THE gap between the richest and poorest in Liverpool is now at its widest since Victorian times, it will be claimed tomorrow by the Conservatives.

The Tories’ Merseyside spokesman Chris Grayling will use a keynote speech to lobby group Downtown Liverpool in Business to highlight the growing divide in cities across Britain.

Mr Grayling, who is also shadow work and pensions secretary, will compare gang culture and deprivation of Victorian times to the harsh realities that exist in many urban communities.

He will argue for a fresh approach for politicians and local communities to unite to combat the problem.

Last night Mr Grayling said: “What we are seeing is the growth of a sub-culture in our society that is utterly divided from and alienated from mainstream British life.

“In many respects, these communities might as well be on a different planet.

“This is something we all need to be concerned about. It’s not just a Liverpool problem, it exists in cities up and down the land.

“This is one of Britain’s great social challenges, and the fact that it remains untouched a decade after Gordon Brown and Tony Blair won power will remain one of the great failures of this Government.”

Last night, Walton MP, Labour’s Peter Kilfoyle, said: “This is a great failing of succesive governments including his own.

“I think it is a bit rich for a Thatcherite Tory party to lecture Liverpool about what it needs, when it was the Tories that talked about its managed decline.”

According to analysis by the Conservatives, up to three quarters of residents are affected by income deprivation in Granby and Vauxhall wards.

Breckfield and Vauxhall wards have pockets of worklessness where half of working age people are dependent on benefits.

But in Childwall and Abercromby wards, less than 5% of the population are on benefits, far below the national average.

In his speech tomorrow, he will say: “Just look round the city centre. One of the country’s biggest new shopping centres.

“The new arena. New hotels. The cruise ship terminal. Plans to transform the docks into a new skyscraper city.

“But if you walk out of here with me, and head a mile off into Toxteth, I can show you streets where no one works, street corners where drug dealing is the main business, children being brought up in squalor, a caged up pub with pitbulls as bouncers – gangs, knives and guns in abundance.

“For the gang strife of Norris Green today, read the fascinating saga of Victorian gang crime in Liverpool by Michael Macilwee. Similar worlds, an era apart.

“But whilst it’s the violence that makes the headlines, the statistical divide goes much further than crime.

“Take the most stark divide of all. The gap between the life expectancy of the richest and the poorest is now at its widest since the Victorian era. There could be no clearer indicator of a society that is getting things wrong.

“And it’s not just health inequalities that are so stark.

“The financial gap between the richest and the poorest is at its widest for generations – almost certainly since the era of the Great Depression – perhaps even longer than that.”

He will also highlight how immigrants have been able to take advantage of work in Liverpool, yet many people from the city have not.

“Just take a walk around this city centre, or go into one of its bars or hotels. Everywhere you go you will find people with overseas accents, people who have come to Liverpool from other parts of the world to find a new life. And they have found it.

“So why on earth is it that so many people from within Liverpool have remained out of work, trapped in a culture of benefit dependency?

“And it’s not just here. It’s in every one of our major cities.”

He will finish his speech by saying that one of the historic challenge of today is to break down “parallel cultures” and return to “an era where social mobility is the norm and not the exception”.

OPINION: PAGE 10

davidbartlett