Do the Conservatives care about Liverpool?
Do the Conservatives care about Liverpool?
They don't have any MPs here and haven't had a councillor on the council for more than a decade.
Politically they have no reason to, and the way they have gone about implementing their cuts programme suggests they really don't care.
Liverpool is not alone of course, but by most measures the city and its council is getting hit the hardest.
The claims that the coalition has applied cuts in a fair way as risible as they are inaccurate.
Take the city council for instance losing 22 per cent of government funding for this coming year.
The government tries to claim it is only losing 8.9 per cent in spending power. Even under their measure no other local authority loses more in percentage terms.
When 80 per cent of your funding comes from government a 22 per cent in funding is going to have a more severe effect than on a wealthy council elsewhere that gets just 30 per cent of its funding from Whitehall.
The Tories and their Lib Dem partners are a bright bunch. The maths here really is not hard. So the conclusion must be that they do not care.
Throwing an extra £15m the way of the council does not amount to a serious way of helping make the transition to lower funding settlements, it is merely a sop.
Southport MP Lib Dem John Pugh admitted today that the cuts were being front loaded and Sefton council will as a result be closing popular children's centres.
Equally Monday's Centre for Cities report kills off the idea that the cuts are fair.
Liverpool will lose £197 per resident compared to £97 in Oxford.
The report calls for a local action plan and more government money to help the region as the number of public sector jobs decrease.
While I am on the subject of the Conservative party. What ever happened to our promised minister for Merseyside?
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David Bartlett
City editor of the Post and Echo covering politics, regeneration, and urban affairs.
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I assume no Minister for Merseyside was appointed as the Tories failed to win the target seats of Wirral South, Sefton Central and Southport - contrary to the predictions of their spokesman Mr Caldeira on Liverpool Party Central.
I assume no Minister for Merseyside was appointed as the Tories failed to win the target seats of Wirral South, Sefton Central and Southport - contrary to the predictions of their spokesman Mr Caldeira on Liverpool Party Central.
The north-south divide reappears with a vengeance! Now it's more like a very deep trench. As a comparison, I gather that most of the detached suburban areas of e.g. Hants, Surrey, Berks etc have escaped the scale that's hitting Merseyside. It's obvious that some areas need more funding than others, but the Tory logic turns this upside down with their current mantra of "the service user, not the taxpayer, must pay for services."
The Lib Dems don't care about Liverpool. If they did, they wouldn't be propping up a Tory government which, like the 1980s, is hitting Liverpool hardest.