£35 MILLION FOR THE EVERYMAN AND PLAYHOUSE - "A rip-off to support the few"?

WE POST THIS COMMENT FROM ONE OF OUR CULTURAL CORRESPONDENTS IN THE INTERESTS OF PROVOKING PUBLIC DEBATE (and stirring things up a bit, ed)....

I have been reading a lot recently about the Everyman Playhouse redevelopment and I am absolutely astounded that these 2 poorly attended theatres will get £25 million pounds of local funding.. a further £8million will come from the Arts Council.
I dont know what you think, but there seem to me to be at least 2 other theatres in town, The Neptune and the Royal Court, which could do with a couple of million each to refurbish them.
I know the Neptune is closed at the moment but the Royal Court seems to be quite busy, and when they have been producing their own shows they sell out.
I know the history behind the Playhouse, but £35million, come on it's a ripoff to support the few.
Maybe 2000 people go to the Everyman and the Playhouse each week, and if they were to pay £1 extra it would take over 335 years to repay the money.
So the public are expected to sponsor the art snobs for the next 3 centuries.
any way just my tuppence worth

Takeme Hatoff

LUXURY YACHT COST £25,000 DURING £265,000 CANNES TRIP

HIRING a millionaire's yacht in Cannes for Colin Cover Up and Fireman Bradley cost council taxpayers £25,000, a Freedom of Information answer has revealed.

They were both able to relax and sunbathe on the luxurious boat which was used for breakfasts, lunches and a string of informal drinks receptions.

And the staggering total bill for Liverpool's week long jaunt to the south of France was at least £265,000.

If you think extremely hard and can come up with slightly better ways to spend public money - (ie, cutting crime, repairing houses, cleaning the streets, improving the schools, extending care, ed) - please do not hesitate to tell us.

The Freedom of Information answer reveals that it cost the city council £10,000 alone in accomodation and flights to send a footie team of council bureaucrats to Cannes for the jaunt last month.

These included Cover Up (also now known in council circles as 'safe hands', ed), Bradley, new Regeneration chief John Kelly and Culture Company Marketing chief Kris 'bullshitter' Donaldson.

Their out of pocket expenses bill for taxis, a round of orange juices, entertaining, dancing girls and boys, etc - (all those receptions, ed) - has not been provided by the council.

In addition, the city council, which is £29million in the red at the moment, coughed up another £50,000 out of its depleted coffers for the MIPIM week.

More public money swelled the total bill to an astonishing £265,000 - Liverpool Land Development Company and Liverpool Vision both chipped in £25,000 each and The Mersey Partnership coughed up a paltry £15,000.

All of these organisations are, of course, funded by city council taxpayers.

So the people of Anfield, Kensington, Picton, Croxteth, Everton, Speke, Garston, Norris Green, Dingle, Toxteth, etc, etc, have paid twice over for Bradley, Cover Up and Co to swan about on a yacht for a week.

Big Business in Liverpool contributed £150,000.

Unfortunately, no Freedom of Information answer will tell us what benefit MIPIM has brought to the city of Liverpool, how many jobs it has created for Liverpool people, how many extra training places it has provided for Liverpool's young people, or how much extra investment it has attracted to Liverpool.

BECAUSE NO ONE KNOWS...

GUESS HOW MUCH CAPITAL OF CULTURE IS GOING TO COST YOU....??????

£400!!!!!!!!!!

Yes, that's the bill for every household and business in the city to plug the £29million black hole in the council's budget.

So how can this be? Didn't the city council promise that there would be no extra cost to Liverpool's council tax payers when it first drew up the bid for Culture?

Well, yes, it did. But things have changed now apparently. Through a spectacular mixture of sheer incompetence, obscene profligacy and rank arrogance the city council has contrived to find itself £29million short of balancing its books.

The lion's share of this - £22million - is for Culture, which is currently spending money on 'who knows what' like it is going out of fashion. The city council needs another £7million just to maintain the existing level of poor quality council services. Total = £29million.

The solution offered by the smiling assassin Hasitall (Phil Halsall, £169,000 a year Executive Director for Finance for those who don't know, ed) whose stewardship of the council's finances is may conceivably be to blame, is to beg, steal or borrow the necessary spondulicks from elsewhere. Any suggestion that, as the responsible officer, he had been criminally irresponsible with the city's finances would be criminally irresponsible, of course.

The council can either beg the Government for more dosh (and get lost, ed), it can steal the money from council taxpayers (already done that several times, ed) or it can borrow.

So it will do a combination of Options 2 and 3, while Warren 'I'm just a fireman' Bradley indulges in the distraction of the usual Lib Dem knockabout stuff aimed at the Government.

Meanwhile the city council will re-mortgage buildings like Millennium House (used to be known as Jase's Fun Palace, ed) and take out some more mind-boggling loans.

Either way, the result will be very clear.

Capital of Culture will leave a post-2008 legacy for the people of Liverpool of a huge new £29million debt. That works out at £400 for every home and business in the city. So we will all be in hock.

And all the time, the consultants and the highly paid Executives will have been happily lining their own pockets, thank you very much. And producing nothing very impressive for 2008 in return.

All of which puts McElhinney's Liverpool Direct scandal, Henshaw's bumper pension pay-off, the jobs for the boys, the £3million Summer Pops fiasco, the astronomical salaries, the foreign trips, the criminal pay-offs, the consultants fees, the freeloading, the waste and the neglect all in a bit more perspective doesnt it?