Joe Anderson, Derek Hatton arrested among others....

[Fugitive]

33 minutes ago, Section_31 said:

Fucking idiots.

 

 

BBC News - Liverpool: Conspiracy theorists disrupt meeting over non-existent policy
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-66324242

Look at the age of them.

 

 

[Section_31]

You see a few of them in town now and again. Bonkers.

[Fugitive]

18 minutes ago, Section_31 said:

You see a few of them in town now and again. Bonkers.

They will all be housebound or dead within a few years anyway, the fucking arl cunts.

[Anubis]

AoT has put up more information on these clowns in another thread (the conspiracy one I think). Far right antisemites who identify as Amalek - an ancient tribe who were sworn enemies of the Israelites.

[Kepler-186]

From The Post (yesterday’s was paywalled )

 

https://open.substack.com/pub/liverpoolpost/p/liverpool-has-become-the-guinea-pig?r=7i95q&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

 

 

By Jack Walton

I’ve not been long outside Town Hall when a short gentleman in a blue cap takes the loud hailer and launches into a tirade about the massacre of poultry. The bird flu pandemic of the mid-noughties, he explains at some volume, was a government plot, and the mass efficiency with which our feathered friends were dispatched offers insight into what might be coming for us.

Let’s rewind. Last week, the Liverpool Echo ran a news story with a fairly innocuous headline: Plan to divide Liverpool into 13 neighbourhoods gets approved. And perhaps the Echo wasn’t expecting this minor municipal shake up to attract global attention.

 

It appeared — on the face of things — to be about that most thrilling of topics: a council meeting, at which it was proposed (and approved) that Liverpool be diced up into 13 zones for the purpose of delivering services more efficiently. Each of those zones will be assigned a service manager, and the budget for the scheme is £1.2 million. Council leader Liam Robinson ensured it would see improvements in things like how “we sweep the streets and empty the bins”.

 

That said, if you were a member of Liverpool’s People’s Resistance, you would have read something quite different. Liverpool’s People’s Resistance is a Telegram channel (Telegram being the favoured social media messaging app of the conspiratorial-minded, owing to its comparative lack of regulation, compared to say, YouTube).

 

Back in 2021, The Post revealed how Liverpool’s People’s Resistance (LPR) were harassing head teachers over school vaccine programmes. Today it has 1,290 members, and is one of a number of such forums to have sprung up locally in wake of the pandemic. In response to the Echo article, LPR members shared worried comments that Liverpool was at the centre of a massive “communist-style” plot to restrict the movement of its citizens. And that the city’s residents were being used as “guinea pigs” by the World Economic Forum.

 

According to one comment in the group, the proposed changes were “part of the World Economic Forum's plan to install 15-minute cities by 2025”. The WEF, a business lobbying organisation that meets annually in Davos, Switzerland, has in recent years become a bugbear of conspiracy theorists who believe it wants to take control of Western nations and immiserate their populations. 

 

But it wasn’t only the comments section that was pulsating with fury. Jim Ferguson, the Brexit Party’s former candidate for Barnsley — now a self-styled social media influencer with 68,000 followers —- picked the story up too. “This is about nothing more than controlling the population of #Liverpool,” he tweeted. “Fight it.” Ferguson’s tweets were seen by well over 350,000 people. Media figures as far away as Canada were sharing the news.

 

Soon after, a leaflet was circulating the LPR page, advertising a protest. People were to gather outside Town Hall on Tuesday night, as the council’s neighbourhoods committee gathered to discuss the new policy. “This can’t be true. They're trying to lock us up in our own areas. Break free Liverpool and stay strong,” read one comment. Needless to say, we had to head along and see what it was all about.

 

There’s between 30 and 40 people here when I arrive, gathered directly outside Town Hall. They have banners reading “AN ATTACK ON OUR FREEDOM” and “GLOBALISTS FUND CLIMATE SCIENTISTS FOR CLIMATE HOAX OR THEY GET DEFUNDED”. As councillors arrive to attend the meeting they’re met with chants of “treasonous traitors”. A number of speakers take turns and I recognise one of them from LPR who targeted school teachers during the pandemic. And while the protest today isn’t especially feisty, it clearly has the effect of intimidating some councillors.

