Larry Neild: Playground antics

Feb 4 2008 by Larry Neild, Liverpool Daily Post

REMEMBER those dramatic serials in the Saturday morning matinees down at the local picturedrome? The episode always ended with a seemingly unresolvable cliff-hanger, guaranteed to have you queuing a week later.

Liverpool City Council is on a par with those Flash Gordon and Superman serials. All it needs is some dramatic music in the council chamber and you would swear you’re on a film set.

This week’s cliffhanger is whether the council will escape from the clutches of a huge £60m cash crisis. Will Warren the Warrior find the golden treasure chest, crammed with sovereigns just in time? Will Emperor Anderson become the hero of the hour to save the city from financial catastrophe? Tune in to the next instalment of The Chamber of Mysteries.

Well, Flash Gordon and Superman always survived, and there was always an answer to their death-defying exploits.

And when the city council meets to settle its council tax for 2008, the books will balance. They always do. The talk nationally is of an average 4% rise in council tax bills. I can almost guarantee Liverpool’s will be lower than that, despite the necessary financial juggling.

What I do find alarming is this year Liverpool isn’t a 12-minute black and white serial in a back street cinema, it’s the big picture in glorious wide-screen Technicolor. On New Year’s Eve, I was in the US and picked up a copy of the top-selling Sunday paper in the States. It had a double-spread listing the top-world events of 2008, the Olympic Games, the Presidential Elections, etc. But guess what was number one on their list? – Liverpool launching as European Capital of Culture. Gee, that’s great.

So we do what we do best in Liverpool – we don’t wait for people to put the boot in; we kick ourselves into the ground. We pay top whack in this city for those who rule us, we are supposed to have the best money can buy, which is why we hired expensive head-hunters to go out and track them down.

We have more spin doctors than the Royal has surgeons. Yet we remain a magnet for critical and adverse media exposure. We should have hired Max Clifford to come here to tell us how to avoid the wrong kind of headlines that allow a never-ending soap opera to continue to feed our critics, and those jealous of our progress.

The politicians and the executives will scream it’s not their fault the media spotlight falls on them and on Liverpool for the wrong reasons. But it is their fault. Let me repeat something I wrote recently – if they don’t do it, we don’t write about it.

This city cannot afford the cost in money terms, let alone image damage, of paying off people with huge cheques just because somebody doesn’t get along with them, because somebody isn’t talking to somebody else. Those are the antics of the playground. People are asking if this Saturday morning serial will ever end, and thinking it’s doomed to go on forever like a never-ending story.