Paddy's other island
Richard West Liverpool Line Street station has a gigantic sign saying: 'Welcome to Liverpool, Home of Britain's No 1 Radio Station'. But of "ling else. The merchant fleets of the world have virtually ceased to call any more at a port whose dockers are known as the Most ready to strike and generally bloody- minded in Britain; even in Britain. The Yards for the building and repair of Ships were killed off back in the 1950s by the immortal dispute between two trade Unions over which of them bored holes. in the steel plate. The merchant houses, In- surance firms and shipping lines faded away with the commerce. All this is regarded here as a natural process of evolution, as though there was no more international trade or ,s`LIPPing; in fact the volume is greater than "et, but Liverpool has been superseded by Ports where the work force actually works like Rotterdam, Hamburg, Singapore and Yokohama. In Britain, the ships have transferred to smaller ports like King's LYnn and Felixstowe. Now the Adelphi has ceased its life as the Frandest of all the railway hotels in Britain; Lt has been sold by the Government to a nchester businessman. Under the owner- ship of the Midland Railway, the aim of the delphi, as Ian Waller wrote last week, was to acclimatise travellers before em- barking - n on the Edwardian transatlantic liners; its lounge, state cabin-like bedrooms and Marble-lined corridors still convey the sense of those great ships'. Even into the l95,0 under the ownership of British f adwaYs, the Adelphi still offered French • c“), od and the best champagne, with Cuban ,1,_gars, to Liverpool's still opulent mer- "'ants, shipbuilders and brokers. Even into the 1960s the Adelphi enjoyed "Be febrile glamour of Harold Wilson's residence there in election campaigns; of s_13,,nthern highbrows coming to see the city °,.t the Beatles and other proletarian cultural ,wondets; of race-goers celebrating the i-irand National thrills with rugger scrums ,n the lounge. All have vanished with the Ocuusinessmen, The Beatles are dead or 81sPersed, though Liverpool is to build a r eaties Museum...Old Harold Wilson has tred a‘vay, along with his speeches about _re hite heat of technology, his fantasies 'hlmself as Abraham Lincoln or Winston Churchill urchill. Even the Grand National now is i„
danger of closing for ever.
Adel,' planned to have dinner in the i on the last night of its old railway 1„arlagement, but the train was one hour and dinner was finished by half past 11!(Te, so I made do with sandwiches in my t2na• For company, one could always go the great Liverpool Press Club, notorious in the 1950s among journalists throughout the whole North of England; more recently rather subdued and sad, and lodged in the basement of the Adelphi. Now even the Press Club is closed, for the time being, perhaps for good. They nearly closed the Adelphi as a hotel. 'They were going to turn it into office blocks,' I heard in the American Bar. But what is the use of offices in a city where nobody does any work? Next morning, the grand old inn changed hands. Breakfast is now served downstairs. Or rather, breakfast is now self-served downstairs — to the sound of jingling piped music. What remains of Liverpool's industry may now be finished off by the present strike at the Halewood works of the Ford motor car company — which had rashly come to this part of the world in spite of warnings about its labour force. The dispute arose after allegations that Halewood men had deliberately smashed up cars as they left the assembly line, caus- ing millions of pounds worth of loss to the company, which then dismissed one Paul Kelly, 25, for alleged vandalism — which he denies. The National Officer of the Transport and General Workers' Union Rod Todd, who last week made the strike an official one, said: 'We're not abandon- ing Paul Kelly. He won't become a sacrificial lamb. I don't want Halewood to go out of the window. I don't want to add to unemployment in Merseyside, but I don't want Paul Kelly unemployed either.' Both management and unions have warned that the strike could mean the closure of Halewood and the loss of 10,000 jobs. On top of this, the British Leyland assembly plant in Oxford has stopped work on the Maestro car — one of our few recent suc- cesses — because of the management's ban on three minutes' washing-up time. The problems of Halewood and of the car industry are best understood by reading a very exciting and entertaining thriller War Without Frontiers (Hodder and Stoughton, 'I've got a bald spot.' £8.95) by Andrew Osmond and Douglas Hurd, the second of whom is a minister in the present government. It is a drama of big business, Common Market intrigue and ter- rorist gangsterism, set in the near future. The story concerns an attempt by a top Brussels official, Sir Patrick Harvey, to merge the sick Turin car company Mobital with the even sicker `BMG, the British Motor Group [which] has now absorbed every motor vehicle manufacturer within the UK, except Ford'. A Trotskyist Marxist group sets out to disrupt this:•merger by murdering some of the Mobital manage- ment and causing fatal confrontation at BMG's Coventry works, whose chief shop steward is one of the terrorists. Sir Harvey is kidnapped and held to ransom; Britain and Italy face revolution; then at last all is saved by the book's sympathetic hero, an ageing, drunken, freelance journalist tem- porarily employed by the new, left-wing Times. If no such hero settles the strike at Halewood, and Liverpool has a further 10,000 unemployed, we should not respond by giving this dump any more money in grants and relief. Giving money to Liver- pool is rather like sending food to Ethiopia where, so we learn from the Sunday Times, it is either supplied to troops fighting the Eritreans, or shipped off to Russia to pay for more arms. Unemployment in Liver- pool, like famine in Africa, is almost entire- ly caused by human folly and wickedness. So what ought one do about Merseyside? When I was coming here on the train a few years ago, I met one of the local MPs in the buffet car and spent a convivial journey. As we drew into Lime Street station, [thought I had better get a 'quote', as we journalists say, and asked if he could express in a few words what was wrong with Merseyside. 'In two words,' he replied, 'The Irish.' Of course this was unfair; although when one reads the names of some of the people in- volved in local disputes, Paul Kelly for in- stance, one does stop to wonder. And sometimes, in Liverpool, one gets the dream of finally solving the Irish problem. What if the two nations, the Catholic Irish and Protestant British, were given separate political status, but not geographically divi- ded as at present? There are more than a million Protestant British in Ireland; more than 4 million Catholic Irish in Britain. Why does not Britain hang on to and sub- sidise Belfast and its environs, while Ireland's Republic is given Liverpool and Glasgow and their environs? This might proye rather burdensome for the southern Irish taxpayer, but would such a sacrifice not be worth the reunion with all those lost children of Erin?
On the way back from Liverpool — 'Home of Britain's No 1 Radio Station' — I found Lime Street station covered in blood-red placards: 'ALCOHOL ON TRAINS.' Anyone found with alcohol on a Friday night or Saturday, morning train is liable to a fine of up to £200. The local Liverpool football team was playing Man- chester in London.
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