 

Eventually, the council members discussing the plan had to be ushered to safety out a side door, with the Echo reporting that “some [were] understood to be fearful of the crowd outside”. 
We’ve since heard that some councillors had received abusive and threatening texts and emails from those involved in the protest.

 

Moreover, The Post has discovered that a member of Patriotic Alternative, a far-right, fascist group — whose neo-Nazi leader cites Mein Kampf as his favourite book — was in attendance at the meeting, having heard about it on Telegram. It goes to prove a worrying point: that among these conspiratorial protest groups, many of which sprang up during the pandemic, there are some overlaps with the organised far-right.

 

Regardless, I’m here to ask the pressing questions. Is Laura Robertson-Collins, the council’s new cabinet member for neighbourhoods, in cahoots with a shadowy global cabal? A man named Paul is kind enough to explain.
 

Paul — in his mid-60s — is a veteran of these kinds of events. Thirty-odd years ago he “woke up”, realising that “everything you’ve been told about everything, the opposite is true”. White-ponytailed, smartly-dressed and well spoken, Paul explains how Liverpool City Council’s plans are essentially a gateway to “15-minute cities”. He asks: “Have you watched The Hunger Games?” I say I haven’t, but I do know it involved people being divided into zones and fighting to the death. “That’s the way it’s going,” Paul says. “I don’t know if it’ll end up with fighting to the death but it isn’t good.”
It’s a little hard to hear Paul talk, because by this stage another man has seized the microphone and is directing his ire directly at the doors of Town Hall. “Demons!” he shouts. “Demons!” But over the furore Paul explains that the new Liverpool neighbourhoods policy will act as a gateway to the creation of a 15-minute city, which is the term used in urban planning for a city in which everything an individual needs is accessible within 15-minutes by foot, bike or public transport.

 

Fifteen-minute cities have become a popular talking point among conspiracy theorists in the last two years. Those in favour of the idea argue it isn’t really an international communist plot, it’s merely a means of making it easier to walk to the dentist. Though if you’ve watched GB News lately, you’ll have heard that “creepy local authority bureaucrats would like to see your entire existence boiled down to the duration of a quarter of an hour”.

 

Paul and many others — whose politics are at the more conspiratorial end of things — see it as a plan to keep individuals restricted to specific zones, which they won’t be allowed out of. There is no evidence that this will happen. Paul says the plan is being laid out by the World Economic Forum, aided and abetted by the Club of Rome, which is a group of businesspeople and intellectuals who meet to discuss pressing global matters, also in Switzerland. The 13 neighbourhoods in Liverpool will merely be the start, he tells me. In the not too distant future our bank cards will be designed to not work outside of our zones and spy cameras on lampposts will track your car number plate if you venture beyond Kensington, say, to Everton. Then you’ll be arrested.
 

Accompanying Paul is his partner Angie. She’s newer to all this, only picking up an interest in the World Economic Forum and its modelling behaviours during the lockdown around three years ago. Paul has been “drip-feeding” her information ever since. “It’s really unbelievable,” she says.
What are the council plans in service of, I ask? “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Paul replies. Try me. “It’s a global Satanic plot to destroy everything created in God’s image,” Paul explains. But why? “Because they’re Satanists. They worship Lucifer, Belial, whatever you want to call it.” As if on cue, a man in a yellow top barrels past with the loudhailer demanding the “Satanists” currently sat in Town Hall come out and answer for their crimes. “Those people probably think he’s mad,” Paul says, gesturing to a group of maybe 15 onlookers who have gathered on the other side of the road. “But everything he’s saying is true. I wish it wasn’t. But it is.” He concludes that roughly 80% of the earth’s population is set to be wiped out.

