NO CHANGE, AND DECAY . . .
Henry Porter argues that the people
of Liverpool are to blame for their city's filth and decay
Liverpool COUNCILLOR Roger Lafferty had been eager to enter the debate on Liverpool's council workers. He rose and mumbled something into the microphone. 'We can't hear you,' shouted the voices of Militant councillors from the back. It was an odd moment for him to choose to speak be- cause he had just placed the majority of a chocolate bar in his mouth. 'Don't eat with your mouth full,' someone shouted baf- flingly from the Militant benches. 'Why doesn't Councillor Lafferty finish his meal before discussing these matters?' said another. 'Silly git,' said a third.
There has always been much eating during the debates in Liverpool City Coun- cil. Throughout the Extraordinary Meeting to confirm the redundancies of Liverpool's dustmen the councillors ate crisps, peeled bananas and drank from cans of Lilt, lounged, sniggered and chatted. There is much feigned outrage in Liverpool City Council, particularly among the warring factions of what used to be the Labour group. 'Councillor Lafferty has named me in a highly inflammatory fashion. I demand the right to reply,' shouted Tony Jennings, a member of the Broad Left group which contains the militants.
`Sit down and shut up,' said Trevor Smith, the Labour Lord Mayor. Then a councillor named Frank Vaudrey, an un- employed cab driver who is part of 'Broad Left', joined in, 'I propose a no-confidence motion against the chair.'
'I am the Lord Mayor, not the chair,' said Mr Smith who has had his fill of the Broad Left. He had recently been set upon in a Liverpool pub after being mistaken for a left-wing councillor.
Not much has changed in Liverpool City Council since I last sat in the chamber during the winter of 1978, when the refuse collectors were engaged in industrial action and council workmen were refusing to bury the city's dead. There are some new councillors, and power has shifted from the Liberals to the Militant tendency and back to the Labour group which now uneasily relies on the Liberal Democrats for sup- port.
But the atmosphere is exactly the same; the same purblind arguments and endless bickering at the back of the class. There is a very special confusion which inhabits the chamber, and many of the councillors who go there with ambitions to serve the city eventually succumb to the pointless treachery and clamour of Liverpool's poli- tical life. There cannot be a council in England where individual sense and com- mitment have so often been disabled.
The Liverpudlian councillors are not short of words. Their meetings often last over 12 hours, prolonged by motions and counter-motions and scouse rhetoric which draws its inspiration from the unchallenged idea that there is a special Liverpudlian spirit.
`The people of Liverpool' is a routine phrase that crops up in many speeches. I heard it a dozen times in the six-hour meeting last week, and my count did not include the variant 'the wairking people of Liverpool' which usually refers to the Council's huge workforce.
The 'people of Liverpool', it is true, are different. They are comic and quick, emo- tional and friendly. They are also rooted in a dependency culture which, encouraged by Derek Hatton, grew stronger in the Eighties. When I worked as a reporter in the city, many of the stories I covered involved people complaining about the `Corpy' — the corporation — or what they called 'the Owsing' — the Housing Depart- ment. Conditions of some of the council's properties were often bad, but equally there was so much that the tenants could have done for themselves. It rarely occur- red to them to cut the grass outside their flat or to mend their own window or to patch a drain-pipe. There was a helpless- ness which was completely at odds with the Liverpudlian's agility when it came to defrauding the DHSS or finding ways of not paying for services. One man I remem- ber solved the problem of electricity supply by hooking up to a street light. There was another who ran a business moving the furniture in and out of people's homes so that they could claim a furnishing allo- wance after an inspection of the temporari- ly bare premises by the DHSS.
There is enormous indebtedness in Liverpool with uncollected rent of £25 million and £22 million in rate arrears (forget poll tax). It is little wonder that the council has so little money to spend on the appearance of the city, which must do as much to deter outside investment as Liver- pool's record of absenteeism and union militancy. The city now looks as depressed and shabby as an eastern European capital. Many of the buildings in the city centre are empty and boarded up; the parks and open spaces are unmown; the back alleys are filled with splitting black plastic rubbish bags as the result of the dustmen's work to rule and overtime ban. The rubbish will probably be cleared up over the next few weeks but Liverpool's dismal and unkempt appearance will remain. This is the fault of the `wairking people of Liverpool', the employees of the city council who kept up their number while the city's population has declined. There are some 27,000 people working for the council, many of them notionally em- ployed in keeping up the city's appearance. Absenteeism is, according to local Con- servatives, the equivalent of 1,200 full-time employees being paid not to work at all. The dustmen who are to be made redun- dant next month are a notoriously poor workforce. It is said that no dustcart in the last ten years has been seen collecting rubbish after 3 p.m. due in large part to the practice of dustmen being delivered to their homes by the dustcart at the end of the day.
The shirking, overmanning and ineffi- ciency have all been protected by Branch Five of the General Municipal and Boiler- makers' union led by Ian Lowes, a Mili- tant. Not long ago his union encouraged an action by the men who tended a garden of remembrance where ashes are scattered and buried. Their duties included digging a small hole for the ashes. Although this involved no more than two or three move- ments of a spade, they demanded more money for this and refused to perform the small service until they got it.
Ian Lowes' members also staffed the `Static Security Force' which was raised under the regime of Derek Hatton and was often accused of political intimidation. The force was an important presence at meet- ings, but was also responsible for ensuring that council buildings which they guarded were locked during industrial action. The SSF was perhaps the most obvious and suspect form of patronage that grew up in the city during the Eighties. It is slowly being disbanded, but the men are apparently being employed elsewhere in the council.
Thatcherism has had little effect in Liverpool; indeed the whole city seems to have escaped the benefits of the Eighties. Liverpool looks and feels as if there has been one continuous recession for the last 20 years. It is difficult not to blame the Liverpudlians and their verbose and trucu- lent representatives in the council.
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