A new council leader in time for Christmas
A new council leader in time for Christmas
Councillor Liam Robinson is leading the race for the position — plus the rest of your weekly briefing
Dear readers — as one political saga ends, another one springs to life. West Derby MP Ian Byrne saw off the attempt to de-select him in a close vote yesterday, and now Liverpool will be appointing a new leader next month. With Joanne Anderson set to step aside as mayor in May, and the role of mayor being abolished, we’ll have a look at the main contenders to become the leader of Liverpool City Council.
At the weekend we finally caved. After 13 months of Beatles-free content we served some up. It was Dan Billingham’s first piece for The Post, as he jetted out to Hamburg and met Rosi — the 81 year old landlady of Rosi’s bar — who’d shared a dorm with four Liverpudlian lads in early 1960s St Pauli as they tried to make a name for themselves.
Last week David Lloyd got the best gig a writer can ask for: a round up of the finest whisky bars and cake shops in town with a slap up meal at Duke Street’s Barnacle to boot. On the latter, he had this to say:
“The starter of ‘cheese and chips’ — crispy slivers of artichoke sprinkled with gouda — is fun. But sometimes flavours hit you like a sudden mid-Atlantic squall when you’ve just settled down on the poop deck for a snooze. A starter of squash was cloaked in that same gouda. It was intense and moreish, but 24 hours later, it still lingers. Less would be moreish.”
Then on Thursday we summoned an expert to tell us why exactly our trains are in such a mess. Like why are they often so cramped you can’t reach for your phone without elbowing someone in the face? And why does a train to London often cost more than a week’s wage? And why are they always bloody late? Tom Haines-Doran wrote the new book Derailed: How to Fix Britain’s Broken Railways and had some of the answers.
This week we’ve got a fascinating and important read from a new writer looking at the accessibility of Liverpool’s nightlife scene (that one is coming out tomorrow), a trip to Kirkby on Thursday and a weekend deep-dive going behind the scenes at The City of Liverpool College (please get in touch if you work there: just hit reply to this email). To get those and help fund a new way of doing journalism in Liverpool focused on serving readers rather than advertisers, please consider subscribing. It costs just £1.25 a week if you pay upfront for a year. You won’t regret it.
Editor’s appeal: The lights are going up around the city and the bratwursts are cooking in front of St George’s Hall. Christmas is almost here, so why not save yourself the hassle of last minute shopping and give the gift of quality journalism. You’d be supporting an independent company and helping to ensure our long-term future.
This week’s weather
This week’s weather forecast is sourced from the Met Office and it’s for Liverpool.
The big story: A new leader for Liverpool
Top line: Liverpool City Council will be getting a new leader in time for Christmas. With mayor Joanne Anderson leaving next year (and her job being scrapped altogether) there’s a power vacuum that needs to be filled, and one name seems to have emerged ahead of the rest.
Context: When she became mayor, Anderson said to BBC Radio Merseyside that the role would be ended. “I’ve said I’d campaign to sack myself, and that’s what I would do,” she remarked. Back in July, Labour controversially did just that after reneging on a promise to hold a legally-binding referendum, instead holding a public consultation and ignoring the result (retaining the mayoral system got the most votes, though turnout was very low).
Split powers: the strange part is that even though the new leader of the Labour Group will be in post from next month, Anderson isn’t going anywhere until May’s elections. As the BBC’s Claire Hamilton notes, this could lead to a strange overlap where both the group leader and the mayor see themselves as the true leaders of the council:
“But — especially with such a tough budget to push through this year — there's a big danger of clashes between the mayor and the group leader, even though they are both Labour politicians.”
The crux of that potential clash between the new council leader and the mayor could be their differing priorities. The former will be geared entirely towards 2023’s all-out elections. For them, passing a highly unpopular budget, for example (such as the one proposed with huge cuts to public services and council tax hikes touted as a means to plug a £73 million gap in the city’s finances) will do no favours electorally. Meanwhile Anderson has less reason to be thinking long-term, and will want to finish what she has started on the budget work.
A clear favourite? The Echo reported yesterday that Kensington and Fairfield councillor Liam Robinson will be the “frontrunner” and our sources concur. Robinson has been transport lead for the city region combined authority for a decade and became the council cabinet member for neighbourhoods after Adbul Qadir was forced to step aside when an investigation into his links to failed property developments was launched. One council source said this to The Post:
“There are possibly more talented leaders than Liam — not that he isn’t talented — but his big advantagement is that he’s never been so close to scandal. It’s a bit of a cliche but he is a ‘safe pair of hands’. Which sadly is exactly what a lot of people think we need after the past few years.”
