On the Brandwagon

In a report published in January 2009, Liverpool was cited as one of the UK cities likely to be worst hit by the global economic recession. The city was ranked as the worst performer in the Social Deprivation Index of UK cities, with the lowest employment rate, highest level of benefit claimants and third highest rates of social inequality (after Manchester and Blackpool). With the election of the Conservative-led coalition government in May 2010, and an austerity programme of massive cuts in public expenditure that is expected to result in the worst unemployment statistics for a generation, the city's economic prospects look ever more bleak. In the Thatcher decade of the 1980s Liverpool had some of the highest unemployment rates in the country. The memorable refrain of ‘Gizza Job’ from Alan Bleasdale's Liverpool-based television drama Boys from the Blackstuff (1981) caught the national imagination at a time of economic deprivation and social unrest, and left an indelible reminder of a troubled period in Liverpool's recent history which few would wish to revisit. Yet headlines in 2010 such as ‘Spending Cuts: Liverpool facing “worse than the worst-case scenario”’ and ‘Third of Liverpool households are jobless’ recall less the sense of hope and optimism that followed the awarding of European Capital of Culture status in 2003 than the negative 1980s-era associations of burgeoning dole queues, growing inequality and social unrest: the very image Liverpudlians had hoped that the ECoC initiatives would consign to history.