 

This all sounds extremely troubling. I certainly wouldn’t want to be arrested for leaving my home in the Georgian Quarter to get my flat white in Lark Lane. But here’s the twist. Not only is the 15-minute city conspiracy theory unfounded — it really is just about being able to walk from your front door to the shops — but Liverpool City Council is not proposing 15-minute cities. They just want to make bin collecting more efficient. A lot of intellectual missteps have evidently occurred for us to get here.

 

So how did we get here? Michael Marshall, founder of the Merseyside Skeptics Society, says demonstrations about 15-minute cities are where the anti-vaxx movement has ended up. The conspiratorial protest groups that coalesced during the pandemic are still active, just focused on other topics. “When millions of people didn’t die by the end of the 2020s they had to find something else to gather around,” Marshall says. Now, he tells me, social media channels like Telegram and BitChute are their main gathering zones, where they can discuss ideas in the comfort of like-minded people. Fifteen-minute cities have become the topic du jour.

 

And just while we’re on the subject Marshall, who edits The Skeptic magazine to challenge unfounded conspiratorial thinking, says the World Economic Forum isn’t quite as exciting as its critics believe. “The World Economic Forum is a global body that pushes sustainable development goals,” he says. “In reality it’s a plutocratic exercise that most governments only pay lip service to.” Although he does concede that Klaus Schwab, its founder, has “a great bad guy name”. 
 

The common thread through all of this is a fear of being controlled. Which brings me to Dave, who I meet outside Town Hall. He speaks softly, and says he became interested in this sort of stuff in 2016, when he realised he could no longer trust the mainstream media. He explains that social media has been able to provide him with more accurate news, stories of the kind major publications exist to silence. He’s very polite, and thanks me for my interest in the topic, handing me a yellow leaflet outlining the threat posed by 15-minute cities, which is of particular concern to him, given the “control”. What’s this got to do with the new Liverpool neighbourhoods policy, though? “I haven’t actually looked at the Liverpool zone proposals, but I do know that once they start talking about that sort of thing it’s not good,” he replies.

 

Unlike Dave, Leane Miles is not soft spoken. As soon as I say I’m a journalist she accuses me of “spreading disinformation and lies” (before even finding out where I work). Soon enough though I’m able to placate her, and we make friendly chit-chat about a Chinese-inspired plot to have 900,000 overhead drones monitoring the British population at all times. Leane abandoned mainstream news channels earlier than Dave, around 15 years ago. She’d lost a child to care and was in a difficult place in her life. After that, she developed an interest in 9/11 and came to realise that “we weren’t being told the truth”.

 

Today she’s travelled from far afield — Yorkshire — with her friend to take part. I ask what’s brought her here. “It’s about those 15-minute cities they’re in there [Town Hall] bringing in.” Is that what they’re discussing, I ask? “Don’t you read the paper?” she says, referring to the Echo piece. “Aren’t you a journalist?”
I explain that, while I personally can’t see why 15-minute cities are such a bad thing, the council aren’t actually discussing 15-minute cities anyway, they’re discussing creating new neighbourhood zones. Hopefully, it’ll improve the delivery of services. “But once they start,” she says. “It’s only ever heading one way — isn’t it?”

 

The detail that jumps out to me, although we only brush past it, is about her child going into care. It’s often said that traumatic life events can shake a person’s sense of personal significance and potentially lead them into conspiracy theory belief. That in the feeling of power brought by being “awake” to truths that others aren’t, they might rediscover that self-confidence. I think it’s worth bearing that in mind when having these conversations. Tempting though it is to mock, the story is often more complex than you realise. And mocking isn’t likely to win anyone over anyway.
 

What’s also striking at this gathering to protest Liverpool’s new policy is how few people actually want to talk about Liverpool’s new policy; the one that’s sparked mass fury online and brought them here. Dave prefers to talk about Sustrans, a charity that works schools to encourage active travel, Paul is into the World Economic Forum, spy-lampposts and transhumanism, and Leane briefly regales me on the perils of black magic. But curiously little on the nuts and bolts of what’s being discussed just a few metres away. I wonder if the council meeting may actually be a little duller than they’re letting on.
“Ultimately, it’s about hiding from the complexity of reality,” Mike tells me. “If a bad thing happens they want someone to blame. Say you like to drive your car and now you’re being told to drive it less because it’s causing pollution. It must be a bad guy’s fault!” 

