickly found himself ensconced in tit-for-tat battles, such as the time in 2013 when the goal of promoting the inaugural International Festival of Business was overshadowed by public arguments between the two men about the city’s rough treatment by the government. How to win friends and influence people it was not. Playing to the gallery it certainly was.

Lack of belief results in puppets

What ties the tales of Steve and Joe together is that sense of outraged moralism triumphing over pragmatically doing what needs to be done to get the rewards for your people. Sometimes, however unpalatable, you have to suck it up. And maybe, if you’ve stopped really seeing the prize on offer and how big it could be, and just how much you are missing out on – well then maybe you’re just less motivated to try. Maybe your words about aspiration and the ‘best days being ahead’ are hollow and just for the gallery, because deep-down you don’t believe it yourself. While Joe Anderson, when in power, was playing with (giant) French puppets (x3), grandstanding about Tory cuts, and messing about with bus lanes, other regions were taking a more pragmatic view, doing the hard yards in Westminster and private sector boardrooms to secure the influence which led to vital investments such as the nearly £40m Manchester pocketed for establishing the National Graphene Institute in 2015 or the 2022 Commonwealth Games which went to Birmingham. It’s hard to think of many (any?) Liverpool equivalents as the leadership tended to focus on ultra-short-term photo-opportunity wins such as the International Business Festival, now much shrunk and rebadged in the favoured moral terms, ‘Good Business Festival’.

Even Joe’s annual trips to MIPIM, Europe’s largest property convention, which were often treated to excitable rolling commentary and great fanfare in the Liverpool Echo, tended to result in little more than glossy CGIs of the still largely unbuilt Liverpool Waters. Leaving with a pocket full of dreams and returning with the same has generally been the order of the day. So, either Joe’s team were not very good at pitching or coming up with investable ideas, or they didn’t try hard enough. Maybe, it just didn’t seem that important to them.

In Liverpool business circles, the talk never strays far from the subject of skills, or more precisely the lack of them. When not re-locating their businesses out of the region like premium sports brand Castore did only recently, CEOs like Asif Hamid of Wirral-based, The Contact Company are left lamenting the shallow talent pool and the slowing effect it has on growth. The worry is that too many leave school without qualifications and families that have never seen anyone attend university become cut-off from the best opportunities. But there is nothing new in this. Liverpool has suffered a brain drain for decades –as many of the best and brightest are forced to seek opportunities elsewhere. Even today, with its healthy student population, the city has a graduate retention rate lower than many of its city rivals. There’s no mystery here. Jobs are the trigger for rising educational attainment. Fail to build a diverse and deep job market and those that can, will move elsewhere.

Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) 2020

Ranking UK cities & towns by the number of FDI-financed projects they have secured (sub-selection displayed only). Liverpool ranked 14th between 2011-2020 but has slipped to 17th in the last year of recorded data.

Source: EY Attractiveness Survey 2021 (UK)

Liverpool’s economic balance sheet

There are positives to talk about the Liverpool City Region economy – the growth of the port, rising demand for industrial and logistics space, the successes of the visitor economy and the beginning of a revival in health care sciences. The unemployment rate has fallen from 10% to 4% since 2014 and the number of people holding degree level qualifications is slowly on the rise. Plus, the alarming decline in total population has thankfully been put into reverse. All to the good. But beware the relentless positive spin from those naturally invested in the regeneration game. A cold look at the other side of the balance sheet reveals that Liverpool is still grossly under-performing. The Draft Industrial Strategy published by the office of the Metro Major reveals the City Region is still in need of an economic miracle and sets out the ‘underlying fragility’ of the economy. Liverpool is the fourth most deprived local authority in England, with a life expectancy 6 years lower than the national average. Its employment rate (even pre-pandemic) was also lower than average and the ONS estimates 51,000 of its residents earn below the Real Living Wage. The city of Liverpool ranked 17th for Foreign Direct Investment in 2020 placing it below such economic luminaries as Peterborough and Northampton and only one place above Newport. It’s doubtful if it ranks much better for Domestic Private Investment, though it’s hard to tell for sure as the statistics tend to get unhelpfully rolled into the North West as a whole, likely hiding a multitude of inequalities. The office take-up statistics, a solid measure of the strength of any city’s business activity are miserable. Of the UK’s big nine cities outside of London, Liverpool has the 8th lowest 10-year average (approx. 533,000 sq feet per year) compared to over 2,000,000sqft in Manchester. That’s a crippling 43% below the average take-up across the nine cities. It also commands the lowest rental rates. The building of new stock outside of the recent Paddington Village development is all but non-existent. And that was true long before anybody had heard of Covid. Perhaps most worryingly, Liverpool’s productivity rates which measure the output per worker (Gross Value Added per head) are only 74% of the UK average. Too many of the region’s employment opportunities are focussed on low productivity sectors and Liverpool just doesn’t have anywhere like enough representation in the high-tech industries of tomorrow. As Rafa Benitez, the manager of Liverpool’s two football clubs might say – FACT.

