The 47's campaign succeeded

Liverpool Councillor Walker reveals a profound misunderstanding of the English language when he describes the 47's defence of the city from the ravages of Thatcher in the 1980s as a 'spectacular failure' (Liverpool Echo 13.3.2017). He uses the only weapon of the now-discredited 'redundancy notice' distortion, so beloved of Lord Kinnock, in a feeble attempt to justify his claim. He seems blind to the £330m slashed from social provision and the further £90m of cuts he and his 'Labour', yes 'Labour', colleagues voted for in the last budget.

He fails to mention in his myopic re-writing of history that the 47 never made a single worker redundant. When we were removed from office, not via the ballot box but by Thatcher’s district auditor, 30000 worked for the council. That number is now less than 6000. In contrast to our record of building 5000 affordable council houses, his council have built zero. In contrast to his supine collaboration with the Tories in, for instance, slashing thousands of care packages for the elderly and admitting that services will virtually disappear from the city, we mounted a campaign of opposition to Thatcher and succeeded in winning resources worth £60m to the city. Far from it being the spectacular failure claimed by Mr Walker, our campaign, by any measure, was a spectacular success.

Tony Mulhearn

ARMS