 

Later in the evening, I log onto the Telegram to see the Liverpool People’s Resistance channel. I read discussions of a job well done. One member shared a tweet by the Echo journalist David Humphreys, who was in attendance at the council meeting, and documented how events played out from inside Town Hall on Twitter. In the tweet, Humphreys corrects one of the protestors who described proceedings as a planning meeting (it was actually the neighbourhood committee) and relays the message of one speaker: “He claims 15-minute cities are totalitarian and compares them to the Chinese regime.”

“Great stuff,” writes a woman called Eileen in response. “The scum echo are sharing our message.”

[VladimirIlyich]

So another group of seemingly ordinary people doing the work of the global elite in making their own lives worse? Enlightened times!

Here is one pictured giving a speech

[Anubis]

I’d confine them to a zone. The Phantom Zone.

[Fugitive]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashworth_Hospital

[Creator Supreme]

It's the fucking Pentavarit from So I Married Axe Murderer!

 

The Queen, The Rothschilds, The Vatican  The Gettys, and Colonel Sanders before he went tits up!

[Section_31]

We should get a GF crew together and stand outside the town hall with placards that say "say yes to titty city"

[stringvest]

Why does Liverpool lose its brightest and its best?

On a city that can’t stop breaking my heart

AUG 5

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By David Lloyd

Two cities. Two huge buildings, both mostly filled with empty air. One deliberate. One desperate.

I’m thinking of the speculative dreams of Paddington Village and its tenant-hungry Spine building as I walk around the quarter-of-a-billion pound soft play area of the Kusama retrospective in Manchester’s Aviva studios hangar. 

What is this feeling I’m getting, standing beneath a huge inflated pumpkin in yet another audaciously aggressive new Manchester venue funded by, well, us mostly. Across town, the UK’s largest-ever entertainment venue is taking shape alongside the Etihad stadium. In the other direction, the galleries and theatres of Home. 

Like all conscientious therapy patients I am allowing my responses to bubble up. I’m leaning in to them and making gentle enquiries. Am I jealous? Am I angry? I lock onto it. It’s not envy. It’s sadness. It’s a realisation that the foundations for buildings like these reach all the way to the other end of the M62. And they were given the green light 40 years ago. In Liverpool.

I have no working estimate of how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall, but I do know that if you rounded up everyone who left Liverpool from the 80s to the start of the millennia, they’d fill Aviva’s (I refuse to call it Factory anything any more) cavernous hall five times over. Assuming they all squeeze in, and they’re allowed to puncture the Kusamas.

Yes, yes, yes — I know. All cities churn. And most cities have downsized as people move to the suburbs. But Liverpol’s lost more than most. Over 100,000 left between 1971 and 1981. A further 8% skedaddled in the 90s, and between 2001 and 2006, the city experienced the ninth largest population percentage loss in the country. That’s not a trickle, it’s a pyroclastic flow. 

‘Me, You and the Balloons’ by Yayoi Kusama. Photo: Sophie Atkinson/The Mill.

But it’s not about the numbers, is it? It’s never about the numbers. Numbers can tell you anything you want them to. And you might have different ones at your disposal. It’s about who left, what made them, who’s still leaving, and why. 

Perhaps, also, it’s about what could have happened if they’d stayed.

From the playpen politics of Militant and the managed decline of Thatcher, to the mates rates and special measures of recent years, Liverpool has not been served well by its public servants, each successive regime hellbent on a rival experiment in social policy. You may disagree, you may not: but this is about me. And my numbers speak for themselves. 

In the 80s, over half of my friends went to London and carved out happy, successful careers, raised families, made new connections and softened their vowels. Two went to Milford Haven and were never heard of again.

