BUDGET: Liverpool, Manchester gain more powers

Unsurprisingly, that Centre for Cities graphic is wrong. Sefton (containing Bootle), Knowsley (containing Kirkby and Huyton and Prescot) Halton (containing Widnes and Runcorn) and St Helens (containing Thatto Heath) are constituent members of the City’s Combined Authority. And hardly rural outposts.

Versus a rather interesting interpretation for Greater Manchester, where distant Wigan is apparently now a fully fledged part of Manchester the city.

The graphic is correct Mike.

How so Max?

The map makes no sense – Only Salford and Manchester are cities within Greater Manchester – If you’re doing it like that, then St. Helens and Sefton should also be included.

Also, districts like South Gloucestershire and Telford & Wrekin are classed as cities, when they’re not.

No such thing as Northern Powerhouse. Osborne refers to his ‘pet’ project Manchester where a lot of behind doors wheeling and dealing takes place. It was same under New Labour.

Cities in their purest definition are economic entities. It is a fact that the economic links within Greater Merseyside to the core area are much weaker than they are within Greater Manchester. Data shows that Greater Merseyside is a multi-polar county whereas Greater Manchester functions much more as a coherent and monocentric city-like unit.

Complete nonsense, the silliness underlined by your use of the term “Greater Merseyside”. I would wager that Wigan has stronger links with the Liverpool boroughs that the Manchester ones, St Helens in particular.

Even ONS statistics (data) shows Liverpool City Region/Greater Liverpool to be a highly mono-centric area, with predominantly inward commuting patterns.

Greater Merseyside is the correct term for a county defined by complex commuting, labour market and business trading patterns that are a long way from being mono-centric in nature.

Mike is right about Wigan. It is a bizarre anomaly that it was ever put in GM. Similar with Bolton. Both those towns should have remained in Lancashire. The other places in GM have only recently become more linked to Manchester,because of Metrolink. It has never been A Mother city to the old milltowns to the North.GM would have made more sense to have taken in places like Wilmslow,Knutsford or Warrington and those places around the Airport,as they are more economically linked to the city.I believe Wilmslow threw it’s dummy out of it’s pram and was allowed to stay in Cheshire?

All sorts of wrong there Elephant. Spinning, weaving, dyeing, manufacture and engineering were all work associated with the refining and production of finished cotton. Different towns, including Wigan and Bolton specialised in different parts of the process but they were all part of the same economic system. Many of the historic economic links between the different towns and cities of Greater Manchester endure to the present day.

I was born in Oldham the greatest Cotton producing town on the planet,so you are wrong Anon.Working people in those towns rarely visited Manchester,as late as the 60s,when I was born and nobody in those great Lancashire towns regards Manchester has ‘town’ in the way people in Edgware or Ealing,would class London. A few Mill owners went to Manchester to the Royal Exchange,but it was never a commuter city,as London is. There was a distinct autonomy about those towns,hence the epic scale of the Town halls and civic buildings. They were never dormitory towns for Manchester.The towns in South Manchester and North Cheshire,fitted that bill.Liverpool on the other hand was always were masses of people from the Wirral worked and there is footage of thousands of people from there swarming from the ferries and underground trains into Liverpool.

Well, Anon, all I can say there is I can cite you official statistics showing the various boroughs being classed as dependent boroughs on the core with an overwhelming commuting pattern into the centre, classified as a monocentric city region.

What can you cite other than your own strange world view, which idealises Manchester and clearly seeks to denigrate Liverpool.

You’ve completely missed the point Elephant. If you accept that cities are primarily economic entities (which makes sense since why do business cluster together if not to trade with each other or draw on a common supply chain) then Oldham is and always has been an integral part of a Greater Manchester economy. Cotton spun in the town was then sent to other parts of the conurbation for weaving, dyeing, finishing, manufacturing, merchandising, selling and exporting. Then you have all the associated engineering trades and the commercial functions of exchange, banking, insurance, warehousing and selling which occurred in the centre of Manchester. The whole of Greater Mancheter was and still is a self contained economic system of which Oldham, Bolton and Wigan were important component parts. It’s just the nature of those economic links have changed with more employment drawn to city centres as the ‘knowledge economy’ has prevailed. What you’re talking about are social and cultural links which form a component of how we might define a city but you find the same complexity of overlapping identities in all major cities; but the main factor in defining a city, logically, are those economic links.

Yes, Centre for Cities always shows bias by its warped definitions that always favour Manchester. Liverpool is mother city for PEOPLE from the north Sefton coast to the middle of Cheshire and from Skelmersdale to West Kirkby and any definitions that can leave out Bootle with Seaforth, my home town containing most of Liverpool’s docks for at least the past 50 years is just crazy. Revise your graphics and definitions Centre for Cities or lose all credibility. The further devolution to Liverpool (for the 1.5 million living within the current city region boundaries) is really good news!

