Thank EU!

Liverpool’s European City of Culture status owes everything to the regeneration of the city thanks to EU funds, Flo Clucas tells Chris Jones

Councillor Flo Clucas is a rare thing in British politics – a wholehearted European. But in Liverpool, where she is a Liberal Democrat member of the city council, she is not alone – indeed, the whole city is grateful for the massive support it has had from the EU over the last few years – support which, Clucas claims, has allowed Liverpool to become the European City of Culture for 2008.

“We would never have been able to be European City of Culture without the EU intervention in this city from 1994,” she says bluntly. “Over the last 10 years or more, the involvement of the EU has been fundamental to changing the prospects, regenerating the potential and boosting the economic wellbeing of Liverpool.” The EU money, she says, has enabled the city authorities to take a more long-term approach to the development of Liverpool – although she stresses that structural funds should not been seen as a convenient replacement for UK funding.

Clucas, who is also the leader of the ALDE group in the CoR, believes that the commitment to Liverpool shown by the former head of the European commission’s regional policy department, Graham Meadows, was of vital importance. “He worked with our desk officers here to implement European regional development methods and that changed the fundamentals of how we went about it,” Clucas says.

For Liverpool had been in serious decline for many years. It was awarded UK area development status as early as 1949, and the problems in the city were, according to Clucas, “deep-seated and difficult to shift”. The docks, always the main lifeblood of the city, were all but closed down in the 1960s, with the number of workers falling from the heyday of 40,000 to around 4,000 today. Between 1979 and 1984, 44,000 manufacturing jobs were lost in the city.

Clucas can also take some of the praise for Liverpool’s dramatic turnaround herself. She was the first councillor to seek EU funding, back in 1986, but it was not until 1994 that the city was granted Objective One status and the equivalent of €700m in today’s money. By 1998, unemployment in the city had been cut to around 22 per cent – a high figure still, but a massive improvement when compared to the rates of 70 per cent seen in some parts of the city before the EU money arrived.  In 2000, the city was again granted Objective One status, but this time the focus was on building economic growth in Liverpool through a number of major investments.

“The Arena, the cruise liner terminal, the School of Tropical Medicine, the science park, the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts – most of these projects have been helped by EU money. And we’ve created 57,000 jobs in Liverpool in the last six years as a result.” All of which, she says, had a massive knock-on effect. “Unemployment is now down to around 5.6 per cent, and companies are actively coming to us for information about moving to Liverpool – we’re now the second largest financial services centre in the UK after London.”

And then there is the City of Culture itself. “We obviously needed to demonstrate that we had the infrastructure to host a festival such as this – and to show how we would use the year to continue the economic benefit to the city and pursue its regeneration. We have clearly shown that we are very good at using the opportunities and the money that we are given to boost this city’s fortunes, and that clearly helped with our bid.”

Among the events lined up this year are a Klimt exhibition, a visit from the Berlin Philharmonic, a concert by Sir Paul McCartney at Anfield, combining Liverpool’s two abiding passions of football and The Beatles, the start of the Tall Ships Race, a Le Corbusier exhibition and many more, quite a lot of which are free. “And for children from deprived areas of the city we have the ‘culture bus’ that gives them a chance to visit the cultural events for nothing,” says Clucas.

But Liverpool has not always been as good at managing the long-term development prospects offered by major events such as the City of Culture. The city’s Garden Festival in the 1980s saw a large part of the city regenerated and  turned into a garden – but now it is once again overgrown waste ground. “We don’t do that kind of thing anymore,” says Clucas. “All the events we organise have to have long-tem benefits for the community – offering equal opportunities, sustainable development and innovation, wherever possible.”

Liverpool is a very European city – it has links with other ‘cities on the edge’ such as Naples, Gdansk, Marseille and Istanbul, for example – and has always been a melting pot for Europeans.

“Five out of every six European immigrants to the New World left through the Liverpool docks – that’s a great heritage to have.” And a low key ceremony this year will also see the city acknowledge that the old days of conflict between European nations are well and truly over. A memorial will be held to remember the 805 victims of the Arandora Star, a cruise liner sunk by a German submarine off the Irish coast while she was carrying internees and prisoners of war from Liverpool to Newfoundland in July 1940. More than 800 Italian, German and Austrian internees were killed when the liner was torpedoed. “Because the incident involved people of different nationalities, some of whom were at war, there has never been an official memorial,” says Clucas. “Now, as members of the EU we are all working together to commemorate all the victims.”