Thatcher told to abandon Liverpool in 1981

[Ideologue]

selling off the population of Liverpool for soup stock.

I just got soda in my sinuses, damn you.

[dps]

selling off the population of Liverpool for soup stock.

I just got soda in my sinuses, damn you.

Well, at least you didn't get soup in there.

[Ed Anger]

Or Reese cups.

[Razgovory]

The US faced similar problems during the same time period.  Some cities bounced back (New York), some didn't (Detroit).  Who can forget the famous headline "Ford to City: Drop Dead!"

[Razgovory]

There's going to be some interesting stuff coming out over the next few years...combined with the way the economy is going hopefully that will put an end to the strange folk who like her lot.

This release makes her generally look pretty good.  The bad stuff'll come when she's at the Mad Thatch stage, so in about 10 years.

I wonder if they have similar stuff from the senile Reagan period.

"Mr. President, Mr President!"

"Wha!  Who the Hell are all you people?  Why am I in this room?"

"Sir, this is your daily security briefing".

" Oh God, I smell waffles!"

[Neil]

I don't think that Liverpool failed because it was full of dangerous ethnic minorities.  I think it was part of the general collapse of everything British that didn't involve finance.

[Brazen]

Boris carried on that grand Conservative tradition. Apologies for Wiki C&P:

On 16 October 2004, The Spectator carried an unsigned editorial comment criticising a perceived trend to mawkish sentimentality by the public. Using British hostage Kenneth Bigley as an example, the editorial claimed the inhabitants of Bigley's home city of Liverpool were wallowing in a "vicarious victimhood"; that many Liverpudlians had a "deeply unattractive psyche"; and that they refused to accept responsibility for "drunken fans at the back of the crowd who mindlessly tried to fight their way into the ground" during the Hillsborough disaster, a contention at odds with the findings of the Taylor Report. The editorial closed with: "In our maturity as a civilisation, we should accept that we can cut out the cancer of ignorant sentimentality without diminishing, as in this case, our utter disgust at a foul and barbaric act of murder."

Although Johnson had not written the piece (journalist Simon Heffer later said he "had a hand" in it), he accepted responsibility for its publication. The Conservative leader at the time, Michael Howard (a supporter of Liverpool FC), condemned the editorial, saying "I think what was said in The Spectator was nonsense from beginning to end", and sent Johnson on a tour of contrition to the city. There, in numerous interviews and public appearances, Johnson defended the editorial's thesis (that the deaths of figures such as Bigley and Diana, Princess of Wales, were over-sentimentalised); but he apologised for the article's wording and for using Liverpool and Bigley's death as examples, saying "I think the article was too trenchantly expressed but we were trying to make a point about sentimentality". Michael Howard resisted calls to dismiss Johnson over the Bigley affair, but dismissed him the next month over the Wyatt revelations

[Warspite]

It is a curious thing that cities once existed for economic activity, and now people seem to think it should the other way around - essentially RH's point that London subsidises much of the rest of the UK. B

ritons moved north (or down from Scotland and across the water from Ireland) in the 19th century because that's where the work was; in the mines, mills, shipyards, docks and factories. Now that we don't have the latter, we should probably stop trying to keep alive economically dead areas.

That means people moving to where the work is - in other words, the south east.

I realise this may be an unpopular opinion but I really don't see much alternative. We're not going to start large-scale coal mining again, and capital-intensive manufacturing simply isn't going to be a creator of mass employment.

[Ideologue]

But neither is anything else, so you might as well avoid the massive transactional costs of moving millions.

[Richard Hakluyt]

One thing that has helped, during my lifetime, is that the "South-east" has effectively become bigger due to improved transportation. I could see the process at work in Suffolk when I lived there a few years back. In the 1950s this had been one of our poorest counties but by 2000 or so the East of England area (NUTS1 definition) became a boom area.

One of the problems for places like Liverpool is that they have been exporting their best people for decades, so they can be forbidding places to set up new businesses in, there are staff and skill shortages alongside massive chronic unemployment.

[crazy canuck]

Maggie