The following letter was sent to the Liverpool Echo this week by Tony Mulhearn (one of the 47 councillors who led a battle in the 1980s for more government funding), in response to an attack by Mayor Joe Anderson.
The mayor and confusion
In questioning my criticism of his stewardship of the city’s affairs (Liverpool Echo 15.12.15) which includes implementing the most savage cuts in social provision in history, Mayor Anderson invokes the word ‘Militant’ as a means of dismissing any rational discourse with any who seek to challenge him.
I’m sure my old mate Derek can answer for himself, but the mayor excels himself when he refers to my ‘muddled rewriting of history’.
In politics he should know that clarity is of the essence. So let me be clear. When the 47 were undemocratically removed from office, the city’s debt per head of population was the same as most councils of a similar size.
The jobs we created, the houses we built, the nursery schools we opened, the money we secured from the government, he characterises as ‘glorious defeats’.
His notion of ‘reputation’ is dependent on the approval of his friends in Downing Street and the Daily Mail, the Murdoch Press, et al. It is self-evident that endorsement from those quarters means the mayor is acting in the interests of the fat cats and not in the interests of the neediest in society whose entitlements have been lacerated.
Can I remind him of the clarion call of the Poplar councillors in 1922 that it is “better to break the law than break the poor”, a noble slogan embraced by the 47.
He might also take note of the following: “Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow…the tree is the real thing.” Abraham Lincoln.
