Sharing the joy and the sorrow

Jul 9 2007 by Larry Neild, Liverpool Daily Post

City Editor Larry Neild revisits the last quarter of a century of Liverpool’s history when some of its greatest emotions were stirred

LIVERPOOL has lived through every emotion known to mankind in the past quarter century. From the torment of the Toxteth Riots, the drama of the Militant era, the tragedies of Hillsborough, Heysel and the horrific slaying of James Bulger.

Yet the new millennium gifted the city with hope for the future.

The 21st century has brought a renewed belief in Liverpool, a regeneration and renaissance that is changing the look and feel of the area. The layer of icing on Liverpool’s 800th birthday cake has been the award of European Capital of Culture to the city.

It is presenting Liverpool with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to wear its Sunday best on the world stage, to shout to the world that finally it has been freed from those despairing shackles of yesteryear.

City rulers gaze across the ever changing skyline of Liverpool and count the number of cranes on the horizon – heading for 50 at its peak. They see that as a signal new Liverpool means business and can deliver its promises.

Who, especially those witnessing the Toxteth Riots of 1981, would have believed that within living memory Liverpool would have a mini-Manhattan skyline and re-emerge as one of the nation’s great visitor attractions for shoppers and tourists?

Film of the riots echoed across the world as people watched in disbelief at what seemed to be the destruction of a once-great city by its own people.

It was like a tragi-drama pageant, being played out on a stage for the world to see, except this was not a rehearsal, nor was it fiction, but real life drama.

Strangely, thousands of people stood on the sidelines, away from the battleground as rioters and police went head-to-head.

The spectacle was floodlit not by arc-lights, but the flames of burning buildings or cars that had been torched.

The whole episode of events started with the seemingly uneventful arrest of a local man, and within hours the community had erupted, citing heavy handed policing in what was essentially the main ethnic quarter of the city.

It was as though that arrest was the straw the broke the camel’s back and the people decided it was time for them to have their say, in a way that even today remains a hot topic for social academics.

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who visited the Toxteth battlegrounds, responded by appointing one of her top men, Michael Heseltine, as Minister for Merseyside.

Out of the embers came the Merseyside Development Corporation, charged with regenerating the derelict docklands that formed the southern boundary of Toxteth.

It led to the country’s first International Garden Festival which attracted 3.5m visitors, including the Queen, to a reclaimed landfill site at Otterspool.

That tip had been transformed into a magical festival garden.

The city, though, was still reeling from the fall-out of the massive job-losses that started in the late 1970s when tens of thousands of men and women ended up on an industrial scrapheap.

The plight of the unemployed and the despairing influenced the political climate in the city which saw the emergence of Militant as a dominating force at the town hall.

It saw the crowning of Derek Hatton as a working-class leader, determined to take on the might of the Thatcher government.

Hatton was only ever the deputy leader of the city council, but that was more than enough for him to lead a confrontation with the government.

We lived, for a brief time, in the People’s Republic of Liverpool, an outlaw mini-state refusing to tow the line laid down by the government.

They didn’t need to send in the troops to liberate Liverpool.

Instead the Labour councillors, who had knowingly set an illegal budget, were dragged through the courts and banished from office for five years, and ordered to pay a massive surcharge as well as costs.