More investment please

What should we conclude from this barrage of data? Liverpool needs more investment like a vampire needs blood. It needs more of everything. More investment from the state, from the private sector, from overseas, from home-grown businesses. It needs more access to venture capital. It needs to diversify, and attack sectors in which it is currently losing out to others, rather than throwing up its hands in defeat and forever banging on about the ones where it is strong now. It needs to step up and compete with its rival regions head-on rather than accepting a subsidiary role. Be better at playing the ‘influence game’. Resource key development and regeneration functions properly with the right level of expertise. Be ambitious and demanding. Fight the right fights for its people. But its leadership won’t do what’s needed as long as it is hooked on the wrong thing – its focus on fairness and the metrics of inequality, not realising they are the symptoms, not the cause of this prolonged failure to attract enough investment, enough ‘stuff’.

Average annual sq ft office take up in the Big Nine Regional Cities (2011-2020)

Source: The Big Nine, Quarterly update of regional office activity

Rationalising low aspiration

Liverpool’s current obsession with morals and good business ethics is at the heart of this misdiagnosis. It is the rationalisation of limited aspirations. Accepting the idea that economic growth is a problem, not a solution and seeing business as something which needs to coached away from its destructive tendencies rather than the source of wealth creation, is forcing the city down a dead-end. What they are left with is a focus on redistribution, because they can’t see the transformative power of growth to improve people’s lives. Fairness, while worthy, becomes about moving the counters around the checkerboard. Fiddling with the rules, but never really changing the game. The leadership has accepted an anti-business, low aspiration narrative because it is misdiagnosing the region’s core problems and its own role in adding to them.

Fairness means accepting defeat

When a moral focus on being a good citizen meets a left wing reflex to identify inequality as the primary social ill and businesses and capitalism as the source of those problems – you end up with a potentially toxic investment agenda that is christened under the name, ‘Fairness’. Instead of understanding that increased investment drives social opportunity, you instead end up fixating on redistribution issues – chasing social justice by achieving a more equitable sharing of the same level of resources that have already proven themselves to be inadequate. As definitions of what is ‘fair’ shift you find yourselves creating a mountain of regulations or informal requirements which make it ever harder for business to act in an entrepreneurial way, particularly prejudicing those small organisations that don’t have the bandwidth to play the game.

But worse – you’ve stopped even trying to grow the cake in any meaningful way, because without realising it, you’ve accepted the limits of low aspiration – your efforts to attract investment become sporadic and half hearted – besides, who wants new jobs when we have a climate emergency on? They’ll only make things worse.

A deep ideological failure lies at the heart of the city region and particularly Liverpool’s sub-par performance. One that sees red lights and limitations everywhere. One that accepts low ambitions as if they were part of the natural order. One that doffs its cap to other cities, for want of imagination about what could be. The kind of ideological blind-spot that leaves our leaders wondering why anyone might want a yacht; that diagnoses symptoms as cause and defaults to lazy moralising about the common good, while wrapping businesses up in ever more unprofitable, energy-sapping restrictions. The city region needs to wake up and kick out the snake-oil salesmen of purpose-driven business from the corridors of power. For a maritime city, it has long since hit the iceberg. It’s time to stop re-arranging the deck chairs. This Titanic needs more lifeboats. And its marinas need more yachts.

Paul Bryan is the Editor and Co-Founder of Liverpolitan. He is also a freelance content writer, script editor, communications strategist and creative coach.

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Where’s our levelling up, Whitehall…?

Liverpolitan Contributor

If you’ve had the good sense to avoid much of the news media over the last year, one of the major political announcements beyond the pandemic has been that of major relocations of the Civil Service from London to the regions.

The so-called ‘levelling up’ agenda is the narrative driving this major change in policy and we’ve been watching keenly ever since to discover how ambitiously and fairly it is being implemented. This is clearly long overdue in a nation that is one of the most politically and economically centralised countries in the western world, and comes 15 years after it was last seriously discussed following the Lyons Review, which largely failed to deliver any meaningful change. Opponents of the idea usually point to the Office for National Statistics move to Newport, which failed to generate much of a boost to its local economy, but I’m not sure what they really expected from relocating such a specific service function to a mid-sized city with little potential to leverage commercial multiplier benefits. Other relocations of civil service jobs and functions have shown limited success due to them effectively being the outsourcing of lower grade roles rather than senior policymakers with real influence. The Government’s own statistics show that over two-thirds of the most senior civil servants remain based in London.

