How did Liverpool get into this state.

Liverpool City Council is currently partially controlled by central government-appointed commissioners. However, some known crooks still hold senior positions, while Merseyside Police should be under external investigation for endemic corruption.

In London, Boris Johnson is under intense scrutiny by the press, as are the Metropolitan Police for not investigating, despite the wealth of evidence. In Liverpool, there is near silence from the local newspaper, regional media and the national press.

The press prides itself on holding the powerful to account. It thinks it deserves special privileges to allow it to do this, but now it often fails to have any impact. At a local level, the failing is even more apparent and no more so than in the Liverpool Echo, part of Reach Plc, formerly Trinity Mirror. Trinity Mirror resulted from the merger of the Mirror Group, former proprietor Robert Maxwell and Trinity International Holdings, a product of rearranging the Liverpool Echo's substantial holdings. This merger wasn't good news for Liverpool. What had once been a successful local company became a minor part. 

The merger had successfully placed the head office in Chester for several years at the first opportunity it moved to London.

In 1995 Alastair Machray joined the group as editor of the Daily Post, which was Liverpool's morning paper. In 2005, he became the editor of the Echo. Previous Liverpool Echo editors had had strong associations with the city, but Machray is a newcomer. He has no knowledge of the city beyond what he would have picked up from generic sources, both good and bad.

The local newspaper market has gone into a steep decline. The falling sales attributed to the rise of new media being the cause. Machray, whether of his own volition or under instruction from management, started making the paper relevant. He did this by firing a large portion of the local-born staff, whose views of the city were based on personal experience and leaving those remaining to peddle the myth of Liverpool.

With Machray as editor, the Echo ran ghost stories and hagiographies for dead gangsters while cultivating scouse exceptionalism. All for its end of making money. Not content with that, Machray has been keen to cosy up to any group he sees as influential, all at the expense of journalistic standards.

The Mirror group was the group of Bouncing Bob Maxwell, Telephone hacking and faked pictures. Machray has taken this Mirror group brand and happily cut and pasted its ethics into the Liverpool Echo.

Out of all this, the city gets a corrupt council and a corrupt police force while he gets an OBE. Even Thatcher and Boris did more for Liverpool than Machray ever did.