There is no doubt Joe Anderson will be mayor of Liverpool a year from now. The question is: which one?
A few weeks ago he was re-elected for a second term as the city’s mayor (one of 17 directly elected mayors including London and Bristol). In less than 12 months, however, he hopes to see his name on ballot papers once again. Anderson, who is 58, wants to be the first directly elected mayor of the newly devolved Liverpool region – the five Merseyside boroughs plus Halton in Cheshire.
So far the contest to lead this combined authority, with a population of around 1.5 million, has yet to attract anyone with the national reputation of the shadow home secretary, Andy Burnham, who wants the equivalent job in Manchester. But Anderson, a former merchant seaman and trade unionist who threw his hat into the ring in a speech at Bootle’s Port Academy on Friday, already has a fight on his hands to be Labour’s nominee.
Local MP Steve Rotheram is standing, as too is shadow minister Luciana Berger. “City MP challenges old pal Joe” was the headline in the Liverpool Echo when Rotheram declared, but Anderson claims to be relaxed about this – as he is about what happens to the post of city mayor once the regional mayor is elected (though he definitely won’t attempt both at once).
“I promoted Steve Rotheram to the cabinet when I was council leader and made him lord mayor,” says Anderson. Speaking before Berger announced her decision to stand, he says he would welcome her entry to the race “as a woman”. “They feel they’ve got something to offer and it’s not for me to say they haven’t. It’s up to them and their consciences.”
Anderson was re-elected city mayor with almost 53% of the vote (down 6% from 2012 but still, he tells me twice, a “thumping majority”). Perhaps it is this resounding victory, or the blue sky outside of the city’s most spectacular offices in the Cunard building overlooking the Mersey, that explains why the mayor is surprisingly upbeat given his prediction that 2017 is the year Liverpool falls into “the abyss” created by waves of cuts.
He has described the city already riven with cuts as a “northern slaughterhouse”. There are potholes in the roads, the parks aren’t as tidy or the streets as clean as he would like them to be. People have become blase: the council has cut so deeply already – £340m, or 58% of it budget since 2010 (a figure that doesn’t include ringfenced spending on schools and housing benefit) – that finding massive savings and shedding jobs has become the new normal, he says. “I’ve got to cut £90m in the next three years, that’s £30m a year.”
But Anderson, who grew up in a tenement block less than a mile away as one of six children, and now lives with his wife Margaret, a care assistant, in a terrace house in the Old Swan area of Liverpool, accepts the city was too dependent on central government. He is proud of the way he has made cuts: 3,000 council jobs lost, but also 15 new schools, new jobs created and homes built so that the city’s council tax base has grown, as it desperately needs to.
There is irony in the fact that Anderson’s bid for mayor will be based on this record of gains chiselled out of the cliff of austerity. He’s also successfully swelled the ranks of Labour councillors, and drawn up a regional development plan focused on house-building (deposit-free starter-homes are one project), car factories and the port he calls the northern powerhouse’s “front door”.
That Liverpool has a directly elected mayor at all is an oddity. In 2012 the city council followed Leicester by imposing one without a referendum, in the same year that voters in many cities voted against elected mayors (with Bristol the exception). Since then, a good deal of the wrangling over devolution has focused on elected mayors, with the government making them a condition for handing down the new powers and budgets councils seek. But if Anderson is a pioneer of localism, he can also be seen to personify the problems with mayoral politics.
Liberal Democrat opposition group leader, Richard Kemp – runner-up in the mayoral race – calls him an “emperor surrounded by courtiers” and fears that the “testosterone-fuelled model” of his mayoralty will be repeated at city-region level. Green group leader, Tom Crone, complains of a “democratic deficit” following the abolition of a scrutiny committee and highlights a court case funded by the council against a school where Anderson used to work. Kemp blames Anderson’s poor relationships with the other Merseyside councils for the weak devolution deal agreed last year, when the government rejected demands to fund a new opera house. Anderson admits that after making the first city deal in 2012, Liverpool has struggled to keep up.
He claims to gain “a great deal of satisfaction” from the fact that shadow ministers are sniffing around the northern powerhouse’s top jobs, but was incensed by Burnham’s suggestion that he and old friends such as Manchester’s Sir Richard Leese lack the right experience. He says Burnham’s remark that the Manchester mayor is “a cabinet-level job, which needs cabinet-level experience”, was the “most ignorant and insensitive comment anybody could actually make because it is disrespectful to every local government leader who has worked hard for their area”.
“Andy Burnham went on to say we failed to put big hitters into Scotland,” he adds. “Well I’m sorry, what we failed to do was set out a vision for Scotland. It’s not about big hitters.”
Anderson is proud of his loyalty to the city, where he was once an altar boy, to Everton football club, and to his family. He is also proud that critics have called him “too powerful and too charismatic” – though he admits a tendency to micro-manage could be counted a fault. He blames the Labour party for its reluctance to trust people like him to run the north of England: “Let me say to Andy Burnham and other shadow cabinet members whether they’re standing or not: a Labour government should have pushed on this agenda of devolution and it’s a sad reflection on Labour that we’re having to do business with a Tory government that is bludgeoning us,” states Anderson.
He is critical too of national media for what he sees as a lack of attention to the north and its elected leaders, himself included. As a young party member in the 1980s, he was sympathetic to some of the aims of the city’s militant politicians, and contrasts their profile with his own: “If you look back at Derek Hatton who was deputy leader of Liverpool, he got on to Question Time because he was a controversial figure. I’ve written a few columns and blog and letters but I’ve never been on Question Time.”
Anderson believes the north-south divide begins with the Westminster bubble. “You couldn’t have coined a better phrase,” he says. One of his reasons for supporting localism is “because Whitehall mandarins don’t even know what Liverpool looks like,” he says. (He thinks the classic sitcom Yes, Minister is a broadly accurate.) He believes that social media, and his 23,000 following on Twitter, provide a more accurate reflection of his profile and influence. He concludes: “As a local government leader who has delivered what I believe to be a socialist agenda, in terms of transforming the lives of people despite tremendous cuts – cuts we have never faced as a city even after the second world war – I don’t believe the role gets the recognition it deserves.”
Curriculum vitae
Age 58.
Lives Liverpool.
Family Married, four children.
Education St Martins secondary school, Liverpool; Liverpool John Moores University, BA social work.
Career 2012-present: elected mayor of Liverpool; 2010-12: elected leader, Liverpool council; 2001-2010 elected leader of Labour Group; 1998-2010 elected Labour councillor for Abercromby (now Riverside), Liverpool. 2001-2010: social inclusion officer, Chesterfield high school; 1992-2001: social worker, Sefton council; 1974-86: merchant seaman, Merchant Navy, then P&O Ferries, steward of the National Union of Seamen.
Public life OBE, founder Sefton Welfare of Pupils; Mayor’s Hope Fund.
Interests Everton football club; spending time with grandchildren.
