Frank Field

Diaries play a special role in Protestant culture. Denied the comfort of the confessional, the best of these diarists confront the blank sheet of paper with the intention of recording the day’s events, but also in order to analyse their own motives. Such efforts often make fascinating reading, revealing the author’s struggle to be honest about his motives, while attempting to present them in as favourable a light as possible. From this point of view, the diary of Robert Kilroy-Silk is a great disappointment.

Whether the country likes Derek Hatton or not – and thankfully most people don’t – he has a point. Liverpool’s two-year budget campaign, brought to a climax after the recent vote to balance the books, has had a deadly serious side to it. Militant’s primary aim has of course been to use the City’s financial crisis as a massive recruiting drive for the Tendency. But this macabre political jamboree could not have lasted this long had there not been behind it the deeply-felt grievances of tens of thousands of people conscious of the near-collapse of Merseyside’s economy. And what the good old British public may not have realised as they viewed the nightly twistings, turnings and rantings of leading Militants on the TV news was that they were being given a chilling glimpse of their own future. For what has been happening to Liverpool may yet prove to be a mere dress-rehearsal of the fate awaiting most British cities. Part of Liverpool’s importance, then, is that it provides a microcosm of what has been happening to the British economy. The difference is that Liverpool’s decline is occurring at a grotesquely faster rate. The city – and the surrounding area, as in my own constituency of Birkenhead – have been hit by unemployment as if by some kind of Black Death.’