Then, as the decade matured, and the city’s garden festival site blossomed into rubble and rows, I studied for a degree at Alsager in deepest Cheshire, after which my new batch of friends left me too: this time to Manchester. Here, too, they carved out happy, successful careers, raised families, made new connections, started businesses and never admitted they came from Cheltenham Ladies College or Hertford. No, they were all proud northerners now. 

The exodus continued well into the 90s, when Liverpool was so destitute it qualified for a billion pounds of Objective One cash from Europe. My friend who became a magazine designer in London because there was nothing for her to design here. My friend who’s managing a huge event space in London because there was nothing for him to programme here, my friend the camera operator in Manchester because a million years later we’re still waiting for the Littlewoods building to turn into the Hollywood of Edge Lane, the food stylist, the fabric designer, the engineer, the architect, the concierge, the software developer, the ice-cream maker and the sound engineer. All gone. 

Portrait of the artist as a young man: me in the 1980s. Photo: David Lloyd/The Post.

Friends whose new business started to blossom but, without the support it needed to thrive, moved to London, Manchester or other cities whose opportunities matched their ambitions. And now, their kids are London kids, or Manchester kids or Sydney kids or Cambridge kids. And so the ripples widen, and the lost generation doubles. 

Because none of this is really about massively over-budget events spaces, grade A offices, shopping malls or concert venues. Cities are built by people. Random connections. The alchemy of chaos and chance. And, no matter how you shake up the numbers, if you lose hundreds of thousands of your brightest, most ambitious and determined souls, those connections aren’t made, and a million possible futures just don’t happen. They will never happen. Because they’re happening elsewhere instead. 

What happens instead is a subtle shifting of emphasis, a mutation in our make-up and a narrowing of expectations. The city becomes a little more inward looking; wary, fretful and unsure of its place in the world. 

You see gay friends shunned from a city of a million microaggressions, watching Liverpool’s gay village atrophy while Canal Street bloomed, you see sharp new sportswear companies move out because our talent pool is shallower than a petri dish, and you see (as I saw when I edited Liverpool’s inward investment magazine a decade ago) the same handful of success stories stuck on repeat. Honestly, I wrote about the Bac Mono sports car so often I should have shares in it. Just recently they’ve been slapped on a billboard in Scottie Road. This is ten year old news, people. Our singular success story.

You get a mayor whose ambitions amount to a new stadium for his football team because, well, football. An asphalt academy. An Amazon logistics HQ. A mayor who was offered, on a plate — investors all lined up and ready to go — a huge Barcelona-style food market, stained glass, cast iron, the works, behind the Municipal Buildings in Victoria Street. Way before Baltic and Duke Street and every other city’s food markets. His response? No one wants that sort of thing here. Can’t you do something in St Johns precinct?

Two theatre students I knew, Jody and Alice, who swapped Liverpool for Manchester. Photo: David Lloyd/The Post.

What did we get instead? A half empty car park in Victoria Street and a dying market. How many start-ups have either generated?

It’s amazing to me how normalised this exodus, this rite of passage out of here, became. When I was growing up, it was just the thing that you had to do. If you wanted to get ahead, you had to jump on a train at Lime Street and seek success elsewhere. 

Of course, some might say that Manchester has lost its soul — its very Manchesterness — in its reinvention, and that Mancunians have been priced out of places like Ancoats and the Northern Quarter: and, with them, the energy and character that made the city great.

It’s true that the Manchester I lived in — briefly — 20 years ago is long gone. Buried beneath spindly thickets of get-rich-quick offshore investment schemes masquerading as apartment blocks. But it’s also hard to argue against a city with rampant population growth: 30% in the past two decades. And, underneath those skyscrapers, hundreds of new bars, shops and start-up adventures are unfolding — and with them, thousands of new jobs. The city’s building a generation of new Mancunians. A myriad of possible new futures. 

Meanwhile, most of Liverpool’s offshore investment schemes have stalled while the developers await further police enquiries, or scrabble for more funds when their ludicrously highly-leveraged houses of cards collapse.