Anon. You have some valid points,but emotionally if that is the right word,there is very little connection between these industrial towns.Manchester was just the biggest of a lot of large Lancashire boroughs.If this relationship had been so intense,as you say,then Manchester would now be the largest,non capital city in Europe and would have swallowed up it’s environs,as London did. Manchester,didn’t even infringe on Salford that much,even the buses were a different colour.If Manchester had disappeared at this time,then those great towns would have quickly filled the void it left.This would not happen now,as they are more reliant on being close to it for employment,as it has,as you say,a different economy.As a child I only knew one person on my street who worked in Manchester and he worked in Trafford Park,everyone else worked locally,mainly in industry.My main argument is that Manchester was never a commuter town for people in these towns. They protected their independence with real passion and some parts of Greater Oldham weren’t even in Lancashire,let alone a Manchester catchment area. They had their own traditions and distinctly different dialects.People on the Wirral,speak with an obvious Merseyside accent,as they integrated with Liverpool.People in Oldham and similar towns speak nothing like Mancunians.Oldham even had it’s own exclusive shopping district for it’s industrialists around Mumps.There may have been similarities in what they manufactured,but these towns were autonomous.

Elephant – you’ve missed the point again. They were not autonomous towns since their economies were dependent and linked to all other parts of the conurbation involved in the cotton trade. Nobody mentioned 19th century commuting patterns (although quite why you distinguish between people moving but neglect the goods that moved along the roads, canals and railways within Greater Manchester is not clear).

On the basis of your argument, the people that live in the East End of London, and who similarly have a distinctly different accent and culture to the rest of London live in a different city. This is a completely arbitrary and nonsensical argument which is why when looking at how you define a city, you look at economic links only.

You’ll come undone on this one Anon. The identity in the Liverpool area is so powerful and people feel so passionately about it that the city’s identity is crystal clear. Even on the economic side your arguments vis-a-vis Elephant collapse. All those Lancashire towns relied on Liverpool exporting their goods for their growth and development. Liverpool was crucial to the development of all these towns for a period of about 200 years! Not Manchester…..

Stop living the past people, history counts for nothing.

It counts for more than you think Johnson, but you’re right it’s the present that matters, and Liverpool is doing well and it’s remarkable progress should be recognised also by ‘think tanks’ that pump out misleading information.

Hoisted by your own petard there Gwidyon. In terms of export, Liverpool was no more important than anywhere else equipped with a dock and some ships for the physical shipment of merchandise since the export trade was actually carried out at the Royal Exchange.

Anon.your reference to the people of East London is a strange one. People in East London are Londoners.A different demograph to Kensington and Chelsea granted,but still Londoners. People in the milltowns around Manchester are not and never have been Mancunians.This is why Manchester has a small population for such a prominent city,because it did not spread,as London did to it’s neighbouring towns.The Greater Manchester ‘idea’ was manufactured by Central government and did not organically grow as London and to a lesser extent Merseyside did,as a functioning Metropolis.There are a number of factors,as to why this did not happen.Public transport played a huge part,as Manchester had no Underground taking people directly to the centre,from outlying areas.Liverpool has always been easily accessible from Birkenhead,Southport and industrial West Lancs,There was also independent local government within the other towns,with rich traditions,which guarded that independence.As a child I had no idea where Altrincham for arguments sake, was. It may as well have been Cornwall,for all the relevance it had to my life.This is because GM never functioned as a unit.Manchester was very parochial and of course Salford’s city status had an effect on Manchester’s growth over the Irwell.That is still the case today to an extent,as MCC have no say in development on that side of the river,even though it is very central.

Elephant you seem to have a very basic understanding of how economies function and know even less about how Greater Manchester economy grew and functioned.

A city’s economy is an organic thing and is influenced by not by artificial local authority boindaries but by trading and labour market relationships, both of which, as should be patently clear, transcend bureaucratic boundaries. As explained Greater Manchester is and always has been a functional economic area and on that most fundamental definition, consititues a city. You’re tying yourself in knots here by claiming that a localised accent or a community’s habits marks a city’s boundary, then simply asserting that your rules do not apply to the east end! It all gets rather convoluted doesn’t it which is why cities are defined by their economic relationships rather than arbitrary factors such as a variation in local accent.

Incidentally there is a healthy separatist movement on the Wirral which has long regarded itself part of Cheshire, has strong economic links to Chester and Runcorn and has long resented the idea of being part of Merseyside.

Anon.GM is not a real county.It was made up by Bureaucrats in 1974.Merseyside was too,but it always worked as a conurbation prior to 1974,a bit like New York functions with New Jersey. In a hundred years time what you say,will be true,but Manchester has never been the Mother city of South East Lancashire.Even today Manchester has a lower footfall from it’s environs even than Leeds at rush hour.It doesn’t even have an amalgamated relationship with Salford.The big towns around it prior to de-industrialisation would have functioned without it.Places in the South East would not have without London and places on Merseyside would not have without Liverpool.

