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Written by Ron Noon at 11:16 on Saturday, December 20th 2008
I forgot in that summary to mention that the most exciting development will be the contributions of the children in terms of the work that they undertook earlier on this year and the drama that they produced on April 23rd called the Boys and Girls from the Whitestuff. That has been filmed and reported by the Liverpool Daily Post and it is a great credit to the teaching staff of Trinity. We will have that film and more about their school project on sugar and slaves on line. In the meantime I will blog on.
What financed those redundant refinery lives when Love Lane closed down on April 22nd 1981? Regional Aid and Ship Sales!
We have interviewed many who think Tates “was a great firm to work for” and the local management was often in the dark and very much on the receiving end of decision making from London headquarters. For many “down there” what was happening became little more than Merseyside’s local sideshow. Their brief was the international sugar economy and profit potential in any of five continents the Sugar Giant operated in.
From the reading and research I have undertaken there are two incontrovertible facts which have shaped my conclusions about closure. The first piece of evidence is that Tate & Lyle were the major recipients of regional aid between 1975 and 1981. That attention grabbing detail is verified by a document from the Planning Officer of the City Council, issued a few days after the 90 day redundancy notices had been issued and in the records that Albert and John gave to the Museum.
“Tate and Lyle have been aware of the problems of their refining operations for some time, and have successfully diversified into warehousing, commodity trading, distribution, shipping and speciality chemicals, inter alia. They were the largest recipient of regional aid in Liverpool over the period 1975/76 to 1979/80, receiving £3.95 million in Regional Development Grant and Regional Selective Financial Assistance.”
The second and equally incontrovertible evidence is that a couple of months after the closure of Love Lane the Lex Column in the Financial Times explained how “ship sales will cover the Liverpool redundancy costs”! Down to 1976 when trading was reorganised and “Albion Ltd” was dissolved, “profits made by the Bermuda subsidiary” of Tates Canadian subsidiary Redpath, “were reinvested to buy ships rented to a British subsidiary”! For a company that denied internal transfer pricing that is evidence of a pretty sophisticated financial policy and one that enabled ships that were originally bought through Bermuda based subsidiaries to be sold to help finance a massive closure in what the Merseyside Socialist Research Group described in the opening section of MERSEYSIDE IN CRISIS (1980) as “the Bermuda triangle of British capitalism”! Funny old sugar world innit? Anyway “transfer pricing” needs explanation but only after I’ve been into town to buy a few presents.