Chapter 2 contended that the peculiar historical and political geographies of Liverpool resulted in a unique response to the mid-1980s crisis (see also Frost and North, 2013). Past struggles have generated a “reservoir of memories” (Guzman-Concha, 2012: 409) through which existing repertoires of conflict are defined, while particular path-dependencies are imbricated within prevailing or residual political contexts (Newman, 2014). In the case of Liverpool, therefore, North (2010: 1380) holds that local elites have not found alternatives to urban entrepreneurialism credible, “especially when Liverpool’s experiences with the confrontational tactics of the Militant-led council are contrasted with observable city centre development”. This is supported by the national austerian realism of Labour municipalities, a gloomy political landscape produced through those historic defeats under Thatcherism (Davies and Blanco, 2017). In Liverpool, the political possibilities for austerity resistance are foreclosed through the constant iteration of particular imagined geographies of the city, which depend on the mobilisation of certain narratives about the mid-1980s struggle to frame contemporary confrontation as unpalatable:
I feel sorry for people who think that [setting an illegal budget] will actually make a difference, because these people genuinely think that if I set an illegal budget then every other council in the country would follow suit and we’d bring the government down. Now that failed in the ‘80’s and it’s gonna fail today.74
Despite there being significant distance between complicit acquiescence to cuts and the experiences of the Militant-led council, LCC often publicly denies these nuances and exaggerates this binary, framing local political discourse within a dichotomy that reinforces the politics of ‘no alternative’. The strapline ‘illegal budget’ is constantly invoked during political debate – within council meetings and engagements with local communities,75 and, as
above, in presentations to the media – in order to discredit dissenters, particularly those identified as being on the ‘far-left’, whose ideas are considered to be “just simply not credible”.76
For activists, this constitutes a form of ‘red scare’, or ‘dog whistle’ politics:
74 Joe Anderson on Radio City Talk, 10/11/14. 75 Field notes (various).
Chapter Five: Situating Austerity Urbanism: The Case of Liverpool City Council
119 Joe Anderson: he always raises this ‘red scare’, it’s like a dog whistle; [mimicking] ‘we don’t wanna go back to the ’80s’.77
Activists posit that this is effective political sloganeering which manages to disrupt resistance, even if it is not recognised as conveying truth.78 Anderson’s quote also demonstrates Labour’s
infantilisation of anti-austerity campaigners, where ‘feeling sorry’ for those who have a “romantic attachment”79
to public services is iterated to contrast social-democratic “nostalgia”80
to the ‘moderate’, ‘credible’ and ‘professional’ Liverpool Labour administration. The mobilisation of discourses of the 1980s demonstrates how place structures justifications for, and potential alternatives to, austerity, and shows how space, scale and time operate as key apparatuses through which austerity urbanism becomes realised. In particular, the notion that Liverpool was left in a state of ‘havoc’, or ‘chaos’ following the Militant-era, of which the long-term outcome was severe reputational damage, repeatedly emerged in interviews:
Liverpool Labour will not put in place an illegal budget. We will not take Liverpool back to the havoc of the 1980s, when Militant gave our city a reputation it didn’t deserve.81
Liverpool was near destroyed because of what happened in the 1980s. So let’s not forget that. Let’s also not forget some of the reputational damage that that’s done to the city and in some ways we’re still suffering from some of that. One of the big roles we’ve had as a city council is being able to turn round people’s perceptions of Liverpool – unfair perceptions in many ways, but the root of those in a lot of cases was because of what happened to this city in the 1980s.82
Invoking such disaster narratives about the city allowed Labour to position itself as ‘forward- thinking’ in contrast to a discourse of ‘going backwards’, of which the consequences would threaten the city’s future and be generational. Time is therefore mobilised as a central theme in such narratives, which is also supported through comparisons which emphasise the relative weaknesses of the labour movement, the growing de-politicisation of society and the tightening of local authorities’ fiscal autonomy as contributory factors to LCC’s austerian realism.83 The consensus states that, since the 1980s, the political and legislative manoeuvre for radical left urban politics has been compromised (Lansley et al., 1989). Even Derek Hatton (cited in Liverpool Echo, 2011: n.p.) concurred:
When you look at the situation now, with the national leadership and the trade unions and a whole lot of other things, the comparison is virtually non-existent. While it’s
77 Member of Liverpool against the Cuts and former Militant supporter, interview. 78 Field notes (12/03/15).
79 Cllr Frank Hont, interview. 80 Ibid.
81 Liverpool Labour (2016). 82 Cllr Nick Small, interview. 83 Interviews (various).
Chapter Five: Situating Austerity Urbanism: The Case of Liverpool City Council
120 OK to say they should put up a fight, in all fairness to Joe [Anderson] I think it’s probably unrealistic. I would not be one of those to argue he should do what we did in the 1980s. It would be political suicide.