Anon. You really do have a bee in your bonnet. What does it matter to you that the Liverpool City Region should have proper recognition from a tin-pot think tank like Centre for Cities….
And your determination to argue that cities are just economic. Try telling that to people in New York or Paris or any other city with a strong identity like Liverpool.
In any case on any economic basis you cannot justify classifying the Port of Liverpool as a part of a non-city area within the Liverpool combined authority. Bootle, Seaforth and Crosby for that matter have always been part of the city proper. The World’s first electric overhead railway linked all these areas with Liverpool from 1893. My Dad (born 1930) was from Seaforth and he was definitely a Liverpudlian, (or a Wacker as we used to call ourselves), and he would used this elevated electric railway to get to work seven and a half miles away on the other side of the city centre in Dingle.

Elephant, you could not be more wrong. At the risk of repeating myself, if you accept that cities are primarily economic entities (which makes sense since why do business cluster together if not to trade with each other or draw on a common supply chain) then Oldham is and always has been an integral part of a Greater Manchester economy. Cotton spun in the town was then sent to other parts of the conurbation for weaving, dyeing, finishing, manufacturing, merchandising, selling and exporting. Then you have all the associated engineering trades and the commercial functions of exchange, banking, insurance, warehousing and selling which occurred in the centre of Manchester. The whole of Greater Mancheter was and still is a self contained, inter dependent, economic system of which Oldham, Bolton and Wigan were important component parts. They could not have been autonomous towns since their economies were dependent and linked to all other parts of the conurbation involved in the cotton trade.

Greater Manchster is therefore congruent with the historic and current day economic geography of the city. You cannot just revise history and economics to match your own peculiar take on the world.

Gonna have to bash some heads together here.

Greater Manchester is a big orrible splurge of a place, with lots of places with their own strong identities. Liverpool is a bit of a splurge, with a strong identity and a bit of an identity in some places on the fringes.

People travel and trade between the two conurbations on a daily basis.

Just get the map right. And cotton is still traded using rules set in Liverpool. 60% of the world’s cotton is still traded using the rules established by the Liverpool Cotton Association. More than 60 countries still defer to the Liverpool Cotton Exchange in these matters.

Raw cotton Gwydion. The export trade was centred in Manchester.

In Australia bedding is known as Manchester. The industrial revolution centred on Manchester and this fact is taught in schools as far away as Canada

Anon has a natural Mancunian built in superiority complex.So many people believe Manchester was and is,more important than it actually was and is.Manchester stops at Newton Heath i’m afraid,however you try to stretch it to the West Yorkshire border.It stops at the Irwell,it stops at Clayton and it stops at the Airport.

Manchester is much bigger than you think. Why do people from Chadderton, Whitefield, Worsley, Marple, Altrincham and Stalybridge consider themselves Mancunian if they aren’t?

Elephant, if you really think local authority boundaries define a city then you really are clueless (although I note you keep changing your criteria!). I suspect the truth is that you understand that administrative boundaries hold little significance but having started an argument and having been shown up as having little real grasp on either history or economics you’re having to make things up as you go along.

Anyone with even a rudimentary grasp on things will understand that Manchester’s economic footprint is largely congruent with Greater Mancheter and on some measures extends beyond that into surrounding areas.

People in Chadderton do not even regard themselves as Oldhamers Welshie let alone Mancunians and I doubt people in Marple would associate themselves with Manchester..Anon,you are still unable to grasp the basic premise that Manchester was never the Mother city to the people living in the towns around it.Manchester economically to the people in these towns,was similar to how Leeds was to the West Yorkshire Hinterland.Somewhere where you went to see Father Christmas once a year.Manchester’s nearness to these places,has had no cultural effect on them whatsoever.They remain separate towns.Trying to make Manchester bigger by stealth,is sadly a figment of your imagination.Manchester’s current population is just half a million. That is about the same as Bristol. Hardly makes it a Megacity. The towns around Manchester to the North,were forced into a conurbation they did not want.

I think the basic thing here is – Manchester tends to try and swallow up whatever it can. You just don’t get Huyton getting called Merseyside – its just Huyton or Knowsley. I think that’s because the identify is so strong both in Liverpool and these other places. And you wouldn’t get St Helens in all this because that’s St Helens. End of. But I do personally believe that Manchester would like to swallow up what it can – whereas Liverpool does not necessarily want to. Just an opinion/observation.

Elephant, you keep chopping and changing your argument! But you’re still failing to grasp the basic premise that all the towns and cities within Greater Manchester were linked economically to each other in a single, economic system. The way Manchester developed is exactly how other cities developed, starting off with some of the earliest mills for (in Manchester’s case) cotton processing which as activities were later exported to surrounding towns as Manchester specialised in higher order commercial activities in the core area and diversified branches of engineering and manufacture outside the core area. It’s the classic template by which cities develop and can be seen the world over.

You’re trying to argue black is white – and not very successfully!

Professor Brian Cox is from Chadderton and definitely considers himself a manc lol.

This debate has got a little bit ridiculous now.

Sound. Madferit. Whatever.