Before we explore this theme further, one of the many impacts of the pandemic has been to change where people want to live and work. This is not to argue that traditional offices, or the town and city centres where they are located, are set for a prolonged demise. Far from it. Offices will continue to thrive as centres for work, but in a repurposed way that maximises a more flexible, collaborative and agile working culture. But increasingly, London does appear to be falling out of favour. Over the last year many thousands of people have escaped the capital for a better quality of life in towns, cities and villages all over the UK. This includes many who have moved back to the Liverpool Metropolitan Region, so it was no surprise to read a recent article in This is Money showing that house price growth in Liverpool over the last 12 months has been the highest of any city in the UK, and more than five times that of London. There are numerous reasons for this, but one significant contributing factor is undoubtedly people escaping the high prices of the capital to return back to where they grew up or attended university. One could describe this as a reversing of the brain-drain effect that all cities have suffered to London over many decades.

Location of Senior Civil Service roles

Source: Moving Out: Making A Success of Civil Service Relocation; IFG Insight November 2020; Institute For Government

There is no doubt that the Liverpool Metropolitan Region has a compelling case for people to relocate to as a great place to live and work. It’s human nature for us to be drawn to water, so the great natural assets we have in the River Mersey, Wirral peninsula and the miles of beaches and sand-dunes on the Sefton coast are a huge draw. Only a little further afield - a mere stones-throw away - lies the mountains and coastlines of North Wales. Then there is the depth of the arts and culture scene and their institutions, quite possibly unmatched in any other city outside London. Liverpool is probably the most architecturally significant regional city, with more listed buildings than any other, and is home to many beautiful parks. It also has a thriving independent food scene and a nightlife that is frequently regarded as the best in the UK. There is good reason why the people who visit Liverpool often come back time and time again. The start of this shift in focus away from the capital is hugely important to our nation and its economic and cultural future.

Back to the levelling up agenda, and it’s worth considering the moves of the BBC. Although not directly controlled by the state, large swathes of the institution have already upped and moved to Manchester/Salford over the last decade to ‘benefit the North’. It now provides jobs and opportunities for more than 3000 people in that city region and has added significant multiplier benefits to its local economy. Currently, the BBC only employs around 30 people in the Liverpool Metropolitan Region, although there is some talk that they might open a small training hub both here and in Hull. This is a matter which I’m sure we’ll come back to in the future. Meanwhile, back in 2018, there was the competition between the major regional cities to secure the new Channel 4 HQ, a selection process which did not give the impression of being particularly fair or transparent. Although the government does not get to tell these organisations where to move, as publicly-owned bodies their decision-making often follows the political theme and thought processes of the day.

The start of this shift in focus away from the capital is hugely important to our nation and its economic and cultural future.

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What department relocations have been announced so far?

In recent months, we have seen news of a new Treasury campus being established in Darlington, albeit with a little nod and wink from Rishi to his Conservative Tees Valley Metro Mayor friend, Ben Houchen. Meanwhile, Leeds was gifted the UK Infrastructure Bank plus a new Bank of England hub, both of which are likely to provide an extremely positive influence on the prosperity of that city and its suburbs. In time, we’ll see how evenly the funds it distributes are spread around the nation. More recently, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) announced increases in its regional headcount, with Birmingham and Salford/Manchester being by far the greatest beneficiaries. The Ministry of Housing Communities and Local Government (HCLG) is moving to Wolverhampton. Peterborough will also secure over a thousand new roles from the HM Passport Office and the Department for the Environment.

What does that leave left for the other large cities so far overlooked?

The fear is that the bigger prizes are already gone. Recently, the Leeds-based think tank the Northern Policy Foundation graded all of the major northern urban areas on their overall suitability for large-scale relocations. Liverpool scored rather well. It then went on to suggest suitable locations for departments based on seven grading indexes. Defence in Preston, Education in Lancaster, Crime to Newcastle, Infrastructure in Warrington, and then Liverpool as the most appropriate location for the various Health and NHS Departments. This was partly based on the city having more specialist hospitals than any other outside London, its research-intensive universities (notably the University of Liverpool and School of Tropical Medicine) and one of the largest biopharmaceutical manufacturing clusters in Europe. It’s hard to disagree with any of that. But what else could we have on our ‘levelling up equitably’ list’?

