The crowd erupted as an ambulance drove past a march of striking workers on Hope Street.
Its crew punched the air, clapped their hands, honked the horn and sounded the siren as the protesters returned the gesture from a sea of flags fluttering ever stronger as the roar of the crowd grew before the ambulance descended Mount Pleasant.
Between the city's two cathedrals, workers shared a moment of solidarity on a day 500,000 people went on strike across the UK. In Liverpool, roughly 3,000 teachers, railway workers, civil servants and university staff represented by at least six different unions left their pickets across the city to gather in the shadow of the Metropolitan Cathedral and march through the city on Wednesday.
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For teachers, it was the first of seven days of strike by members of the National Education Union (NEU), the UK's largest education union representing half a million workers. They've been offered a pay rise worth 5% on average, but they say they need more to retain staff who're burning out, to attract new recruits who aren't applying, and to make one step towards repairing an education system still suffering from austerity-era cuts.
Gill Ridley is an early years teacher who earns £26,000 working part time because she "can't afford to work five days a week" due to the cost of childcare for her three kids.
The 36-year-old, originally from Northern Ireland, told the ECHO: "I want my children to have an education system that's valued by our government. At the minute, I just see cuts, cuts, cuts - to my pay, to their budgets. Absolutely across the board, it's just cuts. They deserve more."
Spending per pupil fell roughly 9% in real terms - adjusted for inflation - between 2010 and 2019, reflecting the Conservative government's budget cuts. Per pupil spend has risen since then, and is expected to return to 2010 levels in 2024, according to an estimate by the Institute for Fiscal Studies last year.
Under the consecutive Conservative governments, teachers' real term salaries have also fallen between 9% and 10%, according to the think tank. With inflation around 10%, most teachers are predicted to take another real terms pay cut this year.
Although they got a pay rise worth 5% on average last year - after a pay freeze - the government gave schools no extra money to fund this. For 132 schools in Liverpool, the squeeze is made tighter by the £2.3m added to their bills by a series of mistakes made by council staff related to the renewal of a central electricity contract.
Despite squeezed budgets, "teachers keep going no matter what", according to Gill. She said: "We steal our own children's toys and bring them into the classroom when they won't give us money for new ones.
"We make it work. We cut and stick and glue and cellotape things, and we make the resources we need, but they deserve better. Our last pay rise came from the school's budget, which was already tight." She added that it feels as if they have "stolen glue sticks out of the hands of children to pay teachers".
"That's not what we want as teachers. We haven't had a proper pay rise in a long time, but the budget is just getting tighter and tighter. There's less money for support staff, less money for resources, less money for everything."
Seeing kids make daily progress in her year seven special needs class is the highlight of Pippa Rogers's job. The 28-year-old is taking part in the strike partly due to a shortage of special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) staff.
SEND teaching assistants earn between £14,000 and £23,000, according to the government's National Careers Service. Pippa, a teacher for six years, said this is too low to attract the high quality teaching assistants schools need.
She told the ECHO: "We really do feel the funding cuts every single day. We don't have enough laptops, we don't have enough iPads. The resources these kids need more than other kids do, we just don't have them there.
"These kids have got the potential to be passing their GCSEs, but if they aren't getting that extra support that they need, and that they should have funding from the government for, then they're not going to catch up. They deserve the same chance as everybody else."
The perennial strikers - the Rail and Maritime Transport (RMT) union and the University and College Union (UCU), with their reputations as unions who fight to improve and protect their members' pay and working conditions - were on the march. But this wave of industrial action has spread to many sectors of the UK workforce.
Matt Exley, a participation producer at National Museums Liverpool, was one of roughly 100,000 civil servants represented by the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) who went on strike on Wednesday. The 34-year-old told the ECHO: "Through the pandemic, we understood that arts and culture played a huge part in the bread and roses of people's existence, and that we needed arts and culture in this country.
"Arts and culture needs to be properly funded. Arts and culture workers need to be paid properly for their time. We've seen year on year, 2%, 2%, 2% pay rises, which when inflation is spiralling out of control, 2% makes me poorer year on year on year.
"Working with a great, dynamic, interesting, amazing group of people who are really invested in arts, heritage and culture, and to see those people then almost punished for their career choices, and becoming poorer, seeing people I work with struggle to put the heating on, struggle to put food on the table, struggle to have the basic necessities of life, is outrageous when we recognise that arts and culture is so fundamentally important.
"It's absolutely heartbreaking to come to the office, to see people not able necessarily do their job to the best of their ability because they're worrying about paying the bills, and people working from home in three jumpers and seeing their breath rise when they go to make a cup of tea in the kitchen, because they can't afford to put the heating on. It's demoralising."
In one line, Matt summarised the sentiment, seen on placards across pickets, behind the mass industrial action. He said: "We came through austerity, then we had the pandemic, and we've still got the Tories in."
This isn't just dispute over pay, able to be bought off with an extra percentage point or a one-off lump sum. There's real anger at the Conservative Party, who've been in power for nearly 13 years.
Stood next to Matt as the march meandered down Hope Street, his colleague Clare Allen, 39, would like to feel hopeful the country has reached a turning point. Clare said: "We've seen so much over the last years of Tory government where you think, 'Oh, this is the thing now, something's got to change now', and I've been disappointed over that time. But it definitely does feel like there's a bit more of a muster happening, so I'm tentatively hoping that that is now true."
Matt said: "I think we're finally at a tipping point in this country. I mean, 500,000 workers out on strike and that movement is going to keep building. I think we're at a point now where it's unsustainable for them to hold government.
"A lettuce outlasted the last Tory Prime Minister, and the current Tory Prime Minister has been marred from the beginning by scandal. Approval ratings are dipping lower and lower each day. It's unsustainable for the Tories to carry on. They need to listen to the 99% of workers, not the 1% of Tory donors."
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