LIVERPOOL AND THE CULTURE OF CA

LIVERPOOL: CAPITAL OF CULTURE 2008 – WHO’S CULTURE?

By Kai Andersen

"out on the Scouse reservations we've heard all this before, we know it won't benefit us"

On Wednesday 4th June 2003 the public announcement eagerly awaited by Liverpool's power elite and business fat cats was greeted with hysterical joy by them and the selected few at an exclusive city centre location. Mike Storey, Lib-Dem leader of Liverpool City Council and leading member of the city's power elite was seen on TV news reports with a disgustingly smug grin on his face.

Liverpool was supposedly neck and neck in the bidding race with the Newcastle-Gateshead bid. Liverpool City Council (LCC) spent over £14 million pounds of our money buying the title. Money was spent on a huge propaganda campaign, producing thousands of window stickers, expensive enamel badges, leaflets, signs and all kinds of promotional materials that were displayed across the city and in all council buildings. One of Liverpool's famous landmarks was decked out with a huge and expensive piece of tacky artwork, which showed John Lennon morphed into a mutated Mona Lisa complete with guitar.

To put the above in context, earlier this year LCC's director of social services, himself a doctor, had the bare faced cheek to tell carers at a meeting in a Mencap centre (In Clubmoor) that the council couldn't afford to spend an estimated £16 million to continue free care at council run day-care centres for people with disabilities. Wearing the increasingly obligatory enamel Capital of Culture (CofC) badge he feebly tried to justify the unjustifiable and came under a barrage of tricky questions from an upset but admirable section of our community.

Most working class people in Liverpool are sick of hearing about CofC. Liverpool's power elite are obsessed with rebranding the city with titles such as Music City, 21st Century City, Liverpool Bay, City of Learning and the most recent "Greater Liverpool". It's glossy propaganda and coverup, it's a conscious denial of the deep poverty which LCC itself has helped to deepen with its obsessive revenue raising policies.

Many of my friends have serious doubts about the benefits of CofC and have said "Why hasn't Liverpool got a large concert arena for bands or exhibitions?" The other cities competing for CofC such as Birmingham, Newcastle-Gateshead and Cardiff all have concert arenas. The best we've got is a tent on the dock front.

Liverpool is a city of broken promises and continual betrayals to the public,our city's only ice skating rink was closed in the mid 1980's and we still don't have one. Furthermore there isn't an Olympic sized swimming pool or diving pool in the city now, the LCC closed the last one in 1993. There are no community arts venues in the city centre with affordable prices or access for local artists.

Since the mid 1990's arts and cultural events organised by local people have become a rarity, the Lib-Dems drastically cut funding since 1998. Events such as the Toxteth community carnival and the Earthbeat 'free' music festival which promoted local unsigned bands, brought in national and international musicians and employed local people. To compound the cultural exclusion further LCC cynically cut its funding yet further in 2002 to grassroots art organisations as the title bid was launched.

The issue with culture and arts in Liverpool is the elitist and exclusionary nature of the arts and cultural establishment here. Throughout the 1990's working class people like myself and friends have been evermore excluded from employment and funding. LIPA (Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts) was launched by Paul McCartney in the late 1990's, however talented Scousers make up a token minority of the students or even staff at his elitist money making institute. LIPA is absolutely nothing like the New York institute of the performing arts, known as the 'fame' school, which McCartney modelled his project on. Liverpool did have SCOPA (Sandown College Of Performing Arts) which
was more like the New York 'Fame' school in terms of it being primarily for the people of the city, it was closed in the late 1990's, the buildings recently demolished to make way for a new Tescos.

In 1993 the European Union (EU) granted Merseyside Objective One (Obj-1) status, due to our levels of poverty, with funds of over £600 million pounds granted,when matched with public and private funds it is close to £2 billion pounds of investment in total. However, all the economic indications show poverty has increased and not been reduced since granting of Obj-1 status to Liverpool and Merseyside. So while Liverpool has never had more money in it, we the working class have never been poorer. A startling figure, more than 60% of adults in Liverpool earn less than £10,000 a year, according to the recent 'Wealth of the Nation' survey, with some areas at the bottom of earnings with £9,100 a year.
Poverty is most extreme on the outer housing estates (eg. Croxteth, Norris Green) with the most disadvantaged still living in what is some of the poorest housing in Europe.

Liverpool pressure group 'People Not Profit' (www.peoplenotprofit.co.uk) are rightfully critical of the way public money has simply not reached the people in most need of it and I agree with their analysis of the financial and political corruption here in Liverpool, an article from one of their news sheets stated;
"A recent report showed that: architects, surveyors, lawyers, letting agents and specialist consultants are all collecting fees on an unprecedented scale. Meaning the latest flow of money from Europe has not gone to local people to improve our lives, it has gone to people who are already some of the highest earners in Liverpool."

