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Love Lane Lives - the boys & girls from the whitestuff

Love Lane Lives

The history of sugar in Liverpool and the effects of the closure of the Tate & Lyle sugar refinery, Love Lane

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Maggie snub for Mr Cube team

Written by Ron Noon at 10:11 on Thursday, February 10th 2011

The headline in the Liverpool Daily Post on 11th February 1981 was “Maggie snub for Mr Cube team” and it came on the eve of a meeting between Liverpool MPs and Peter Walker the Agriculture Minister about seeking to persuade the Government to intervene in a campaign led by a new CONGRESS OF MERSEYSIDE. David Alton the Liverpool Edge Hill MP was fulminating with anger at Thatcher’s “insult to the people of Merseyside. The woman has n’t visited Liverpool since she was elected Prime Minister in 1979” and now “her policies have increased unemployment to well over 100,000 people she refused to see people who simply want to present a case to her”. The Congress of Merseyside was a cross party group including MPs, councillors and church leaders like the Bishop of Liverpool, David Sheppard and Archbishop Derek Worlock.


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This is a photograph of Bishop Sheppard and Archbishop Worlock from a book they wrote together entitled BETTER TOGETHER in 1988

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The Daily Post reporters David Rose and David Utting, explain “how she told MPs that those seeking to save the jobs of the refinery’s 1500 workers should see the ‘management concerned’”! The initial request for the PM to meet the delegation was from Sir Trevor Jones the leader of Liverpool City Council. “In the Commons yesterday Mr Alton intervened to ask Mrs Thatcher whether she would agree to the request. But she replied: ‘I don’t myself see delegations’.”

The early 1980s were really grim but history has a tendency to repeat itself, sometimes as farce and tragedy. Judging by the repsonse in the House of Commons yesterday of Thatcher’s heir, David Cameron, to our Council leader Joe Anderson’s rejection of the “Big Society” as the Big Con, there was clear evidence of a recurring Tory theme, which sees the flesh and blood victims of Government cuts as having only themselves and their councils to blame for the pain!

On a lighter note just imagine how Evertonians felt at Thatcher’s snub! There was “no culture of consolation in football results” for “us Everton fans” but in drawing 1-1 with Manchester City “an off form” Liverpool FC benefitted from “match winner Kenny Daglish” who with the rest of LFC and their fans were on their way to Wembley in reaching the League Cup Final.

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P.S. “If” I’d had this when I did the last blog, it would have been “common currency” by now and seminars would have been conducted (!),  but belatedly it’s here to add to the newspaper archives that I’ve built up and which I’m now re-visiting with a passion and a sense of deja vu!

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