Vote due on Barrow's 'once-in-a-lifetime' regeneration chance
Projects being paid for with the original pot of funding include asbestos removal in the Market Hall and demolition on Dalton Road, Stephen Street and The Ginnel to make way for a public park and other new features.
'Concept stage'
But the three-pronged partnership, formed last year and known as Team Barrow, says it has access to greater funding which would be spread across 10 years.The money would be used to build houses, improve transport links and develop education and skills training.The Team Barrow board has recommended work on the existing schemes is halted to allow for further investigation into what is described as a far greater re-modelling of the town centre than currently envisaged.The report to be discussed by cabinet members says the alternative plan "remains at early concept stage" but is a "once-in-a-lifetime" opportunity.It adds: "It aims to unlock private sector investment and to future-proof the town centre for its population, beyond a traditional physical regeneration scheme."This could include a new or improved theatre and events space, further utilising the Town Hall, creating a better food and drink offer alongside leisure and market facilities that boosts current investment in Portland Walk from BAE Systems, as well as new accommodation and community and health facilities.''
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The Guardian
a minute ago
- The Guardian
Nine students trapped in Gaza will get help to take up places at UK universities
Nine students in Gaza with full scholarships to study at British universities have been told the UK government is working to facilitate their evacuation. The students – who have all been awarded Chevening scholarships, funded by the Foreign Office in recognition of their potential as future leaders – welcomed the development on Wednesday, but dozens more Palestinians in Gaza with university places are still awaiting news. The breakthrough follows months of advocacy and campaigning by more than 100 MPs, university leaders and other civil society organisations. More than 80 Palestinian students in total have offers at UK universities, including 40 who have secured full scholarships. Dr Nora Parr, a researcher at the University of Birmingham who has been coordinating efforts to support the students, said: 'We received news of the government plans with mixed emotions. On the one hand, relief that indeed there is a shared sense of the importance and urgency of the students' situation – and on the other our hearts sank. What about the rest? We must believe that this is only a start.' Khulud, 28, who has a place at University College London to study for a master's degree in dental health, said: 'Receiving the news about the evacuation today was overwhelming.' The students have been unable to travel and begin their studies because of a Home Office requirement for biometric data for a visa application. The UK-authorised biometrics registration centre in Gaza closed in October 2023 and it has been impossible for them to travel to other centres in neighbouring countries. Other countries, including Italy, Ireland and France, have already evacuated students. It is understood the British government is considering requests for support from other Palestinian students with places at UK universities. 'Through all these struggles, our voices are finally being heard,' said Khulud. 'Nothing we have endured has been in vain. I hope these steps are completed smoothly so that we can join our studies on time.' Of her fellow students who are still waiting, she said: 'I hope their determination is recognised, and that they too receive the support they deserve to continue their studies and achieve their dreams.' Sign up to Headlines UK Get the day's headlines and highlights emailed direct to you every morning after newsletter promotion A government spokesperson said: 'We are working urgently to support Chevening scholars in Gaza who have offers from British universities to leave and take up their places in the UK. 'We are doing everything we can to support their safe exit and onward travel to the UK but the situation on the ground in Gaza makes this extremely challenging.'
Daily Mail
28 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
JOHN MACLEOD: What this Clydeside giant could teach the political pipsqueaks of today
It's a Glasgow shipyard: July 30, 1971. It's muggy, with men everywhere – thousands huddling in around the platform, hanging on Jimmy Reid's every word. Still not 40, assured, fluent, neatly suited and be-tied. Like an achingly cool teacher – and enjoying himself. 'We are not going to strike,' he carols. 'We are not even having a sit-in strike. Nobody and nothing will come in, and nothing will go out, without our permission. 