Crashing onto the Guardian's Comment is Free webpage is Warren Bradley, leader of Liverpool City Council. Bradley issues what amounts to little more than a glorified PR handout, the sort of thing which the Liverpool Echo is wont to report as fact:
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/warrenbradley/2008/01/mersey_sound_finances.html .
Bradley responds to the finding by the Audit Commission that Liverpool is the worst financially managed local authority in England by penning a puff piece which makes no mention of last year's cancelled Matthew Street festival (surprise, surprise!). He even begins his piece with an invocation of an old, cliched ruse: "When the Liberal Democrats took over from a bankrupt Labour administration in 1998, the city was still reeling from the disasters of Derek Hatton and Militant, when Liverpool's great assets were put in hock to the moneylenders of Zurich."
Ah, yes, the old Militant bogey. Used to work every time criticism was levelled at those guilty of civic misrule. Not any more. Bradley's already in a hole & articles such as this only deepen it.
According to the Guardian's report on the Audit Commission's findings, Paul Clein, a senior Lib Dem councillor in the city, admits that the commissions criticisms are valid:
"[Clein] blamed part of the problem on the cost of Liverpool 'being the European City of Culture this year, which we are funding 60% and has led to people taking their eye off the ball'."
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardianpolitics/story/0,,2248440.00.html )
I wonder who he could have in mind regarding that final remark?
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