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Liverpool in the media

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3M views 22K replies 464 participants last post by  Cardenio123 
#1 ·
This thread is for representations of Liverpool in the media and any issues raised by how the city is represented.

As I write, there is a piece on Radio 4's Today programme about the UNESCO visit to Liverpool, and the danger of the city losing its WHS if it goes ahead with the museum.

The key narrative appears to be: Can the city remain faithful to its past whilst growing?

I have to say that it is an informed, balanced piece.

It ended with a statement to the effect that if UNESCO doesn't accept the arguments by LCC, EH, CABE, Liverpool might have to contemplate pulling out of the WHS club.

What do you think?
 
#81 ·
^^Nancy Banks-Smith has family connections in Liverpool and is fond of the city. Pity she's eighty-odd and won't be around much longer. She's a indication that the Guardian does not have a unanimous vendetta against Liverpool as Tony imagines, just one or two Manchester-based correspondents that are (with depressing predictability) anti-Liverpool.
 
#85 ·
There was a brief item on yesterday's Look North West, about how council tax payers are going to have to shell out millions more to clad the King's Dock Arena. The item was completely negative - no mention of what a great asset this is going to be for the city.

What a disgrace, wanting some more money, i will have a word with the government, this arena must be cancelled and the steel sold as scrap to China. The taxpayer must not be expected to pour more good money after bad to pay for this gross over budjet project. Turf it over and plonk up a gazebo. :nuts:
 
#87 ·
What a disgrace, wanting some more money, i will have a word with the government, this arena must be cancelled and the steel sold as scrap to China. The taxpayer must not be expected to pour more good money after bad to pay for this gross over budjet project. Turf it over and plonk up a gazebo. :nuts:
we do not know about the manc overspends over the years as manc TV does not report that type of negative stuff.


Tyer has been many incidences, from the Commonwealth Games briberies to the metro getting massive exdtra hand outs, but that would not go down well with the image makers for 'our region'!!!
 
#89 ·
I think he means stuff like Man City getting a free gaff from the nation because the government bailed out the Commonwealth games overspend and the metro getting extra funding because some magic formula appeared out of nowhere to justify it's existence when the rug got pulled from other worthy schemes not in the golden mill town.

Manchester got more grants and subsidys from the UK than Liverpool got from Objective One. Work that one out.
 
#91 ·
T-O-X-T-E-T-H is still burning (with OUTRAGE)

Sophia Evans and Richard Kelly
Sunday December 17, 2006
The Observer

The Parish Priest: Fr Peter Morgan

'I'm more committed now than I was five years ago'
Fr Peter's Morgan's parents were born and lived in the parish - St Anne's, Liverpool - of which he is now priest. He arrived to take over the church and the neighbouring Our Lady of Lourdes and St Bernard's just after the riots that incinerated much of Toxteth. Fr Peter voiced the concerns of the poor and downtrodden through decades of wrenching change in the area. But of late his pastoral work has been transformed by the arrival of thousands of asylum seekers, many of them victims of mass rape and torture - whom he fights to keep from deportation and accommodates in a church property next to St Anne's, and even in his own home. 'I'm a priest,' he jokes, 'I never expected to have a baby seat in my car! It's been heart-breaking, but an extraordinary experience, which has made me a more committed person than I was five years ago. There is this shattering certainty: where else are we to find Jesus if not with the outcast and oppressed?' I get concerned sometimes that some of the younger priests now being trained are of a conservative frame of mind. But for me it is like this: the Ministry is about so much more than saying Mass at weekends. If I am doing God's work the way I think it should be done, Sunday is the easiest day of the week!'

---------------------------------

So how many buildings were lost as a result of the 'riots'? (Protests against the shite local police?). Erm, not that many.

Do people still reference the Brixton riots or the ones that happened elsewhere in the country during this period? On the other hand, I wonder who mentioned it first in the above piece. The journo or the priest. I wouldn't be at all surprised if it were the priest. In my experience, the people of this city (especially those from North Liverpool) are every bit as sterotyping about Toxteth and people from 'Tocky' as the UK media. Worst of all are some of the local born religos and politicos - they just seem to glory in all those depraved, impoverished souls they are saving. **** them. They are not having mine! As soon as anyone mentions the word Toxteth they reveal themselves for what they are (not from L8, or arrived in the 80s and still don't get it) :yes:


Independence for L8 in the republic of South Liverpool that's what I say.
 
