What exactly is London’s problem with Liverpool?
Posted on Friday 30 December, 2011
Filed Under Conservative Party, Politics
LONDON has a Conservative mayor who famously accused Liverpool of displaying a ‘deeply unattractive psyche’, and even of ‘wallowing in its victim status’. But as a cockney myself, I reckon scousers can be forgiven for feeling that little bit chippy.
Nor is Boris Johnson’s attitude any novelty within his party, as is demonstrated by today’s revelation that back in 1981, top Tories Geoffrey Howe and Sir Keith Joseph advised Margaret Thatcher to abandon that beastly city altogether.
Howe actually employed the expression ‘managed decline’, before duplicitously warning everyone else against using such a scandalous locution in the public’s earshot. Thanks to the 30 year rule, the gaffe is now public. Be sure your sin will find you out.
Despite the reputation Liverpool picked up for radicalism after Militant secured control of the local authority in the year that followed Howe’s overly frank memo, until the 1950s it was just about the only working class conurbation in this country to return mainly Conservative MPs to Westminster, thanks largely to religious sectarianism imported from the other side of the Irish Sea.
These days, only a handful of better-off local constituencies do so, and that is only when the Tories have a good year. What changed matters was decades of decline, and not particularly managed decline at that.
For most of the political, media and business classes of the South East, ‘the provinces’ represent today’s faraway countries of which we know little. I am not absolving myself from that stricture, either.
I have a job that regularly takes me to various European capitals, and sometimes to the Middle East and the Far East. So it is that I have been to St Petersburg, but never to St Helens; to Tokyo, but never to Toxteth; to Warsaw, but never to Wallasey.
What is the rest of the UK like? Why would anyone go there? I mean, there are posh bits as well, right? Search me, and search the average London-centric policymaker, come to that. The incomprehension is almost complete.
Majority thinking on other towns that ostensibly form part of the same country in which Londoners live can be summed up in the infamous Cities Unlimited report, published by the centre-right think tank Policy Exchange in 2008.
Essentially, the document demanded mass migration from Liverpool, Bradford and Sunderland to the bottom right-hand corner of the country.
The impossibility of developing the necessary additional housing and attendant infrastructure in a region that cannot keep pace with the needs of its own natural population expansion did not seem to figure in these deliberations.
Authors Tim Leunig and James Swaffield identified real problems, of course. But if the free market economics they espoused was capable of delivering solutions, surely the Invisible Hand would have done the business already.
What I do know is that under Labour, Liverpool recorded annual economic growth of 5.5%, the best performance of anywhere outside London. Yet even that seems not to have eradicated some of the deep seated social problems on the Mersey.
And what I also know is that writing off entire swathes of the north to ‘managed decline’ is wrong in principle. What is needed is a regional policy that offers a strategy for managed revival, and sadly that isn’t going to happen under the ConDems. Then and now, the sheer indifference stays the same.
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39 Responses to “What exactly is London’s problem with Liverpool?”
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But how much of that growth of 5.5% was due to public spending?
And how well distributed was that 5.5%?
At city level several hundred million spent on a new hospital or a clutch of new schools makes a very significant contribution to local GDP on paper – but how much of that money will actually go to local people as opposed to private sector investors and builders who will almost all be out of area?
We shouldn’t forget how much the Tories fear working class people and the potential power they have. That’s the lesson to be learned from the 1970s and 80s. The labour movement needs to arouse that kind of fear again.
It isn’t about London versus Liverpool, or good cities versus bad cities, or the impoverished north versus the affluent south. There are cities, towns, villages and housing estates everywhere that have faced economic decimation and general decline over the course of the last fifty years. But what we must not forget is that they’re all divided by class, including Liverpool, which has traditionally had a local ruling class just as ruthless as any other. I think appeals to civil pride or localism based on myths about the inherent radicalism of certain places can be very misleading and potentially damaging.
Every upheaval in the economic organisation of society is reflected in the creation, expansion, regeneration or decline of certain types of place developed under certain historical circumstances. Places like Liverpool and Middlesbrough are no different: they were built for a specific purpose, and gradually incorporated other functions, many of which are sadly redundant in the world of global capital and the international division of labour.
“until the 1950s it was just about the only working class conurbation in this country to return Conservative MPs to Westminster”
Really? London, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Glasgow didn’t return any Conservative MPs to Westminster?
Dave
This post deserves a considered response and its getting late and I am up early tomorrow.
