Liverpool is often held up as the epitome of a Labour stronghold — a city that bleeds Red, and always will. And in many ways, this view is justified: since 1997, all the city’s MPs have been elected under the Labour banner; the party has also dominated the council since 2010, and held the city’s mayoralty since its creation in 2012.
Unfortunately, however, Liverpool’s local Labour Party does not repay the city in kind. For the past five years, it has been mired in scandal, culminating in the arrest of former mayor Joe Anderson in December 2020, on suspicion of conspiracy to commit bribery and witness intimidation. Now, that in itself isn’t a first for Liverpool — senior figures in the previous Liberal Democrat regime were also investigated by the police. But unlike previous scandals, Labour’s had wide-ranging ramifications for the city and its governance. And come Thursday, the consequences of this will be laid bare: as a result of a damning government inspection into Anderson’s behaviour last year, Liverpool Council will no longer be participating in this week’s local elections.
Anderson’s arrest in 2020 led to the commissioning of a Government “best value inspection” of Liverpool City Council, led by Max Caller. His report, published last year, found evidence of severe wrongdoing, ranging from repeated incompetence to corruption. The Labour leadership, he concluded, oversaw a climate of fear, harassment and bullying in Town Hall. As a result, our city has suffered the humiliation of having government-appointed commissioners oversee council decisions. For those who wanted to see Tories back in the Town Hall, this was not the way they had in mind.
Labour’s current state of ignominy was years in the making: it is not fair to paint Anderson’s downfall as the result of a few bad apples at the head of Labour. For years, a culture of impunity had developed around the mayor, always something of a political bruiser, which was accelerated following a decision in 2015 to scrap the mayoral select committee, a body that was supposed to scrutinise the mayor’s decisions and behaviour. Who’d have guessed that wouldn’t turn out well?
As a result of the Caller Report, the city faces significant changes to its local government arrangements. Previously, a third of the council’s seats were up for election in three of every four years. But Caller’s report found this frequency distracted the council from actually improving the lives of residents; they were too busy fighting the next electoral battle. The logic of this is not very sound — other councils manage such a pattern of elections without such scandal — but nevertheless the government has replaced it with a system of all-out elections, where every seat is up for grabs, every four years. The first will take place next year.
Chief among the reasons for this remarkable intervention — and for the chaos within Labour more broadly — is the lack of appropriate candidates among the city’s leading politicians. The current mayor, Joanne Anderson (no relation to Joe), was not the party’s first choice. She wasn’t even their third choice. Unlike Joanne Anderson, the original shortlisted candidates — all female — all had experience of running the city: Wendy Simon was acting mayor, Ann O’Byrne was a former deputy mayor, and Anna Rothery was a former committee chair and a councillor since 2006.
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