Londoners are Ruining Liverpool

This week Barry Sheerman, Labour Co-operative MP for Huddersfield, did a rollicking job of holding the government to account over the chancellor George Osborne's so-called "Northern Powerhouse" project. "Stop patronising" and "start investing", he said, arguing that the rhetoric over building an economically potent hub of northern cities to rival London was not being matched by tangible investment. Southerners, he railed, "live parasitically" off the efforts of the north.

Northerners living in one of the Northern Powerhouse cities (Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield, Hull, Liverpool, and the "North East") will recognise the southern parasite, which gleefully harvests the UK's graduate populace each year and spews back semi-credible chain restaurants and branches of John Lewis as recompense. They will recognise the – as Barry said – "patronising" attitude of southerners towards the north, despite the fact their businesses have humbled and homogenised it and made the city centres look like a Westfield, only without the posh bits that sell Dior and Prada.

I left my home city for London straight after university, like pretty much everyone I knew. I went to live the journalistic dream at a national newspaper. I returned to Liverpool, penniless, in 2013 when that dream ended in trying to displace an article about a gigantic walk-in vagina from the most-read section of that newspaper's website. The fret was palpable. "Are you quite sure this is the right thing for you?" friends asked. "Is this just a phase, Liam?", "Do they even have jobs up there any more?" said colleagues, "Apparently they don't even have Pret?"

But people in the south needn't be so afraid of the north, for it has changed beyond measure. Before I left Liverpool there was a restaurant I loved called The Pepper Pot. You could ask the waiters what was in the chicken salad, and they would reply, straight-faced: "chicken". It sold a dessert called "Malteser Magic" which consisted of Baileys, Maltesers and ice cream. My nan ordered it without the ice cream, fishing chocolates from Baileys with a spoon. Sadly this restaurant is no longer with us, and in its place we have Byron, the latest branch of Wahaca and all manner of Meat Liquor ripoffs. One of them sells a burger called the "River Phoenix". Another, themed around the last meals of death row inmates, offers the "Smoke Me" and the "Burning Love".

There are so many sights here to make tourists from the capital feel right at home. Mirroring the destruction of central London's queer nightlife, the iconic Liverpool club the Kazimier is being torn down in the New Year to make way for studio apartments and a shopping plaza. Chinatown – admittedly a bit of a show – is being razed to the ground in favour of a few glass boxes. The Odeon at Liverpool One – a retail destination concocted by the Duke of Westminster's Grosvenor Group – offers Friday night cinema tickets that won't get you much change from £20. Not only will we take your franchises, we'll have your juvenile exclusivity too, in the form of "Ex-Directory", a bar where you can only gain entry if you find the secret post-box and dial the correct code.

What is most dispiriting about London's parasitic spread northwards is the fact we have grown fluent in their language and can parrot it back to them. But these attempts to transpose the nonsense economy of Shoreditch onto the north don't work. Most often in these places I think: "This would be rammed if it was in London." But it isn't.

There is a charm to Liverpool entirely absent from Shoreditch. It's a place where rather than no-platform someone, it's best to just batter them. Where the new Indian restaurant offers a dish called "Keema Therapy" (imagine that getting past a London PR launch) and donates the proceeds to a cancer charity. Where the attendance of Coleen Rooney and Alex Gerrard signal that a bar is a must-visit, rather than a downmarket avoid-at-all-costs. Where there is a café offering Scouse (translation: stew) In A Pouch as a takeaway option. Where my nan's charity shop takes my Reiss and Cos cast-offs and flogs them for a pound.

I'm not saying Liverpool can't be a Powerhouse, whatever that might be, but it needs to find its own way of doing things. The devolution deal the region signed with the government – a deal that showed the "simply unstoppable momentum" of the Powerhouse, according to Osborne – was full of fluff and so poorly checked you'd have to assume no-one important actually cared. Published in November, it highlighted the crucial need to "maximise the opportunities from HS2 (High Speed 2 rail link)". Two months earlier, the head of HS2 said the network would not reach the city until at least 2033.

The south won't willingly create prosperity for the north, and southerners will always sneer at a group of people they consider themselves to have moved beyond – financially, but mostly culturally. It's up to the north to show them how wrong they are, and to do so without aping the patronising behaviours that enforce the divide.

@lobyouknowme

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