Your correspondents should realise that Liverpool’s population declined from over 800,000 in the 1930s to a little over 400,000 today. This is a massive social and economic dislocation over a fairly short period. Basic industries suffered under the same Thatcher policy as the rest of industrial Britain exacerbated by an eastward shift in investment and trade towards the EEC when the UK joined under Wilson.
Yes investment did increase under Labour but there is also the massively disruptive anti working class Pathfinder programme inflicted on the city by that Bufoon Prescott which has decimated working class communities in the city.
Managed decline is a de facto experience of all industrial cities in the north and is actively being pursued in the US.
I read your reference to ‘London’ as the home of the political classes not a North v South mindset.
More to come and a happy new year to all Oslers and readers.
Poetry corneR:
the fucking cops are fucking keen
to fucking keep it fucking clean
the locals are a fucking crime
who fucking draws a fucking line
at fucking fun and fucking games
the fucking kids Clegg fucking blames
and nowhere to be fucking found
anywhere in LOndon
the fucking scene is fucking sad
the fucking news is fucking bad
the fucking weed is fucking shit
the fucking guns are fucking sick
the fucking knives are fucking daft
don’t make me fucking laugh
it fucking hurts to look around
everywhere in That London
the fucking train is fucking late
you fucking wait you fucking wait
you’re fucking lost and fucking found
stuck in fucking That London
the fucking view is fucking vile
for fucking miles and fucking miles
the fucking babies fucking cry
the fucking flowers fucking die
the fucking food is fucking muck
the fucking drains are fucking fucked
the colour scheme is fucking brown
everywhere in That London
the fucking pubs are fucking dull
the fucking clubs are fucking full
of fucking girls and fucking boys
with fucking murder in their eyes
a fucking bloke is fucking stabbed
waiting for a fucking cab
you fucking stay at fucking home
the fucking neighbours fucking moan
keep the fucking racket down
this is fucking That London
the fucking train is fucking late
you fucking wait you fucking wait
you’re fucking lost and fucking found
stuck in fucking That London
the fucking pies are fucking old
the fucking chips are fucking cold
the fucking beer is fucking flat
the fucking flats have fucking rats
the fucking clocks are fucking wrong
the fucking days are fucking long
it fucking gets you fucking down
being in That London
Monseur Cooper-Jelly
Liverpudlians are formidable Jelly but a good effort at poetry and worth saving for posterity.
Monsuer Jelly est Formidable
Thank you for the poetry.
That London blah blah blah that London blah blah blah that London blah blah blah. It’s not the centre of the universe, not even the centre of the galaxy or the solar system. In fact it doesn’t even have the makings of a moderately decent black hole.
PS on the behalf of the comrades of Wales, the North and Scotland : giz wor fuckin’ coal, oil and gas back — or an equivalent value at current ‘market’. In Britain, imperialism has always begun at home.
we can also extrapolate from this subject to the wider werld re exploitation of resources/human beings (euphemistacally called human capital – and not without ‘reason’ if we take at face value and accept the bullshit ideology behind such terminology and its rational irrationalism). See Zizek from a few years ago — still absolutely essential and basically correcvt re everything else in the world:
[http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n07/slavoj-zizek/nobody-has-to-be-vile]
eg:
“According to liberal communist ethics, the ruthless pursuit of profit is counteracted by charity: charity is part of the game, a humanitarian mask hiding the underlying economic exploitation. Developed countries are constantly ‘helping’ undeveloped ones (with aid, credits etc), and so avoiding the key issue: their complicity in and responsibility for the miserable situation of the Third World. As for the opposition between ‘smart’ and ‘non-smart’, outsourcing is the key notion. You export the (necessary) dark side of production – disciplined, hierarchical labour, ecological pollution – to ‘non-smart’ Third World locations (or invisible ones in the First World). The ultimate liberal communist dream is to export the entire working class to invisible Third World sweat shops.
We should have no illusions: liberal communists are the enemy of every true progressive struggle today. All other enemies – religious fundamentalists, terrorists, corrupt and inefficient state bureaucracies – depend on contingent local circumstances. Precisely because they want to resolve all these secondary malfunctions of the global system, liberal communists are the direct embodiment of what is wrong with the system. It may be necessary to enter into tactical alliances with liberal communists in order to fight racism, sexism and religious obscurantism, but it’s important to remember exactly what they are up to.”
Happy new fuckking year (except the cuernnts who post here – I hope you all die of syphillus).
BBC – BBC Comedy Blog: Tangerinegate… by Robert Popper
Last Monday I decided to do one of my silly and – admittedly – childish phone calls under the guise of my Timewaster Letters character, Robin Cooper.