Department of Culture, Media and Sport

Liverpool has a rich history and expertise in both culture and sport. In 2008, the city of Liverpool was awarded the prestigious title of the European Capital of Culture and, according to our local leaders, encouraged by central and regional government to focus on culture and tourism rather than business to drive future prosperity. As unthinkable as that strategy is to most intelligent people, for the Government to not award this department here would be a huge disappointment. And media? This is an area where the Liverpool Metropolitan Region is seriously underserved, but housing that Government function here could provide some counterbalance to the poor treatment the city region and its people have suffered at the hands of regional and national media over many decades. Perception is critical to any region’s prosperity and with better representation we’d hope to see a gradual improvement in the way media institutions depict our region. A more equal playing field would also provide opportunities for our future generations.

Department for Transport

I won’t go into the hugely damaging side-lining of the Liverpool Metropolitan Area by HS2. That will no doubt feature elsewhere. Nor that Liverpool is statistically the poorest connected out of all the core cities by rail. But, over the last 20 years many other regional cities have benefitted from significant amounts of capital expenditure with whole new tram systems, new railway routes and underground lines. Although we have a local rail network in Merseyrail that is the envy of many others, having to wait 10 years for each new (typically small-scale suburban) station seems more like levelling down and does a huge injustice to a network that covers an area of nearly 2 million people. Would such disparity be allowed if the government department responsible for it made its home in the place it has seemingly ignored for so long?

The above are, perhaps the most obvious examples, but there are others that we could make a genuine and compelling case for…

National Cyber Force

It has already been announced that this new function will have a permanent new base in the North West of England in a so-called ‘cyber corridor’. With Manchester already having been gifted a new outpost for GCHQ, including its Accelerator programme, as well as other support to the local business community, surely locating the new National Cyber Force in the Liverpool Metropolitan Region is right to achieve levelling up fairly? We are already home to a thriving tech and start-up scene. Our four universities develop large numbers of quality graduate talent. And with large historical and civil service links to the Ministry of Defence, it would seem entirely logical and equitable.

Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA)

As well as a leading research-intensive university and health and biotech sectors, the Liverpool Metropolitan Region is also a leading player in advanced manufacturing and robotics, and is home to The Hartree Centre, a research facility for the advanced high-performance computing, data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI), which is based in Halton. It is well known in university circles that those in London and the South have traditionally secured greater allocations of research funding and investment than those in northern cities. It was at the time of the new Millennium that the Government took the decision to move the Synchrotron Radiation research facility from Daresbury to Oxfordshire, along with £500m of investment that came with it, so maybe now it’s time to correct the mistakes of the past and truly level up…

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What price heritage?

Martin Sloman

The UNESCO World Heritage Committee meets in China this July. One of the items on the agenda is going to be the recommendation to delete Liverpool – Maritime Mercantile City from the list of World Heritage Sites.

If Liverpool is deleted from the list, it will be the first UK site ever to suffer this fate and only the second in Europe. It’s a decision the city can could do without at a time when it’s struggling to emerge from the Covid pandemic. No doubt, the decision will attract far more attention in the national media than the original listing ever did. So, how have we got into this situation?

One thing is clear, UNESCO has a point. The inscription of the Liverpool site arose from an agreement to protect the Outstanding Universal Value (OUV) of the property. The development of Liverpool Waters was pursued outside of any planning framework agreed with UNESCO despite their repeated requests. The decision to develop a major football stadium on Bramley Moore Dock has brought matters to a head.

There is a wider issue though and that’s the value of World Heritage Status to a city such as Liverpool, which is always struggling to attract investment and jobs.

There are thirty-two WHS sites in the UK. Nearest to Liverpool are the Castles of Gwynedd, North Wales including those of Conwy, Caernarfon and Beaumaris, which boast some of the finest examples of medieval military defences in Europe. Even though their military function is long gone, it makes complete sense to preserve these buildings and their setting. Today they earn their keep through their popularity with tourists.

Further afield, the City of Bath is a WHS more comparable to Liverpool. The value of Bath lies in its ability to evoke, through its townscape and architecture, the Georgian and Regency eras immortalised in the novels of its most famous resident, Jane Austen. However, unlike the Gwynedd castles, Bath’s famous buildings are still in use, as residences, offices and hotels. Whilst modern Bath may not be as fashionable as in Jane’s day, it remains a relatively prosperous city.

The lesson for Liverpool is surely that heritage and modern usage need to exist side by side. Derelict docks and warehouses do not have the tourist draw of ruined castles; so we need to reimagine these places for the 21st century. Despite all the gloom surrounding World Heritage Status, we must not forget that Liverpool has been quite successful in doing just that.