One more name in the hat is Norris Green councillor Barry Kushner. Kushner is ambitious, having tried to replace Joe Anderson as mayor last year and run to be West Derby MP in 2019 (some would say he was left off of the final shortlists in surprising circumstances both times). His difficulty, however, could be that he served in various roles in Joe Anderson’s cabinet. Robinson will be able to play on the notion of turning over a new leaf in a way Kushner perhaps won’t.
Bottom line: Liverpool urgently needs some political stability. One issue for Joanne Anderson has been the persistent belief among her colleagues that she wouldn’t be around for long, leaving some colleagues to view her as a lame duck. “There's an interregnum period going on, like John Major or Gordon Brown,” one Labour councillor told us earlier this year in our special report into Liverpool’s politics. Whoever takes over needs to establish their authority over a fractious council and project enough competence that the government stands down its commissioners. A massive, unenviable task.
Your Post briefing
Victory for Ian Byrne: The West Derby MP’s battle against de-selection ended in victory yesterday, after he got 210 votes to 198 against challenger Anthony Lavelle. The race was marred by allegations of abuse between the supporters of each candidate and Byrne’s statement that “multiple rules” were broken in the process. Even on the day, supporters of the MP on Twitter complained that they were being “silenced” and that some would-be voters were being prevented from joining the queue to do so. As ex-BBC journalist Michael Crick remarked on Twitter, “Liverpool buck[ed] the trend”. The left wing candidate has invariably lost in Labour selection battles so far ahead of a 2024 general election. One source told The Post that while postal votes were believed to have favoured Lavelle, Byrne “was magnificent” in his final remarks before the votes on the day were cast. “Anyone who was undecided in the room could not but have been swayed by him,” they said. One positive we can all take from this? Our endless updates on the matter have finally drawn to a close — for now.
Hooters is here — the planning application saga of the summer has drawn to a close and the American eatery famed for scantily-clad staff in white and orange tank tops has arrived on Water Street. It’s been a long time coming and over the past year a number of anti-Hooters voices on the council made their misgivings clear, with Maria Toolan starting a “Say no to Hooters” petition and Nick Small making persistent objections, believing that Concert Square would be a more appropriate site to avoid the creeping stag do-ification of the rest of the city centre.
Merseyside has a new support service for victims of crime. According to the BBC, “Victim Care Merseyside hub will provide free, confidential and non-judgemental advice for all victims of crime, no matter when it happened”. The purpose is to ease the process of reporting crimes for people who are averse to contacting police. A team with “extensive knowledge and community links,” has been established according to Police and Crime Commissioner Emily Spurrell. The services provided by the hub are varied, including therapeutic support and counselling, financial advice and addiction support.
Health secretary Steve Barclay says “it’s key we learn the lessons” from the extensive delays in building the new Royal Liverpool hospital. Visiting the hospital, Barclay commented on the fact that five years had elapsed since the hospital was supposed to open in 2017 — the delays largely caused by the collapse of original contractor Carillion — but praised the building itself and the “fantastic news” of an £800 million investment for Liverpool.
Home of the week
Its interiors are vaguely reminiscent of the set of a Hitchcockian thriller (one where you fear the worst for the female lead) but this £200,000 detached house on Croft Lane in Fazakerley could be a winner with a bit of love. It’s got three bedrooms and plenty of garden.
Post Picks
🎄 If you haven’t already, head to St Georges Hall where the Christmas markets are getting into their groove. Whether you're a stein-and-a-bratwurst in the Bavarian bar type, or more of a cane-the-mulled-wine-and-jump-off-the-snow-slide person, there’s loads of great independent stalls and eateries that could do with some support. Here’s a little overview.
🎶 And another festive pick: an evening of carols at Speke Hall. The local Singing Our Socks Off choir will be belting them out amid the Tudor surrounds, and mince pies are on offer too. Tickets start at £7 but several of the nights have already sold out, so be quick (and wrap up warm, it’s a big house and that means big draughts).
❓ What does it take to bring together young people and museums? That’s the question being asked at the Pyramid in Warrington on Wednesday, with a series of workshops and events for people interested in exploiting the world of youth-led culture work. It’s free.
⚽️ You might not be able to pair England’s first World Cup game against Iran with a beer if you’re watching live from the Qatari desert, but you won’t have that issue at Liverpool’s fan park. It’s probably less faff to get there too. You’ll need to book.
Open newsroom
Open newsroom: If you want to tell us about a story or give us some information, please email editor@livpost.co.uk. We are always happy to speak to people off the record in the first instance, and we will treat your information with confidence and sensitivity.
