Review of Liverpool: City of Working Class Resistance and News from Nowhere’s 40th Birthday

Adelphi Hotel, Liverpool
Saturday 3rd May, 2014

Reviewed by John Owen
Photographs by Redskye

Adelphi hotel room service! Mayday, Mayday, Mayday please!

“Life begins at 40”, “100 is the new 30”, with this in my deteriorating cranium and addled mind I expected to find some people eluding the Grim Reaper’s call, people who should have let go of the reins long ago. To the – as yet – untrained youngsters and untrained, half-baked revolutionaries with their hare brain schemes and plans and fancy clothing to boot pahh!

I came to the occasion to celebrate the 130th year of Mayday in Liverpool and News from Nowhere turning 40, though we were not treated with nostalgia nor did rose coloured sepia tone all our yestermorrows talk. Instead, a hive of activity was in progress from the get go. Considering the combined age of the ensemble would be half of Barbara Cartland’s age and half as racy.

I was pleasantly surprised that the lower half of the building was occupied by Liverpool left – what’s left of the left that is – and some who wished to be further to the left of the left. Ohh for the ideological wings of any bird other than a battery hen.

However, the ultras and the mediocre crews; the great and the good; the unwashed and underfed nowhere in sight we said an atheist prayer and cowed down for lunch. Free in the true socialist tradition and better than a skip or Salvation Army sarney by a long chalk.

The program consisted of discussion, workshops, entertainment, films, displays and a birthday party with music to follow. Who could grumble? Well, some did… perhaps they always will! Perhaps their shorts were too tight or knickers in a twist or maybe they like it that way – arsey and argumentative…

The organisers included the Liverpool Trades Council, Nerve magazine and News from Nowhere. A coalition of the willing, willing to do the dirty for a shilling unwillingly. They pulled off a coup de grace of sorts by bringing together the unspeakables with the unmentionables and allowing them room and space to say what they wouldn’t say to each other and force them to listen and hear.

In commemoration of Des Warren and Micky Abbot, the day grappled with all the current issues of the today. By collaborating in this way we honoured the memory of these two fighters.

From Hillsborough justice to blacklist support groups, keeping NHS to public bedroom tax federation, libraries and sure start nurseries, and Barac speaker Collette Williams on iniquities of racial inequality. All and then some was thrown open for debates after the intros of invited speakers.

Music from the socialist choir helped sluice off built up tension and Claire Mooney and poetry helped lighten the load for the day. Arthur Adlen, Alison Down and John G Davies, whom sadly I missed, tickled the ribs of all who stayed to listen.

A political cartoonist John Minion and a film Big Society: The Musical was received with rapturous applause. Created by First Take, the makers were on hand to discuss and reply to the audience.

The day went well, socialism and Mayday and some of the ideals enshrined within the name were celebrated and discussed in comradely fashion, although it could go on forever and a day and still you’d be a splitter in some eyes. My daughter enjoyed the singing and, fist clenched in mouth, gurned to the international tuneless with gusto. The way it should be sung.

Printer friendly page

Sorry Comments Closed