Tag Archives: urban affairs

We need to move from the shires and suburbs into the deprived areas of the UK

By Richard Kemp | Sat 6th July 2024 - 2:30 pm

No matter how successful we have been in the many General Elections that I have been involved in since my first in 1970 there has always been someone who, after the elections, says, ….”but!” So, it might as well be me! In fact, let me correct my own first sentence. For the first time since 1970 I have not been involved in the General Election at all. Convention in Liverpool is that for the year that you are in office the Lord Mayor plays no part in politics so that they can act as the only member of the council able to speak in Purdah periods but also, as with the Speaker, can be neutral throughout the year.

For most of my political life I have been involved in the school of hard politics, which is Liverpool, but it could be any other rough, tough, urban core city or borough. Although I represent a reasonably affluent area now, the fabulous Penny Lane Ward, for much of my time on the council I represented difficult inner-city areas. My lament through the whole of this period has been that the Liberals and then Liberal Democrats have been a party of the suburbs and shires. A quick look at the map of where Lib Dems took seats on Thursday will see that this has not changed at all.

I do understand the need for targeting and believe that this policy was absolutely necessary to ensure that we came back from the political wilderness to enable the Party as a whole to be relevant to the law-making processes of the nation as a whole. But we have now achieved that and my plea to Ed Davey and our other leaders is that now is the time to be bold and push for real representation in our major cities.

Now I know that we are not entirely unrepresented in urban areas at local level. We control Hull and have significant and growing numbers of councillors in places like Sheffield, Newcastle and a growing re-energised presence in my own city of Liverpool. But over the whole of my 50 years in Liverpool we have had to do everything ourselves and fight a poorly funded urban guerilla warfare against Labour’s well-funded mighty machines.