Liverpool certainly doesn't want to go back to the difficulties of the 1980s - but right now it feels like the government is doing all it can to force the city back towards those dark days.
This week the ECHO launched a new podcast called The Brink, looking at the Militant era and a time when Liverpool became a high profile battlefield between government and council.
The timing of the podcast launch couldn't be more pertinent.
For the past 10 years, the city has been subjected to unrelenting budget cuts that have repeatedly inflicted pain and misery on communities that were already struggling in terms of poverty and life chances.
With £436m wiped out of the council's budget in that decade, vital services now hanging by a thread and the local authority's back-up reserve funding at its lowest ever point, it would seem nothing short of Kafkaesque for the government to consider wielding its ideological axe towards the city once again, wouldn't it?
After all, this is a Conservative government that promised investment in the north, an end to austerity and a spending boom before the General Election just a few months ago.
But talk is cheap - and restoring proper funding to struggling local authorities is not.
Just a few weeks after that election victory and we hear that the Chancellor is planning another cutting spree - ordering ministers to draw up fresh savings of up to 5% in their department spending plans.
And a worrying reallocation of council funding looks set to redirect hundreds of millions of pounds from communities in the north of England to the leafy southern shires.
The Local Government Association predicts that a new government funding formula will require Liverpool Council to find another £27m of savings each year from 2021.
That's another £27m on the £436m since 2010.
Another £27m on the £30m of savings the council has just scrimped and saved to find in its latest annual budget plan.
For Liverpool Mayor Joe Anderson, who has had to try and borrow and invest his way out of the difficulties of the past 10 years, enough is enough.
The city has done remarkably well to keep all of its libraries, children's centres and other key services running in the face of the onslaught - but the fresh round of cuts would put these things at risk and the city leader says he simply won't do it.
He told the ECHO this week that 'enough is enough' and he will refuse to implement any further cuts because they will mean the closure of vital services and facilities that people in the city rely on.
This is the first time the firebrand mayor has taken this stance - he knows it puts him on a collision course with government, and as someone who lived through the 1980s, he will be all too aware of the nuances such rhetoric will bring.
To this day there is still anger at those accused of setting an illegal council budget and the difficulties that surrounded it - whatever your thoughts on the ideas and motives behind such moves, it was a dark and chaotic time for Liverpool.
But Liverpool is a city with very few options left.
The approach of investing and borrowing to keep the city's lights on has worked for a while now and the city council should be praised for some of the creative solutions it has found over the past 10 years.
But at every stage the council's progress is hampered by further punishment and if the LGA's analysis is correct, it will mean crucial services and vital facilities around the city facing the axe.
Joe Anderson says he won't do that and has challenged the government to come and make the cuts in the city themselves.
What happens next will remain to be seen - but the spectre of the 1980s seems to be looming larger than ever over this proud but badly bruised city.
