Liverpool council has tonight voted to ditch its council leader and have an elected mayor instead.

Sixty-two councillors voted in favour of the measure, three were against, and there were 12 abstentions in the vote held in the council chamber, my colleague David Bartlett reports.

That kind of result will please the government whose pet project this is. In deciding to ditch a referendum - which 10 other cities will hold in May - and go straight to a mayoral election, the city council has reportedly secured some £130 million in extra funding.

It's been interesting to observe this little democratic (or not as the Lib Dems would have it) experiment that my former home city is undertaking right now in deciding to go for a mayoral election on 3 May...

This heat map of the cuts does a pretty good job of showing the north south divide in the way government cuts are hitting people.

Unsurprisingly, Liverpool having taken one of the worst cuts in the country is shown as having lost more than £40 per person out of next year's budget. St Helens and Knowsley are in the same category.

On Wirral £20 to £30 per resident has been lost. Sefton fares better losing 'just' £10 to £20.

If you exclude London boroughs, the south of the country clearly fares much better than the north.

The debate around full disclosure of the documents relating to the Hillsborough disaster is due to take place in the House of Commons this evening as the families of the 96 made a fresh call to The Sun newspaper to reveal their controversial police sources.

Hillsborough Family Support Group chair Margaret Aspinall, who lost her 18-year-old son James in the disaster, demanded the paper name who told them the lies that caused such deep hurt in this city.

Imagine the scene at the Garmoyle: Lib-Dem activists hurrying around, printing off leaflets, stuffing envelopes.

Weary souls will slump down in the Liverpool Lib-Dem HQ returning to the office with very little sleep after spending days in the run up to the general election pounding the streets.

"We don't want to get carried away yet, but we are quietly confident that Colin will beat Luciana," one campaigner will look at the camera and say.

It could possibly be the opening sequence of "Winning Wavertree".

Before I started work at the Liverpool Daily Post in the summer of 2007, I had covered politics in Blackburn for the Lancashire Telegraph.

So naturally when @blackburnlabour started following me on Twitter a couple of months back I returned the compliment.

The local party has also created a great blog at blackburnlabour.org

Almost 2m people in Greater Manchester may, in part, hold the key to whether the latest attempt to make a funding bid for Merseytram is successful.

As we reported on Friday (see here), the Department for Transport (DfT) is to be asked for at least £270m to build Line One of Merseytram from Liverpool to Kirkby.

People living in Greater Manchester are currently voting in a referendum on whether a congestion charge should brought in.

DALE Street is the political powerhouse of the city, with the Town Hall at one end and Municipal Buildings at the other.

Like Blues music, politics in Liverpool can often be full of surprises, but it is never dull. Indeed reporting politics in Liverpool is a fascinating job.

Hopefully this blog will help shed some more light on the comings and goings in the corridors of power (not just in Liverpool, but also across the region).

And finally, both council leader Warren Bradley and the Labour opposition leader Joe Anderson are Evertonians.