So I switched on LBC (a London talk radio station) where the topic was Gordon Brown’s alleged bad temper. I called up and got through almost instantly. “What do you want to talk about?” asked the LBC operator. Without time to think I replied, “Gordon Brown visited my place of work and lost his temper right in front of me”. Very soon I was on air, explaining how Gordon Brown had toured my workshop – a ‘lamination factory’ – and thrown a tangerine into one of the machines, breaking it, before calling a member of staff a ‘citric idiot’. It was all I could think of at the time. A load of nonsense. But I was quite proud of the phrase, ‘citric idiot’.
Anyway, skip forward to Friday night. It’s midnight. I’m lying in bed, when I get a message on twitter that the tangerine story had been mentioned on BBC Two’s The Bubble. I clicked on iPlayer and fourteen minutes in, I see the brilliant David Mitchell telling his guests that Gordon Brown had allegedly thrown a tangerine into a lamination machine.
What?!
I immediately stuck my phone call up on my site (I’d animated it with my crap drawings), mentioning how it had been picked up on The Bubble. Very soon someone tweeted saying that they’d read about the tangerine incident in the Financial Times. And there was a link! Within seconds, someone else added that it had been in The Telegraph, with the headline: “Gordon Brown accused of throwing a tangerine”. The article went on to say, “One of the factory workers told The Sun Mr Brown became angry and threw a tangerine he was holding into a laminating machine”.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/comedy/2010/03/tangerinegate-by-robert-popper.shtml
This story has to be false Mr Jelly, there is no way you have ever been near a bloody factory, let alone worked in one. I can smell a middle class knob from a thousand miles away.
au contraire herbie hanCOCK. not that any of that matters anyway. Being a Marxist i do not fetishhise the werking class – you are a) obviously a cuernt b) a dick and C) a perineum either way. and d)someone who needs hunting down in an alleywaay and clubbing to death.
Thank you, however for the opportunity to educate you on the finer points (not even that really – just the basics) of Marxism. Here goes.
We (Marxists) believe – until we are proven wrong – that the transcendence of capitalism can only be carried through by the world proletariat, by which we mean, the class of workers and fellow travelers who work and live in this context of the planet-wide colonization by capitalism, and whose lives are being suffocated and destroyed by the alienated forms of wage-labor, commodity production, capital accumulation, State power, and all forms of contemporary social domination. When we refer to revolutionary proletarians, we mean all the workers of the world who know themselves to be the victims of this epoch-long social dispossession, and who will seek, even potentially, for a way out of the global catastrophe that is now unfolding.
PS. No Marxist worth their salt talks of the ‘middle-class’ – to do so betrays certain misunderstandings of a very basic nature.
PPS. if you really want to know (as I am SURE YOU DO SO) I worked after leaving school at 16, in a factory. I was an apprentice turner for 4 years during the 1980s before getting the fuck out of it by dint of being made redundant during Thatchers de-industrialisation project.
I despise herbiecuentjerbs and all like him, with their noses for smelling and shit. You will be first up against the wall when i get anywhere near any power. next week hopefully.
PS. I get the impression from the likes of herbieHANDcOCK that anyone who shows any sort of intellectualism (howver limited) is automatically consigned to “middle-class dustbin” – what a sad tosser and short of brains cuernt. Again – would have handCOCKS legs chopped off at the neck and fed to pigeons.
Let’s see Herbie Handjob’s CV then shall we?
i don’t watch x-factor mind you so that means i is middle class and that.
i must be one of those elitists and that.
also have a flat scren telly.
Obviously middle class me.
Middle Class is the modern lexigon does not equate to the Communist Manifesto era definition. Your words bear the hallmark of a middle class knob, so the factory story was certainly false.
Now you say you don’t fetishise the working class (you would say that being middle class!) but then you go onto say “We (Marxists) believe – until we are proven wrong – that the transcendence of capitalism can only be carried through by the world proletariat”, which comes across as fetishisation.
To quote prava 1918,
“Exactly because the lower middle-class mass is numerically large, it has retained an influence over the working-class movement. But every concession to this influence represents a departure from the Marxian standpoint, because it was precisely Marx who freed Socialism from lower middle-class adulterations.”
fuck off you are an idiot par excelent and werth the soiled shit that develops on the sole of sandals after being worn for several months in 40C sun by a sweaty cuernt.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8IVlfyIc8g
actually – just skip to part nine
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyvzfgxY0kc
you know worritis… after the little excahnge with the cuerntjerb above … oh fuck it. life is ever soooo short.
