In Liverpool for the Trades Union Congress, I see the city has been further transformed in the 18 months since I last visited. Now it has the massive Liverpool One shopping complex, the Echo Arena and the BT Conference Centre where the congress is taking place.

Luckily for the city, all these developments were under way before the recession. Liverpool is not without problems. As the TUC warns, Merseyside has the highest proportion of public sector jobs of any UK region. A 10 per cent cut in public sector employees across the country could send Liverpool’s claimant count unemployment rate, already high at 7.6 per cent, up by nearly half. But it is better equipped to weather the storm than it was 10 or 20 years ago.