This week we’d still like to speak to staff at The City of Liverpool College in relation to an ongoing dispute over pay and conditions. If you work at the college, do help us out.
We’re also looking into Liverpool’s latest commissioners. Know something about one of the new faces that we might not? Get in touch.
Our favourite reads
For years, Fatima Cates’ grave lay unmarked in Anfield cemetery. Born Frances Elizabeth Murray into a strict Christian family in mid-Victorian Liverpool, she became drawn to Islam whilst working as secretary of the Association of Prohibition of Alcohol in Birkenhead, having seen the effects of drink on her city. A local lawyer gave her a Quran and she began to study it, eventually becoming the first woman to convert to the religion on British soil. She took the name Fatima — one of Prophet Muhammad's daughters — and joined a band of converts based on Mount Vernon Street, where their meeting place was often attacked with stones. Years after her death, her grave was located by Hamid Mahmood and a fundraising campaign was launched to pay for a headstone. Read the full story on the BBC here.
When Everton Women’s forward Toni Duggan fell pregnant, her teammates thought she was injured. This interview in The Telegraph gives a great look at how elite female athletes negotiate pregnancy. Maternity cover is new to contracts, for example, and Duggan describes her own confusion at receiving the news, not knowing who to flag it with at the club or how to feel about the effect on her career. “Players need to be comfortable in the fact that they can have a baby at any time in their career. It's their decision and it's their right,” she says. She gives a great closing line too: “When I want a sausage roll now I can just have one and blame the baby! If you see me walking around with a Greggs then you know why.”
And one from last year in case our weekend read ignited a passion for Beatles-in-Hamburg content you never knew you had. In a London Review of Books article entitled “Four moptop yobbos” Ian Penman charts the band’s rise, from the humid climes of Reeperbahn in the early 60s — a time and place caught between postwar German efficiency and the “anything goes” of red-light nightlife — to their eventual place at centre of Western cultural life, when “virtually anyone” would latch on and attempt to exploit their image: “Political hucksters and metaphysical hustlers; bean diet propagandists, head drillers, motorcycle nomads.” A word of warning for the purists though. After 6000 beautifully crafted words, Penman writes up Hey Jude’s famous anthem-like singalong as “Laaa, la la, la-la-la laaa…” You wouldn’t catch us getting our nas and las mixed up.
Letters from readers
I worked for one of the companies that won two of the first privatised rail franchises in the mid 1990s. One of our PR advisers was a former Tory parliamentary candidate who had connections still to the Major government. He told us that privatisation was made as complicated as possible so that it would be impossible for the expected Blair government to renationalise the railways. The company also ran buses and we had the absurdity that we couldn't coordinate bus and train times as this was 'anti-competitive'. And we had to employ a whole team of people whose job was leasing and 'off-leasing' trains. The current problems were designed into the system, ‘Train Man’, Simon Jones
Thanks for a very decent, and well written article. It's a part of the Beatles' life that you never get to read about in too much detail, other than the usual "They started off in the Star Club (which is obviously wrong) where they honed their skills," and also the - almost obligatory - mention of Astrid Kercherr. Am I correct in also thinking that it was during this time that they met Klaus Voorman, designer of the Revolver album cover, and occasional guest musician? ‘Red lights and late nights in St Pauli’, Baz
Liam Robinson is about the worst possible leader Liverpool could have. As chair of Merseytravel he has presided over cuts to bus services and promoting "active travel" a greenwash excuse to deprive people of bus services. In Robinson's fantasy world everyone can walk or ride a bike. Merseytravel should be promoting and providing public transport, not telling people to walk. Absolute cheek. I fear greatly LRs stewardship of Liverpool council services if his butchery of the buses is anything to go by.
After a dozen years of Anderson and the stagnant economic pool we've been left with, what Liverpool needs is competent, professional and inspirational leadership to claw us back to the starting post.
Once again, what Labour needs - a safe pair of hands - diverges from what the city needs. Once again, the Labour party personalities put themselves first. None of them offer what we need. All of them lack the courage and selflessness to admit it.
Robinson may not be embroiled in scandal, but he has never struck me as someone who puts our city first. In broad Northern tones I have only heard himself describe himself as a proud northerner. Given the popular promotion abroad of our city region as nothing more than a labour pool for Manchester, we need a northerner at the helm like we need another office to resi conversion.
Robinson's Merseytravel tenure may have been long, but it has not been spectacular, from a city perspective. And wasn't he someone's choice?