This is a good piece. The issue of a North/South divide is a neglected one. For example, London has the Olympics. Not Britain. It isn’t the same thing. (And I imagine that Londoners aren’t that happy themselves having to pay for a hyper-nationalist corporate trough-snouting monstrosity)
moran.
uberbanal shit
re tyhe stupid and dumb cuerntjkerb above re herbiecuent some more basic Marxism for you, you thick divvi cuerntjerb:
The class of all those who have to sell their labor-power in order to survive, and who, therefore, have little or no control over the use of their own lives are proletarians. Time sold is time alien. The term was originally used by Marx to mean the industrial workers, but in our time, the proletariat has expanded to include service, technical, and clerical (“white collar”) workers — in fact, the huge majority of the population. Hence the term “proletarianization”. Revolutionary theory cannot glorify the proletariat, “proletarian culture”, “proletarian morality”, etc. This would only be the glorification of alienation itself. What is positive about the proletariat is the historical possibility of its self-negation: since, for the proletariat, to free itself is to abolish itself, by abolishing Capital, class society, and alienated labor — that is its only glory.
you, on the other hand are an idiot. A supreme cuernt. A fucknutt and a shitbollox piece of aretrumpett.
You also eat roadkill as a regular diet.
and you afre a cuernTT
“Time sold is time alien”.
Maybe, but it can be exceedingly profitable, too. Just ask a lawyer, or, a London tube-train driver!
Even so, Monsieur, I am grateful to you for bringing your knowledge of Marxism to my aid and supporting my long-held notion that the ‘proletariat’, or, the ‘working-class’, are virtually all of us today. Previously, on this blog, I think, I have received a sort of confirmation of my theory because no-one, no matter how Leftie they be, can answer my question: how do you define the ‘working class’?
Duffy sez “I am grateful to you for bringing your knowledge of Marxism to my aid and supporting my long-held notion that the ‘proletariat’, or, the ‘working-class’, are virtually all of us today.”
That is correct David. Well done for reading something and undertanding it. Now get to organising a bolshevik party with the intent of taking power – both economic and political. And going beyond bourgeois democarcyry. You are a radical after all ren’t you?
i thoht my poem deserved more propds thsn it was given
Jelly. Absolutely brilliant poetry. Even better than Wilfred Owen or Rabbi Burns the greatest ever Jewish poet.
Happy New Year. I look forward to your death threats next year.
David Duff. Would it not be better to define it as the very well off, the well off, the not so well off and the skint. I am not entirely skint so I must qualify for the third option. I do recall my ma getting shoes and clothes for me and my brother from the parish. She was skint. But she was always proud to say that we were never sent out wearing dirty underwear. That is pride.
Ooooh how sweet. Herbie Handjob got the Great BIG Commie Colouring Book for Crimbo.
who are the 12%?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/dec/31/ed-miliband-labour-bbc-bias
anyone know a corpoaral cloGG voter? anyone?
Good point Monseur Jelly. Blaming the BBC for it’s own failure to engage isn’t going to win any sympathy for Labour.
Monsieur,
You sum up your own dilemma better than I can myself by suggesting (only somewhat ironically, I guess) that I help organise a Bolshevik party, presumably, to put right the ills of our current society in which the 19th century ‘working class’ has disappeared with the result that, today, we can all say we are ‘working class’.
Sorry, but alas, the first redundency in this 21st century society is Marxism! In a society in which (with some tiny exceptions) there are no poor but only ‘those with loads’ and ‘those with loads more’ there is simply no need of Marxism. By and large we all feed at the same enormous, and with fits and starts, growing trough provided by the unqualified victory of capitalism over socialism.
Time for a rethink, Monsieur, painful but necessary!
(PS: And in answer to our host’s question concerning the problem with Liverpool, the answer is obvious – it’s full of Scousers!)
I visited Liverpool early last September to do the Ship Canal trip.
The city has undergone a face lift since my last visit. New hotels and small businesses in the centre. The waterfront has been refurbished.
The place appeared pretty vibrant to me. However like Glasgow you had many especially men of working age with the bloated bellies standing smoking outside the pubs.
The hotel I was in had probably 90% foreign workers and no doubt that would apply elsewhere. Culture change is slow.
There’s a difference between being a bit chippy and being “self-pity city” where half the population thinks the world owes them a handout just because they bothered crawling from under their rock.
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fuck off scouse spambot cuernTT