#92 ·
Welcome to the new holy land. (Yeah, it's frigging TOXTETH)

Ed Vulliamy
Sunday December 17, 2006
The Observer

They come to Britain in their hundreds of thousands, the poor of Africa, Asia, South America and eastern Europe, all seeking refuge, asylum or just a better life. And for many, the first port of call is the Catholic Church. Together they form a diverse new flock that is revitalising - and reinventing - the faith

... (for the full article http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1973527,00.html)

If the Good Book is true, and the driving character of its New Testament did indeed come again, looking for signs that his word was alive in this country, I would recommend a visit to the traditional capital of British Catholicism, Liverpool. Not that the original reasons for that title are really there any more: many of the original Irish parish churches that made Merseyside the Naples of the North have closed. Even the lovely 19th- century Polish church has, in the spirit of my mother's native city nowadays, been converted into a snazzy bistro. But other things are happening. Attendance at the glorious modern lantern of a cathedral has doubled due to Filipino and Indian migration. Then there is the singular flock of Fr Peter Morgan.

Liverpool, along with Croydon, is where people register for political asylum in Britain. An intimate Mass on Thursday morning in a little room at the back of Fr Peter's church of Our Lady of Lourdes and St Bernard in rundown Toxteth is also attended by people the priest has invited to stay in his home. These include Martin, a man with a haunted expression who is seeking asylum after torture in Congo; and the wife and child of another torture victim recently deported to Togo (where he was promptly rearrested). This brief, private ceremony does, somehow and perhaps absurdly, recall days when Fr Peter would have been burned at the stake for performing it. His day with the outcast and untouchable, the asylum seekers, has only just begun.

Adjacent to Fr Peter's other parish, St Anne's, Edge Hill, is a large church property which he has given over for use by the Merseyside Asylum Link. It is populated by what must be the most traumatised collective memory within any building in Britain: those in flight and in terror of returning whence they came. And although he has regular communicants, native to the city, it is these people who have become Fr Peter's flock, which he, a clutch of lawyers and staff at St Anne's fight to protect from the nightmares awaiting them back home. Others are referred to Fr Peter as a result of his chaplaincy to Liverpool Women's Hospital and by a women's centre, Blackburne House.

They are people like the woman for whom a Scouse taxi driver called Neil, parking his cab to attend that little Mass, had requested special prayers: Charlie Happi Koameko, one of several mass rape victims from Africa to whom Fr Peter has been summoned. Ms Koameko was ordered to become the 18th wife of a tribal chief in Cameroon and refused. Her punishment was 17 months of incarceration, serial mass rape, whipping and cutting with chilli rubbed into the wounds. She arrived in Liverpool traumatised and pregnant by one of her rapists, only coming round when one of Fr Peter's communicants placed a French Bible beside her hospital bed.

'As she recovered and gave birth,' says Fr Peter, 'she kept her faith and was regularly at Mass. But her application for asylum was rejected and Ms Koameko was taken to Yarlswood detention centre in Berkshire for deportation last week. At the last minute a solicitor, Pete Simm, located an arrest warrant awaiting Ms Koameko on her return. New evidence obliges the Home Office to rule again, but, an hour before her flight, Ms Koameko knew nothing about this development until Fr Peter reached her at the airport by phone. On Thursday she was granted bail and returned to limbo in Toxteth. Fr Peter says: 'When four men and two women came to detain her, they watched as Charlie removed her nightgown and dressed. After that degradation, for 20 hours before her planned deportation flight, her baby had neither milk nor food. It is people like that mother and child who have become my calling.'

'Charlie was my best student,' says Fr Eamon Doyle, a Christian Brother and retired teacher from Dublin, who tutors those sheltered in English. 'Our inclination is to believe them, while the government's is the opposite,' he says. 'Not that we're so naive. I was woken at 12.30 one night and asked to help because one of my people had been arrested driving without a licence or insurance. "No", I said.'

His pupils gather round him and Fr Peter, their lives in the balance. Ali was an opposition activist in Iran, recently baptised into Fr Peter's church, terrified to return. Rebwar Zabari is also from Iran, partially paralysed after torture. Warda Dared lives in Fr Peter's house: an Iraqi Christian who fled after her husband was incarcerated by Saddam Hussein. She won her appeal to stay but faces a Home Office appeal against that victory, insisting that now her country has been 'liberated' it is safe to return.

'In 2003,' says Ewan Roberts, who runs the centre, 'there were 100,000 asylum applications, plus some 30,000 dependants, with 50 per cent granted status. Now there are 30,000 applications, plus some 6,000 dependants, with only 25 per cent granted leave to remain. Has the world really become twice as safe for these people?'

'It's been heartbreaking,' says Fr Peter, 'but an extraordinary experience which has made me a more committed person than I was five years ago. There is this shattering certainty: where else are we to find Jesus if not with the outcast and oppressed? He was, after all, the first asylum seeker. It began to feel different when I opened my home to share it, in close proximity with these people, every day.'

