Liverpool city council's struggle in 1983-87 for more funding from the Thatcher government was an inspriation to workers, photo Dave Sinclair

Liverpool city council’s struggle in 1983-87 for more funding from the Thatcher government was an inspriation to workers, photo Dave Sinclair   (Click to enlarge: opens in new window)

Tony Mulhearn, one of the 47 heroic Liverpool city councillors who fought Tory prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s cuts in the 1980s, sent the letter below to the Observer after Robert Service reviewed Tristam Hunt’s book “Ten Cities That Made an Empire” on 8 June. This is an extract.

“Robert Service’s jaundiced view of those who challenge the neoliberal economic model is revealed in his characterisation of Liverpool city council in the 1980s.

That courageous defence against Thatcher is dismissed in the words ‘Liverpool plumbed its nadir when its council bankrupted itself under the rule of Militant Tendency in the 1980s.’

Ironically he chides Hunt for historical inaccuracy but Service himself commits a seriously sloppy, inaccurate assessment of Liverpool in the 1980s. The nadir had been plumbed long before Militant were elected.

Between 1977 and 1983 65% of the Liverpool economy had collapsed. 100,000 jobs had disappeared, Tory minister Heseltine had slashed £100 million from the city’s rate support grant; the outgoing Liberal/Tory alliance had lost millions to the city because of its crazed rating policy, and it left behind £10 million of unallocated cuts and provision for 2,000 redundancies.

The incoming socialist councillors made a courageous stand against that process: cancelled the redundancies, built thousands of houses, created thousands of jobs and expanded services.

Liverpool’s current right-wing Labour administration has plumbed something beyond the nadir with its cuts of a third of a billion pounds of social provision. Militant in the 1980s opened six new swimming pools; the current administration is closing them down. I look forward to reading Mr Service’s characterisation of such an administration.”