LCC’s overarching strategy for mitigating austerity deploys the slogan ‘Invest to Earn’ (Liverpool Echo, 2015d). This entails a focus upon accelerated forms of urban entrepreneurialism whereby ‘growing a way out of the deficit’ involves actively creating conditions to attract private capital to the city, so that local economic growth and inward investment may plug the funding shortfall and stimulate job creation. This is encouraged by central government spending restrictions which discriminate between revenue and capital expenditure; the former is restricted to funding services, and is supported by the Revenue Support Grant (cut under austerity), while the latter supports capital investment which is instead being encouraged through austerity urbanism. This is illustrated in Figure 5.9, note also the framing of municipal budgeting in household terms, as discussed earlier.
Chapter Five: Situating Austerity Urbanism: The Case of Liverpool City Council
128 Figure 5.9: Infographic: Capital versus Revenue Spending (Source: Liverpool City Council, 2014b).
Liverpool, argues one councillor, is “capital rich”,107
which promotes opportunities for pursuing economic growth rather than alternatives. In the mid-1980s, the council focused on winning resources from central government to fund house-building and services, rather than on wealth creation which, today, councillors propose, will increase finances to provide the city with sufficient fiscal autonomy to pay for such services and much more besides (see also North, 2010). This is supported by the steady re-building of trust amongst local elites, who cite the mayor’s “more grown-up attitude towards central government” as providing the platform for local market stability (cited in Parkinson, 2016: 9). This type of advanced urban entrepreneurialism, within a context of austerity urbanism, is mirrored throughout cities across Europe where growth is the only bulwark against decline and market values are being
107 Cllr Barry Kushner, interview.
Chapter Five: Situating Austerity Urbanism: The Case of Liverpool City Council
129 increasingly ingested by local authorities (Fuller and West, 2017). In Figure 5.10, LCC attempts to communicate this strategy to the local populace. Councillors also explained:
We’re trying to lock in growth into everything that we do; we’ve got to find ways of creating private sector-led growth. That means a whole business-friendly Liverpool agenda. There’s a real need there to invest and to grow our way out of the deficit.108
We have to actually keep reinventing ourselves to keep getting a new market and keep getting new customers, and that’s actually what keeps a city going. What is the competition doing? Let’s compete! Let’s do better services and better products. There’s things you can do in ‘Invest to Earn’ that aren’t confrontational, that we as a city should be proud of.109
Moreover, an economic development organisation leader (quoted in Parkinson, 2016: 15) claimed:
Because of [Joe Anderson’s] style, Liverpool is now seen as a can-do city. Investors see it as on the move.
These quotes exemplify archetypal tropes from the urban entrepreneurialism catalogue, as the city is obliged to reproduce itself according to the demands of capital (Harvey, 1989; Leitner, 1990). Place is also an inescapable discourse permeating such narratives, as councillors draw upon ideas of place-making and identity to align the interests of Liverpool’s residents with those of globally-mobile capital. In this instance, it can be argued that increased rhetoric against a Tory-led central government and fresh appeals to the scouse identity constitute nothing more than a Trojan horse pervaded by neoliberalism; ultimately, the local state is being shrunk and cities are re-directing their capacities to embracing the global economy upon which they increasingly depend (Peck, 2016, 2017a). This is coupled with the sale of assets to raise revenue, estimated to be valued at £35 million when up for sale in 2015-16 (Liverpool Echo, 2015e), despite evidence which demonstrates that such policies are socially regressive (such as the Right to Buy, see Jacobs and Manzi, 2013). Preventative measures, whilst welcome, are informed by the intent to “mitigate, rather than instigate, the need for public services in the future” (LGA, 2014, cited in Fuller, 2017: 13) in ways which direct state services to the most vulnerable and, in turn, erode those remaining elements of welfare universalism (Lowndes and Gardner, 2016). This is evidenced by local healthcare reform (Healthy Liverpool) which aims to responsibilise citizens for their own well-being (Healthy Liverpool, 2015). Yet, rather than complete withdrawal, such transformations represent a qualitative re-orientation of the local state, evidenced by the Mayor’s touting for global investment in Shanghai (Liverpool Echo, 2015b). Labour councillors are also wary of the deepening spatial inequalities produced
108 Cllr Nick Small, interview. 109 Cllr Gary Millar, interview.
Chapter Five: Situating Austerity Urbanism: The Case of Liverpool City Council
130 through austerity urbanism where, despite notable city centre regeneration, the northern and peripheral areas of the city continue to be unproductive to capital and therefore chronically underfunded, with many communities ‘left behind’.110
Figure 5.10: Infographic: Invest to Earn (Source: Liverpool City Council, 2016d).
110 Interviews (various). See Chapter 2, supported by Frost and North (2013), Jones (2015), Sykes et al.
Chapter Five: Situating Austerity Urbanism: The Case of Liverpool City Council
131 Rather than representing something new, perhaps austerity urbanism merely extends those processes of urban entrepreneurialism and variegated neoliberalism which are well-rehearsed in the literature. In the mid-1980s, recognising that the private sector was in retreat, Liverpool promulgated municipal socialism under the Marxist view that rejected urban entrepreneurialism as a dangerous compromise which simply enabled capitalism and began a flawed route for the left (Gyford, 1985; Mackintosh and Wainwright, 1987). However, the lessons learned following those defeats, combined with laws prohibiting budget deficits, and the return of the private sector to Liverpool,111 have seemingly reinforced a local politics of ‘no alternative’. Where the Militant-era sought to defend the interests of workers at all costs, even to the detriment of local services (Lansley et al., 1989), the contemporary Liverpool Labour strategy involves embracing the return of private capital and harnessing the opportunities for the benefit of the whole city, which is framed as inclusive to the entire city.112
This is in contrast to the Militant approach of privileging the interests of manual workers which it saw as the ‘authentic’ voice of the working class, as discussed in Chapter 2. Finally, it remains to be seen what kinds of opportunities and threats will be posed to this model through the shifting political landscape towards both regional devolution to the Liverpool City Region and Brexit (North, 2017).