Joanne Anderson, Mayor of Liverpool and Steve Rotherham, Metro Mayor of the Liverpool City Region, are very much in favour of hosting Eurovision in our proud city. It will be good for the city, we often hear.
However, Eurovision in Liverpool will only be good for those in the L1 postcode, that being the affluent central area of the city. The governors of our city are failing us.
I am proud to come from Liverpool, but I am not proud, in fact I am ashamed and angry at the way it is mismanaged. It is not run for us or by us, but by careerists who have little to no experience of the everyday life of the rest of us on Merseyside.
Rotherham has the power to distribute money around the Metro regions, yet very little has been given to anywhere outside of central Liverpool and almost nothing has been given to Bootle in Sefton and even less to Huyton in Knowsley. The prices of hotels have increased fourfold, even for those who had booked them months ago.
Anderson has a degree in Business Management, yet she has been declared bankrupt twice. She has only two years of experience on the council before becoming Mayor. She also stated that Liverpool is the only city in the country to be a European Union ‘Capital of Culture’. This is incorrect – Glasgow was the ‘Capital’ in 1990. Just like the Festival Gardens of 1984, Eurovision will be a massive white elephant to distract from the actual problems that plague not just Liverpool (outside of the L1 postcode area) but also Bootle and Huyton, now part of the Metro Area.
She also believes that Liverpool has UNESCO World Heritage Status. However, this was removed in 2021 after she allowed Peel Ports to continue to develop the dockside and pretty much destroy our iconic skyline.
There was a big deal made that she is the first black woman to be a Mayor, but she was part of a group of candidates who replaced the original three for reasons not given, but it is reasonable to surmise that that the replacements were less hostile to Sir Keir Starmer than the original shortlist of three candidates. Our current Labour council is literally controlled directly by government, not that it would make a blind bit of difference if it wasn’t.
The money that comes into the city goes to business owners, not to the common men and women who work hard to generate it. We will have to apply for temporary jobs in the hospitality industry to get any of the crumbs from the table that the Marks and Sparks Arena Eurovision Song Contest junket will create. Volunteers have been called on to help with the event. So is the wealth that the Eurovision Song Contest creates on the backs of unpaid workers?
Local food vendors are being charged an extra £6,000 to keep their pitches on the docks as it falls within the “Eurovision Zone” Even the fittings of the Eurovision stage were installed by a private company from Yorkshire!
We will have to put up with the abuse of drunkards and the humour of camp “jokers” just to earn nine or ten pounds from bosses that are reaping in hundreds of thousands.
Liverpool is twinned with Odessa, another working-class port city. What has been ignored is that in 2014, before Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine, the Trade Union Hall in Odessa was besieged by far-right activists who killed 50 people by burning it to the ground. While we should show sympathy with those fleeing war, we should not be hosting a music festival that has been given to us after our government has openly backed with those who have caused the conflict.
Our government is now even accusing the rail union RMT of trying to ruin Eurovision by striking on that day, when it is their anti-worker laws that have forced the RMT to strike on the day of the show, as the union would have to have another ballot to extend their mandate to strike later.
They have even said that, as we are hosting Eurovision on behalf of the Ukraine, the strikers should have more compassion. Our twin city Odessa is (or rather was) a unionised dock city, so that’s why we are twinned. For the government to say such things is beyond cynical.
It’s bloody disgusting.
Chris, a proud son of Liverpool
Class Consciousness Project 
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