Unmanaged decline?
Labour lacks a vision for Liverpool
Liverpool was stripped of its UNESCO World Heritage Status this week. And, with Liverpool being Liverpool, the reaction has been defiant.
Liverpool City Council tweeted “a great city not defined by labels”. No tagging of UNESCO required. The Liverpool Echo wrote that “a proud, historic and truly vibrant city simply shrugged its shoulders and moved on”.
It seems that some kind of myth has taken hold. World Heritage Status was simply an albatross: preventing much-needed inward investment and holding the city back, instead of driving it forward.
This idea was at the heart of Metro Mayor Steve Rotherham’s response. He wrote that “many of the sites cited by UNESCO are in communities sorely in need of investment. Places like Liverpool should not be faced with the binary choice between maintaining heritage status or regenerating left behind communities”.
False equivalence aside, the invocation of scouse defiance is at best unhelpful and at worst lazy. The council, local newspaper and Rotherham suggest it’s not where you’re from but where you’re going that counts.
But where exactly is Liverpool going?
The previous mayor was arrested for corruption. Government commissioners were sent in to run the city. Labour NEC voted for central control of the local party.
The battle between gangs and police is unrelenting. Gun crime is now commonplace. There is an epidemic of homophobic attacks.
Liverpool has been fobbed off for far too long.
To put it simply, the local Labour party has gotten lazy. It has taken Liverpool for granted while Downing Street has cruelly redirected budgets to Conservative strongholds. The mix of underfunding and local incompetence has been crippling. And, as we know from the days of Militant, turning inwards would be fatal.
Liverpool deserves better. Leaders who are smart, savvy and with an appetite for the hard yards. The type of politicians who hear UNESCO’s warning in 2012 and hit the pause button, not those who forge on with anodyne glass skyscrapers and backhand deals that do nothing for local communities.
Looking beyond the waterfront, the city badly needs innovative and bold ideas which solve issues like the diabolical local transport; the social mobility crisis; and the sorry consequences of decades of under investment (all of which I hope to write more about).
For now though, however local Labour is taken over, the output must be a roadmap for returning Liverpool to the ascendency.
Because Liverpool doesn’t need more defiance. It needs a new vision. One that’s co-designed with local communities. One with the climate and emerging economies at its heart. Its absence is what happens when leaders get lazy.
