PRIVATE PARADISE CLOSED TO "RIFF-RAFF"

A large part of the city centre surrounding Paradise Street, will be declared private property if the council has its way and people walking through it will merely be guests of business types. Guests who can be thrown out if they don’t fit in. Liverpool Council wants to privatise 35 public rights of way, which means people will lose the automatic right to walk through the area. Donald Lee of the Open Space Society is very worried that a “series of so-called ‘public realm’ routes that are nothing more than permitted ways under the control of private management”. After raising the issue with the council, he was told the measures are necessary because “the developers and the council needed to be in a position ‘to control and exclude the riff- raff element’.”

Similar measures in US cities such as Los Angeles have seen persecution of homeless people, political campaigners and street entertainers. Small businesses and groups in the area are fighting compulsory purchase orders, but they too are likely to lose out to the big developersand stores and be unable to afford rents in new shopping centres. The ‘sanitisation’ of OUR city continues, and it seems the only thing we’ll be allowed to do in it is shop. ‘OUR’ council is in the pocket of the already rich, but legalchallenges and campaigns continue. It may not be too late to influence things.

GRAVY TRAIN COMES TO TOWN AGAIN!

Meanwhile, Liverpool, with its ‘City of Culture’ (COC) status, has been chosen to host a major regeneration conference, by the Local Government Association. The event, scheduled for March 2004, will see around 1,000 delegates from councils across the country arriving in Liverpool, where they will presumably learn how to make large sums of public money disappear, make friends with important business people and pass the whole thing off as ‘regeneration’. Council chiefs are predicting it will bring tens of thousands of pounds of revenue to the city businesses, money which should perhaps be used for improving peoples housing and their lives. When will the regeneration funds finally trickle down to the people of Liverpool?