A tourist (sporting a CofC enamel badge) was telling me "surely it'll trickle down to benefit the whole community", I replied "well out on the Scouse reservations we've heard all this before, we know it won't benefit us, because Obj-1 didn't benefit us and that was granted because of poverty here." So a Canadian tourist is telling me that gaining CofC will benefit our communities.
It's patronising, we Scousers now get talked down to by tourists after years of being talked down to by out of town middle class students. Also singing the praises of CofC was a poet from St.Helens (near Liverpool) when I said "it won't benefit us", she repeated the same trickle down benefit nonsense. I said, "we've had Obj-1 funding, it's not benefitted the poorest communities in Liverpool, it's actually helped destroy them", she begrudgingly agreed, saying "I've noticed the dereliction on the route I travel into Liverpool."

I write poetry and have been involved in the local music and arts throughout the 1990's and have friends who are artists, musicians, comedians, writers, actors and we find it close to impossible to get resources, access to venues, our ideas heard or funded. Many of us are surviving on benefits or low waged employment.
We, the local people are the creators of the real culture here in Liverpool, however arts and culture have become evermore elitist and totally middle class dominated, with local working class people excluded from expressing ourselves artistically, creatively and culturally. While funds have been cut to projects run by local people, public funds have been siphoned into prestige projects and thus arts and culture become a tool to aid the insidious social engineering project.

Gaining CofC could also be seen as a celebration of two decades of oppression of Scouse 'working class' culture and identity. What's happening in Liverpool now is similar to what happened to working class communities in London and who were also victims of gentrification and class cleansing in the 1980's. This insidious social engineering is becoming a seething class issue, for Liverpool's rich power elite gaining for themselves CofC title was the icing on the cake of gentrification of Liverpool city centre with the accompanying exclusion and expulsion of working class people and communities from the city centre on all levels. CofC was the victory parade of the middle class, yuppies, right wingers, Liberals, big business fat cats and the rich power elite elements here in Liverpool.

TV News reports were talking about the triumph of the 'Armani suit' over the 'Track suit' an unguarded moment of class prejudice by the BBC reporter, what was meant is that working class people wearing street wear of 'trackies' ie track-suits are not welcome in the city centre but middle class - yuppies wearing 'Armani suits' are to be fawned over and catered for, this is already a fact. Laughingly, Derek Hatton, former deputy leader of Liverpool City Council during the Trotskyite/Militant Tendency's leadership in the mid 1980's, claimed it was the foundation built by his council leadership that gained CofC. How ironic that he's a noted yuppie & 'fake' socialist who favours expensive Armani
suits - he was probably closer to expressing the truth than he realised!

Local über-propagandist Roger Philips is the presenter on a daily phone-in show on BBC Radio Merseyside where many voice their opposition to what's going on in Liverpool and Merseyside. Those who call in have the most reactionary nonsense thrown back at them by Philips. Many of those who've rung in clearly haven't thought out why they're opposed to CofC, ironically they end up strengthening the self-congratulating power-elite view, however they do represent many who feel completely detached from the decision making processes by LCC, they realise they're the victims of decisions made behind their backs. Many would question -if they only knew- why £14M was found for buying this title while the council constantly tells us it hasn't got money to run our essential services.
There are suggestions of disloyality to your home city if you oppose or criticise Liverpool getting CofC.

I find myself allied to many people who oppose CofC for what it represents, they have clearly thought out the whole farcicial nonsense and realise at best they'll be no worse off or worse case scenerio they're going to end up a lot worse off, facing evermore exclusion and possibly their community gets demolished as many already are. There is a looming crisis in affordable housing provision for working class people in Liverpool which has been created by the Liberal led council in collusion with Labour.

In a post-celebration BBC TV interview, Mike Storey was interviewed in regard to CofC. He stated, "Independent research has shown, this is not us saying it [LCC] that getting this prize is worth about £2 billion pounds in extra investment, an extra 1.7 million tourists, and for us the most important thing is jobs, and it's going to create an extra 14,000 jobs. -Where do these figures come from though councillor Storey- you'll be pleased to know that I don't make these figures up.
The consultants, worthy people, who look at the effect on Dublin, on Graz, on Glasgow they're the people who say this, and err if only half those figures are correct then it's a real bonus not just for Liverpool but for the North West as a whole."

I'll finish with a quote from 'People Not Profit' from one of their recent news sheets: "The trickle down effect was discredited in the days of Margaret Thatcher, yet the poor people of Liverpool continue to have little say in the spending of regeneration money as it piles into the city centre. In the same way many hard working local artists, bands and writers feel excluded from the Culture bid and related projects. It's a classic example of something that is organised from the top down, by people who don't appreciate the diversity and value of grass roots activities. Voluntary projects and small arts venues are struggling for money while the cultural image of Liverpool is being shaped by councillors, PR firms and other business interests. Culture is produced where ever people meet and by everyone."

(This article was originally written in the summer of 2003 just after the Capital of Culture award for 2008 went to Liverpool. Article reissued in September 2007, on the eve of that event.
The Capital of Culture title, formerly known as the City of Culture, which rotates around Europe from year to year, was last held in Britain by Glasgow in 1990. The current holder is the Romanian city of Sibiu).

-ENDS-