Fr Peter's initial mentor in Liverpool was a man ordained into the Catholic Passionist congregation, better known than any community leader in Toxteth and held in awe even by the rioters of 1981, with whom he entreated while Princes Avenue burned. Fr Austin Smith, from this city and assigned by Rome to work here in 1968, is elderly now and, surrounded by books on Wittgenstein and Marxism, gathers his thoughts carefully with the help of a strong cigar. What he says puts all I have heard in the context of the institution of the church, with its awesome history and formidable durability, hierarchy and power. And comes so much more cogently from an ordained Catholic than it would from an aetheist or agnostic.

'Oh, you can be as radical as you want, so long as it's all under control.' Under whose control, the Catholic or secular hierarchy? 'Well, both really. Yes, secular people can pat Fr Peter on the head, say he's wonderful then send those poor people back! But I was thinking mainly of the church. They can praise what Fr Peter does, so long as it doesn't become too central, doesn't challenge too far, or get out of control. With the likes of asylum seekers, we're asking probing questions about poverty and justice. Same with Iraq and nuclear weapons - you can say it, but don't make it too central. It was the same with St Francis of Assisi - if it sounds like trouble, incorporate it,' he says.

'I've always thought of Catholicism as a movement. But it is also an institution, which still has this terrible fear of facing up to the signs of the times and cannot face that uneasiness, that undercurrent. It addresses these issues in theological terms but has never really taken in the discomfort which is the essence of Christianity as a movement.'

Reflecting on four decades in Toxteth, and recalling a recent exchange, Fr Austin says: 'You know, the inner city has changed my idea of God. I saw some boys I knew, smoking drugs, crack I think, behind Kwik Save . I said to them: "Lads, why don't you just cut it out!"

'"What do you mean?" they replied.

'"Look," I said, "let's just change this place, shall we?"'
 
#93 ·
TOXTETH again! Give me a feckin break - maybe we should rename this thread?!

Big interview
Sunday December 10, 2006
The Observer

Simply the Beth


One of the highlights of a poor year for British sport came when a young gymnast who trains in a run-down area of Liverpool won a world title. She talks to Anna Kessel

You have only to visit the Park Road Sports Hall to understand why the fuss has hardly hit Beth Tweddle. Park Road snakes through Toxteth, a run-down area of Liverpool famous for riots and Robbie Fowler, and the gym occupies an unassuming red-brick building on the main road. The interior flickers with strip lighting and it smells of school dinners. Faded newspaper cuttings cover the walls. They are mostly of Tweddle. An A4 poster, reminiscent of the First World War recruitment campaign, says 'Beth needs your vote'.

yada yada yada - for the rest

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/sport/story/0,,1968656,00.html
 
#94 ·
I think he means stuff like Man City getting a free gaff from the nation because the government bailed out the Commonwealth games overspend and the metro getting extra funding because some magic formula appeared out of nowhere to justify it's existence when the rug got pulled from other worthy schemes not in the golden mill town.

Manchester got more grants and subsidys from the UK than Liverpool got from Objective One. Work that one out.
Greater Manchester will probably get more grants because it is twice the size, had the heart of it bombed in 1996, held an event of international importance (Commonwealth Games) and has had, since the late 80's a structured, viable public transport plan.

Manchester City pay rent on for their usage of the City of Manchester stadium, so they have not inherited a free gaff from the city, or nation.
 
#97 ·
Greater Manchester will probably get more grants because it is twice the size, had the heart of it bombed in 1996, held an event of international importance (Commonwealth Games) and has had, since the late 80's a structured, viable public transport plan.

Manchester City pay rent on for their usage of the City of Manchester stadium, so they have not inherited a free gaff from the city, or nation.

This could deteriate very quickly.

Like for like Manchester's been well looked after largely by the public purse.

Man City may well pay rent, very favourable it is as well, but they had no capital expense and the Manchester council tax payers got off with it.

Tony has a valid point and it's not anti Manchester from him or me, rather that Manchester isn't an urban utopia where everything is well planned, well managed, self financing, never has problems in the same way that Liverpool isn't a basket case.

Like for like reporting of issues wouldn't go amiss, the Manchester media base compared to the Liverpool one is a factor.
 
#99 ·
I find the level of ignorance on this board when it comes to Liverpool/Manchester issues quite demoralising. Normally sane posters are reduced to diatribe.

It cost Man City £24 million to adapt the COMS to a football stadium and this continues to be a source of financial difficulty. Never let the facts get in the way of a good story!
 
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