'And there will be no hooliganism, there will be no vandalism, there will be no bevvying' – there is warm laughter – 'because the world is watching us, and it is our responsibility to conduct ourselves with responsibility, with dignity, and maturity.' Jimmy Reid's moment at the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders work-in is still one of Scotland's greatest hits. Up there with Jim Baxter running rings around England's World Cup-winning side. Archie Gemmill's goal in Argentina; Rikki Fulton's Supercop pulling up Taggart himself. The 'work-in' – occasioned because, in 1971, the Heath administration would not advance a £6million loan to keep the yards, with their full order books, ticking through a tight spot – was brilliantly framed. Not your usual strike, occupation or demo. But based on the blazing concept of the right to work, not merely the right not to be made redundant – not just the rights of one riveter, but those of an entire community. In an instant it captured the public's imagination. The likes of Matt McGinn and Billy Connolly rolled into Govan, Scotstoun and Yoker to entertain the lads. Donations poured in from the public. There was even a £5,000 cheque from John Lennon. Trounced in the court of public opinion, Heath blinked first. The government caved – and, thanks to Jimmy Airlie (the strategist) and Jimmy Reid (the rhetorician) two of the yards thrive to this day. Both men were stalwarts of the Communist Party. Indeed, Reid was a Clydebank councillor and, when he stood for Dunbartonshire Central in the February 1974 General Election, many thought he would be our first Communist MP since Willie Gallagher. It was an extraordinary era when, though Labour had many more members in Greater Glasgow, the Communists had far more activists. And – as the men of my late father's blue-collar Free Church congregation often told him (for the most part, wiry Lewismen) Communist shop stewards and officials served them far better than the Labour jobsworths. They listened. They cared. Indeed, they were weirdly Presbyterian. They spoke with the certitude of a preacher; their cadences – and Jimmy Reid, really, was our last great platform orator – echoed the Scottish Metrical Psalms and the King James Bible. Born in Govan in 1932, Reid's formal education ended at 14. He served briefly and unhappily in a stockbroker's office, found his metier as a shipbuilding engineer, joined the League of Labour Youth, and drifted rapidly to the Communist Party even as, bright and curious, he took avidly to lifelong learning. This was a world of dignity and structure that has all but gone. Boys did not just learn a trade; they learned to be men. There was constant discussion and debate, from which sparks flew and leaders emerged. A wider community – some 20,000 supply-chain jobs depended on those shipyards, as well as the 8,000 immediately employed – sat on the shoulders of strong women, family values, corner shops and churchgoing. And a planet away from the graffitied, heroin-addled drear to which much of West-Central Scotland is reduced today. That merry – if dignified – oration was not even Reid's greatest speech. In 1972, he was installed as Rector of Glasgow University. His address would win headlines all over the world and was even printed, verbatim, in the New York Times. 'From the very depth of my being,' Reid declared, 'I challenge the right of any man or any group of men, in business or in government, to tell a fellow human being that he or she is expendable…' His theme was alienation: a warning against blind pursuit of personal success, regardless of the consequences for others. 'Reject these attitudes. Reject the values and false morality that underlie these attitudes. A rat race is for rats. We're not rats. We're human beings. Reject the insidious pressures in society that would blunt your critical faculties to all that is happening around you, that would caution silence in the face of injustice lest you jeopardise your chances of promotion and self-advancement…' It was, someone said, the greatest speech since the Gettysburg Address. Yet only fragments of video and audio survive. This week, Reid's daughter Eileen, 66, has called for it all to be restaged and reinvented digitally, with the aid of artificial intelligence. For all Jimmy's ability, abundant charm and iron-clad integrity, he would never secure a national platform on which to stand. Time and again he lost elections for high union office. He slipped into the Labour Party, and stood against SNP incumbent Gordon Wilson at Dundee East in 1979. But terrified Tories in Broughty Ferry and so on voted tactically for Wilson, dreading anyone straight out of the Communist Party, and Reid was defeated. He would have the ear of Neil Kinnock, but could not win the trust of the wider Scottish Labour movement. He was thought too clever by half; too prone to unpredictable announcements, too thoughtful to be a knee-jerk supporter of every last, fashionable Left-wing cause. In 1984 he slammed the smuggest of union barons for the betrayal of his members: 'Arthur Scargill's leadership of the miners' strike has been a disgrace. The price to be paid for his folly will be immense. 'He will have destroyed the NUM as an effective fighting force within British trade unionism for the next 20 years. If kamikaze pilots were to form their own union, Arthur would be an ideal choice for leader.' It wowed the country – but appalled the comrades. From 1994, disillusioned, Reid moved away from Blair and New Labour. In 2001, he founded the Scottish Left Review; in 2005, he joined the SNP. In August 2010, Reid, 78, was felled by a brain haemorrhage. He was quintessentially a youth of the 1940s. Immaculately groomed, formally dressed and with the poise of Hollywood, Jimmy Reid could have stepped out of a Vettriano painting. Hugh Kerr, sometime Scottish Labour politician, met him for the last time in 2004, when the two addressed a London meeting of United Left MEPs. He recalled: 'At a good lunch afterwards, with his customary brandy and cigar, he said: 'Hugh, you know, there is nothing too good for the working class.' 'For me, he was a deeply human person who loved the good things in life: literature, music and, above all, people.'
Daily Mail
28 minutes ago
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