At Larks in the Park, the legendary Seftob Park music festival, in 1984. Mark, here in the centre, would eventually leave Liverpool for London. Photo: David Lloyd.

And this is the point when people start going on about how Liverpool still feels very Liverpool, and what a precious and rare gift this is. Of how, in some corners, the suburbs actually bite into the city centre itself. Look, you can see the rich street life of Kenny from the empty floors of the Spine Building. Isn’t that thrilling? So real. 

The Liverpoolness of Liverpool is a decoy. It’s a lazy distraction. Which Liverpool are we talking about anyway? The glory days of Cream? The crystal days of Erics and Echo and the Bunnymen? Or golden days of diphtheria and Doctor Duncan? The people who spout this shit the most are the ones who visit a couple of times a year for the match and get misty eyed watching Brookie repeats. The people who’d really love to come back to look after their old mum, if only they could get a decent croissant in Croxteth. Or, worse, the ones you meet walking the dog: “Yeah, we sold our flat in Hammersmith and bought a little place up here. What’s it called again Jamie? Oh yeah, West Derby.”

If you were to build a replica, brick by brick, of Liverpool circa 1962, and placed it somewhere out in the fields around Billinge, would that be more Liverpool than this Liverpool? Of course not. Cities are about continuity through change. There is no other point to them. What if Manchseter did the same: a brick by brick simulacrum of the city one second before the bomb went off? Would that be more Manchester than the plate glass facades of New Cathedral Street? And would anyone want it? Really? 

I doubt it. All they want (and all they’ve got) is an ersatz strip of recycled bricks running along the bar in the polished concrete atrium of Aviva Studios — a hamfisted nod to the fact that you’re standing above the cobbles of Coronation Street, and with each new MIF retrospective, your On cloudflow trainers are pushing them deeper into the dirt. And that’s exactly the way it should be.

You couldn’t get more Liverpool than the Museum of Liverpool. It’s wall to wall Cilla and Shankly and slave traders in there. But is this what we want to cling on to when bright, ambitious 21st-century Scousers leave to grow their sportswear brands down the other end of the East Lancs road?

Neal and Nigel from Half Man Half Biscuit and Mick our roadie, taken upstairs in Probe Records in 1986. None of us left — the exception to the rule. Photo: David Lloyd/The Post.

Feeding into this fear of losing our sense of ourselves, our leaders have for too long been paralysed by a sense that aspiration is anathema to our working class roots. We know our place. Let’s not get all flat white when a milky Nescafe in Sayers is who we really are.

But then, this spring, something happened. One of those spine-tingling (if not Spine-filling) moments we witness every few decades. For two weeks in May the city remembered its true vocation. We know how to make people happy. We know that we’re all fighting for our lives, that we’re all working ourselves into the absolute ground, and that we’re social animals hungry for connection. 

From where I’m slouching, these are the metrics that matter these days. 

If Eurovision taught us anything (apart from the fact that the best song never wins) it’s that the city can throw the best parties, and knows how to tap into a deeper truth: that Grade A offices aren’t full of blue chips and incubator hubs, they’re full of people. 

Two weeks in May isn’t the answer, of course. But faced with the eternal chicken and egg of ‘no talent pool means no businesses’, and ‘no businesses means no talent pool’, we have to light the touchpaper somehow. And just maybe throwing the best-ever parties — and inviting everyone — might be even more audacious than building the biggest arts venue after all. 

It’s a way to say, hey, look over here — Liverpool is a city powered by people. But can we be brave enough to realise it? 

Festival Square in Manchester — next to Aviva Studios. Photo: Mark Waugh.

Great article from the Post that describes succinctly the moronic lack of vision and basic competence that has blighted the city for longer than most of you have been alive...

 

 

Just as I was packing up to leave Manchester in 2005, I met a friend who’d quit her decent job in London, and was relocating to the city. “I’m starting this new bi-annual arts festival,” she told me, in a tiny office on Portland Street. I wished her well, but couldn’t help feeling the region didn’t need a new arts festival. Didn’t we already have the Biennial in Liverpool? 