Austerity urbanism also hinges upon a repudiation of the political identities crafted during the Militant struggle, and makes new appeals to ‘scouseness’ in order to craft consensus in the city. Chapter 2 showed how Militant mobilised the scouse identity and channelled a ‘shout against’ the decades of economic decline that the city had suffered previous. Yet, in contemporary austerity politics, a different form of scouse political identity is being proposed, one which harnesses the enterprising spirit of the seafaring days and makes shared sacrifices in times of scarcity. While Joe Anderson continues to embody the “Tories’ worst nightmare; a bolshie, big, angry, aggressive scouser”84
expressing local pride and defiance, this is strategically aligned with non-confrontational strategies of positive engagement which emphasise new relational identities concerned with fighting strategically against central government. Contra the ‘us’ versus ‘them’ separatism of Militant (Kilfoyle, 2000), new Liverpool identities become politicised according to familiar austerity tropes, such as ‘we’re all in it together’ and ‘sharing the pain’ in order to legitimate fiscal retrenchment. Requesting that Liverpudlians support plans for council tax rises, Mayor Joe Anderson (cited in Liverpool
Echo, 2016a: n.p.), stated:
I understand the reasons why the people who said no did, they themselves are struggling as are many others living in our city. I was also surprised and proud that so many, 43 per cent, said yes! It’s a truly heart-warming reminder of how caring our city really is.
This is also allied to new forms of place-making, through which Liverpool’s entrepreneurial spirit, generated through its relational trade engagements with the global economy, particularly of the past, is celebrated as a means to produce Liverpool’s future, whilst also invoking further historical narratives about the city (see also Figures 5.5 and 5.6):
I like to think quite a lot about the history of the city and where the city positioned itself; when they built this city, the people that built this city, this building and the Town Hall and St George’s. They were making a statement, they were saying ‘well here we are, this is Liverpool; it’s glorious, it’s massive, you just come and invest in it’. 40 per cent of the world’s trade came through this port; we didn’t look backwards! Our forefathers didn’t build a pokey little room and say ‘come and invest in our city’; it wasn’t mealy-mouthed. It was saying ‘we are Liverpool; this is our future, this is us’ and they were making a statement, and that’s what we have to do, we don’t have to be shy about where we are and who we are.85
84 Cllr Steve Munby, interview. 85 Cllr Roz Gladden, interview.
Chapter Five: Situating Austerity Urbanism: The Case of Liverpool City Council
121 Figure 5.5: The Pier Head, a UNESCO World Heritage Site (Source: Author, 2017).
Figure 5.6: Liverpool Town Hall (Source: Author, 2017).
Such developments have persuaded Anderson to argue that “Liverpool’s best days are still ahead” (cited in Liverpool Echo, 2015c: n.p.), whilst Deputy Mayor Councillor Nick Small claimed in interview:
Everyone wants Liverpool to do well, everyone’s in Liverpool’s corner. We need to take advantage of that – I think that’s the biggest thing that’s changed since the 1980s;
Chapter Five: Situating Austerity Urbanism: The Case of Liverpool City Council
122 people want this city to do well, people are taking another look at this city and what it stands for.86
This emergent discourse reflects the aggressive place-marketing strategies of the city, and speaks to new relational political identities within national and international politics, where undefined outsiders are claimed to be re-thinking what the city stands for in ways that are oppositional to those identities that were discussed in Chapter 2. This seems an apparent paradox when contrasted with the disaster politics invoked earlier in this chapter, yet supports work which notes how city administrations draw upon attachments to place in order to justify economic development (Harvey, 1985; Leitner, 1990). It also shows how crisis is mobilised to re-shape political identities (Fuller and West, 2017). Austerity urbanism is, therefore, highly situated and is dependent here upon the malleability of the scouse identity to re-frame what austerity means and prescribe the means to resolve it.