The Albert Dock – abandoned and derelict in the 1980s - is now one of the country’s major heritage attractions. The combination of museums, shops, bars and restaurants, offices, hotels and private apartments has worked. Purists may not like the cast iron columns painted red but little of heritage value has been lost.

The lesson for Liverpool is surely that heritage and modern usage need to exist side by side.

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Much the same can be said of Stanley Dock. Preserving the gargantuan Tobacco Warehouse was once seen as a hopeless task but the conversion of the building into apartments is now well underway.

Of course, not all our heritage docks are graced by giant warehouses, but Brunswick and Coburg docks now host a marina, Queens Dock has a water sports centre and Salthouse Dock is a haven for canal narrow boats. So new uses can be found for old docks but what is questionable is the heritage value of these new uses.

There’s a classic heritage dilemma surrounding the future use of the Cavendish Cutting, which is just off Tunnel Road in Edge Hill. This, largely forgotten cutting was the scene of the official opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway and the departure point for the first ever trains from Liverpool to Manchester. As such, it is one of the most important relics of the railway age and, deserving of World Heritage status. People have campaigned for its recognition by UNESCO as an extension to the existing World Heritage Site.

One problem lies in the fact that Merseyrail has a long-term proposal to run a passenger rail service through the Wapping Tunnel, which opens into the cutting. The proposal would integrate the City Region’s rail network and vastly improve public transport provision. However, re-opening the cutting to rail services would detract from the Outstanding Universal Value of the site. Or, in other words, re-using a heritage asset for its original purpose removes its heritage value. What would the great British civil engineer and ‘Father of Railways’ George Stephenson have thought?

It can, of course, be argued that any form of development – even remodelling docks for modern shipping – adversely affects the Outstanding Universal Value of a site. If we are to prioritise heritage over modern needs the logical but obsurd conclusion would be to leave the heritage asset in its derelict state and forbid any development. That works for Conwy Castle – but would it work for the vast areas of prime real estate represented by Liverpool’s heritage docks? Even Historic England accepts that this area needs regeneration. However, given the absence of historic warehouses, such as at Stanley and Albert Docks, what is it exactly that they expect?

Historically, Liverpool’s dockside buildings have varied in scale from single storey transit sheds to the Stanley and Waterloo Dock warehouses and the long gone but imposing Clarence Dock Power Station. Consequently, there can be no definitive template for future development of the area.

One cue might be taken from the docks themselves – often hundreds of metres in length. Would they be dwarfed by even a 200m high tower?

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The debate between the heritage and development lobbies has become very polarized but, if there is one area of agreement it’s surely that whatever is built within the World Heritage Site should be of outstanding architectural quality. However, if we’re realistic, quality of design and materials cannot be divorced from the financial return that the developer requires to make a project viable, which will be more difficult to achieve where the scale of development is constrained.

Obtaining agreement on what is ‘appropriate’ development on a site such as Central Docks is not an easy process. It involves input from different interests and requires an ability to compromise on all sides.

We have been led to believe that the final nail in the coffin of the World Heritage Site has been the decision to grant planning permission for Everton’s stadium on Bramley Moore Dock. Bramley Moore is the northernmost and largest of the docks within the WHS and forms part of a complex of five docks that were state of the art when opened in the 1840s. It is only natural that UNESCO would take a dim view about its infilling.

Yet there are other considerations. Bramley Moore is outside of the World Heritage Site- in the ‘buffer zone’. It screens the WHS from a large wastewater treatment plant on its northern side. The Everton plan is not a bog-standard football stadium but consists of an elegant, curved roof topping a brick sub-structure designed to emulate traditional dock-side warehouses.  The original dock walls are to be preserved and a channel retaining the link with the Northern Docks is to be retained. The existing hydraulic tower will be refurbished and incorporated into the stadium setting.  Everton describe this scheme as a ‘heritage project’ and that is hard to deny.

In fact, Bramley Moore stadium could be said to define the northern limit of the Central Docks in much the same way as the Three Graces indicate their southern limit. As has been often pointed out, the Three Graces were themselves built on an infilled dock.

So, is Bramley Moore dock the deal-breaker? Are UNESCO unable to compromise to allow such an important regeneration project? After all, one of Britain’s most famous World Heritage Sites, the Tower of London does not seem too bothered by ‘buffer zones’.

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Buffer Zones in action: The Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula at the Tower of London WHS – burial place of Henry VIII’s wives – yet overshadowed by the infamous ‘Walkie Talkie’.

Maybe if Liverpool – Maritime Mercantile City is to have a future, it will depend on constructive dialogue between heritage bodies, developers and Liverpool City Council.

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