Now, 18 years later, I’m standing in its new supersized HQ and remembering that conversation. “They’re really determined to make it work,” Christina said of Manchester Council, who’d lured her north. “They’re throwing everything at it.”

Well, they did it. Aviva Studios’ complex, bullish and contrary geometry looks right at home in the bullish and contrary new Manchester. 

This spring, we threw everything at it too. It felt like we were awaking from a long, medically-induced coma. Like we suddenly remembered why some of us chose to stay (and plenty of brilliant people did, let’s make that clear). Keep the momentum up and there’s no reason in the world why disruptor companies — such as Starling bank, who recently opened up an office in, oh guess where, Manchester, won’t start to look again at us. And no reason at all why those of us who now work at home won’t see a city’s attributes start to stack up differently. A shifting of priorities towards the stuff we’ve always been good at. 

Liverpool, more than any other city I know, has a terrifying capacity for self harm. But we have an indestructible ability to come together, as one, and show people what we’re really made of. “Fair play to Liverpool,” said one Glasgow Twitter comment during May’s festivities. “No one could have pulled this off better than Liverpool. Not even us.”

So what happens next? No city could capitalise on it, or crush it dead, better than Liverpool. 

[stringvest]

Great article that describes the lack of vision, drive and basic competence that has blighted the city for longer than most of you have been alive.

[Section_31]

1 hour ago, stringvest said:

Great article that describes the lack of vision, drive and basic competence that has blighted the city for longer than most of you have been alive.

 

Pre covid I went to talk to an incubator in town. I'd actually done a story about how liverpool was trying to encourage the tech scene to develop around the Baltic quarter and they were one of the people featured at this meeting/event.

 

I contacted them a while after as I wanted some desk space to take my freelance business full time. I met the boss and she just sat there for ages slagging off the city's lack of vision and how "certain people" just turned up for photo shoots but offered no practical help.

 

She offered me some desk space and then ghosted me when I kept trying to contact her, three times no response. Kind of summed up the whole sorry picture. Another place I contacted never responded at all and when I googled the company it was managed by a guy who, according to linkiedin, previously worked as a barman.

 

It's always been the same. I've been involved in writing/arts/comedy groups down the years and they die on their arse pretty quick. 

 

I've said before there's an ENTIRE industry in Liverpool built around grants. Grants for business, arts, social enterprises etc - far fewer than there used to be - but they're not based on actual results, just appearances.

 

A typical arts scheme in Liverpool will host, say, a talk on getting into screenwriting. It'll be held at the Albert Dock at 11am on a Thursday when most people are in work. You'll get there to a fine spread of yams and coffee and there'll be a mentalist there with a Wilkinsons bag, and nobody else. A couple of posh twats will take a picture with him then boot him out, and send the picture to the EDF or the RSF or the fucking MFI for yet more grant money for next year. Exactly the same deal with anything tech or business related. Anyone I've ever spoken to in the tech space in Liverpool,  and there aren't many who're successful, says it's just a base, they don't bother with anyone or have "given up".

 

Me and a mate went to the "Liverpool writing festival" last year. Booked in to see a book agent and got an itinerary for some events. The event we tried to go to had finished when we got there as they'd decided to start early (?!) And the agent turned out not to be an agent but was part of a 'small agency" which was "too small to talk about".

 

The whole ecosystem, unis, incubators, arts venues, are just on one giant grant screw.

 

[Section_31]

Still can't believe this was found in a store cupboard at the town hall after he'd gone. My city. My Mayor.

[sir roger]

Why would you let somebody paint you while you were on the toilet?

[Bjornebye]

6 hours ago, Section_31 said:

Still can't believe this was found in a store cupboard at the town hall after he'd gone. My city. My Mayor.

 

What the fuck has Phil Mitchell got to do with Liverpool City Council? 

[AngryOfTuebrook]

On 27/07/2023 at 20:09, Section_31 said:

Fucking idiots.

 

 

BBC News - Liverpool: Conspiracy theorists disrupt meeting over non-existent policy
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-66324242

They're coming back next Wednesday.

[Bjornebye]

Wasn't that Mark Collett outed as a nonce? 

[Kepler-186]

Today’s long read from The Post about Liverpool City council investing in luxury supercar brand BAC. Not sure if it’s paywalled as I use the app.
 

The usual suspects involved. I’m honestly of the opinion that they (Tory govt.) banked on this happening and it was a case of being given enough rope. 

 

Last week it was announced Melodic Distraction was closing after 9 years. Chased out of the Baltic into the “Fabric” district off London Road. They had some great shows on and showcased artists and genres you might not think of. Great shame all the money that’s been wasted couldn’t have supported them.
 

Still, Eurovision filled up the tills. 
 

https://open.substack.com/pub/liverpoolpost/p/how-liverpool-city-council-blew-almost?r=7i95q&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

[Bobby Hundreds]

On 16/09/2023 at 12:56, Section_31 said:

Still can't believe this was found in a store cupboard at the town hall after he'd gone. My city. My Mayor.

Fucking voldermort back of the head shit that, is Derek Hatton at the front.

[Creator Supreme]

16 minutes ago, Kepler-186 said:

Today’s long read from The Post about Liverpool City council investing in luxury supercar brand BAC. Not sure if it’s paywalled as I use the app.
 

The usual suspects involved. I’m honestly of the opinion that they (Tory govt.) banked on this happening and it was a case of being given enough rope. 

 

Last week it was announced Melodic Distraction was closing after 9 years. Chased out of the Baltic into the “Fabric” district off London Road. They had some great shows on and showcased artists and genres you might not think of. Great shame all the money that’s been wasted couldn’t have supported them.
 

Still, Eurovision filled up the tills. 
 

https://open.substack.com/pub/liverpoolpost/p/how-liverpool-city-council-blew-almost?r=7i95q&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

Pay Carl Cashman no fucking heed whatsoever! So much of a proud Prescotonian that he ditched his ward on Knowsley council as he wanted to be in power in Liverpool, worked out well eh Carl?

 

Otherwise a good read, monumental fuck up on fat Joe's part, he's as dodgy as they come unfortunately! It's a terrible pity when a Labour local politician swallows the Tory koolaid and thinks he's a financial whizz!

[Kepler-186]

16 minutes ago, Creator Supreme said:

Pay Carl Cashman no fucking heed whatsoever! So much of a proud Prescotonian that he ditched his ward on Knowsley council as he wanted to be in power in Liverpool, worked out well eh Carl?

 

Otherwise a good read, monumental fuck up on fat Joe's part, he's as dodgy as they come unfortunately! It's a terrible pity when a Labour local politician swallows the Tory koolaid and thinks he's a financial whizz!

Tip of the iceberg when it comes to local government across the country. Shameful shit. 

[Bruce Spanner]

2 minutes ago, Kepler-186 said:

Tip of the iceberg when it comes to local government across the country. Shameful shit. 

Yep, when you tell a bunch of armatures to be speculators as budgets are being decimated you couldn’t foresee this at all.

 

The equal pay claims will likely see off a few more high profile councils.

[Strontium]

53 minutes ago, Creator Supreme said:

Pay Carl Cashman no fucking heed whatsoever! So much of a proud Prescotonian that he ditched his ward on Knowsley council as he wanted to be in power in Liverpool, worked out well eh Carl?

 

Yeah, how dare those disgraceful Lib Dems, er, move home to live with their girlfriends. Do they believe in freedom of movement or something?

[Creator Supreme]

2 minutes ago, Strontium said:

 

Yeah, how dare those disgraceful Lib Dems, er, move home to live with their girlfriends. Do they believe in freedom of movement or something?

Stronts, if he'd said that publicly I'd have wished him well, and an effective opposition, much to my own surprise, is needed in local politics (and it helps when the Tories are neither in power nor the opposition).

 

However he painted it that he was moving on to bigger things, and Prescot North was no longer good enough for him.