The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain

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As Ian points out, this mess is ongoing - and people trying to make a living, and carve out a decent life, are dealing with the government's sheer indifference 'all the time'.

and little trains whirred past little stations, rattling over points, past signals, through tunnels and model cuttings. Eyes sparkling, Galland turned to Bader, looking like a small boy having fun. The interpreter said: ‘This is the Herr Oberstleutnant’s favourite place when he is not flying. It is a replica of Reichsmarshal Goering’s railway, but of course the Reichsmarshal’s is much bigger.’ He was political but never polemical, his column-writing notable more for its accumulation of telling detail than the force of his opinions. He never forgot that he was first and foremost a reporter, and he wrote in a way that accorded the reader respect and invariably gave pleasure. He once observed that “good reporters matter in the media above all else, because without them we can never get near to confidently knowing the truth of an event.” She didn’t mention, and too few of us understood, that Caledonian MacBrayne and CalMac Ferries Ltd were different things. The second ran the ferries, the first was a dormant limited company whose intellectual property rights were owned by CMAL. In other words, Caledonian MacBrayne was a brand: it could be sold. The sudden rush of sentiment – that the dear old name might be evicted from its Highland home – was misplaced. The name and the livery could remain, whoever operated the ships: Serco or the sovereign wealth fund of Dubai. No traditions were imperilled, but jobs were at stake. Since the Scottish government decided on the routes, the levels of service and the subsidy, a new franchise-holder had little room to find a profit by cutting costs, other than in the size of the crews and their wages and conditions. When I spoke to him, McColl was keen to point to these as examples of the government ‘rushing … to get [things] out for PR reasons’. But the timing held important benefits for him, too. When he gave evidence to the audit committee seven years later, the convener, the Labour MSP Richard Leonard, suggested to McColl that the announcement of Ferguson’s as the preferred bidder ‘must have strengthened your hand in any negotiations that were taking place’. McColl disagreed: subsequent negotiations had taken longer than he had expected – they had, he implied, been difficult. Leonard pressed him:He started as a trainee journalist at the Glasgow Herald in 1965, before moving to London in 1970 to join the Sunday Times and then joining the team that created the Independent on Sunday, which he edited from 1991 to 1995. He had been a Guardian columnist for the past 15 years.

The cemetery opened in 1859, when the dead of Port Glasgow outgrew their old kirkyards and could no longer be dependably counted as Presbyterians. Generations of shipyard workers have been buried here, their lives often shortened by too many shifts in the cold and rain, or squalid housing, or too much drink, or a more 20th-century condition, mesothelioma, which is caused by exposure to asbestos and has a particular prevalence in old shipbuilding towns. But as the draughtman said, ‘it’s not just bodies that die, the skills and the memory of the skills die with them.’ Spencer never seems to have considered that aspect of the resurrection: that it would be useful as well as joyful, this rebirth of so much skill in a land that had lost it. It was pleasant to imagine the resurrected brushing off the earth and reaching for their tools, the just with the unjust, the welder with the fitter, the draughtsman and the joiner, the hauder-on and the putter-in. Chancellor, Alexander (27 August 2011). "Diary – Alexander Chancellor". The Spectator . Retrieved 29 October 2022. But that came later. In 2015, the news was good. Travelling by train through Port Glasgow, I would look out at its familiar landmarks: the abandoned tenements, the long-closed ropeworks where my cousin Margaret used to work, the near derelict hotel where in 1964 I danced at her wedding. Among these dim memorials, how could a reinvigorated shipyard with an ambitious industrialist at its helm be anything other than cheering? Oliver Luft (28 November 2008). "Timeline: a history of the Independent newspapers – from City Road to Kensington via 'Reservoir Dogs' | Media". The Guardian . Retrieved 20 March 2016.Janet Malcolm. "The Journalist and the Murderer | What's New". Granta Books . Retrieved 20 March 2016.

He was born in Lancashire, but his Scottish parents returned to North Queensferry when he was seven. He started work as a trainee journalist at the Glasgow Herald in 1965. Like Weir Pumps, Clyde Blowers had its origins in steam technology. It manufactured a device that could blow soot from the boilers of steam engines – in locomotives, ships, factories and power stations – without the boilers having to be shut down. The ship or the factory could continue, the flow of steam to its engines unaffected. ‘Most of the Clyde-built ships had Clyde Blowers in them, including the royal yacht Britannia,’ McColl told me when I spoke to him in May, although by the time he bought the company its focus had shifted to coal-fired power stations. In 1992, it was the smallest of eight similar firms scattered across the world. In the following five years, McColl bought six of the other seven. ‘We ended up with 60 per cent of the world market and that included a very big market in China, where we set up a very successful factory,’ he said. ‘When I bought Clyde Blowers we were making 600 soot blowers a year. When we sold the Chinese factory, it was doing 6000 a month.’ truly began to pervade the national consciousness. It filled doomy books ... It became a melodramatic staple for newspapers, magazines and television programmes. It darkened the work of artists, novelists, dramatists, film-makers and pop musicians. It soured foreign commentary on Britain ... And it shifted in tone; from the anxious to the apocalyptic. He wrote for the Observer and Vanity Fair before joining the team that created the Independent on Sunday, which he edited from 1991 to 1995. From there he moved to the editor’s chair at literary magazine Granta, where he remained until 2007. His departure from the Independent on Sunday meant no more Fleet Street: he went to edit the literary magazine Granta, itself an exercise in the long form, where new writing flourished. Under Ian, from 1995 to 2007, the writers included Monica Ali, AL Kennedy, Andrew O’Hagan and Zadie Smith, still flourishing.He won a number of accolades throughout his career, including reporter of the year at the British Press awards in 1988 and editor of the year at Newspaper Industry awards in 1993. Nettles, willowherbs, brambles: nothing suggested that ocean-going tablecloths had once been woven there or a girl's cheese sandwiches had warmed on the hob. In 1959, Mathewson's end hadn't been so long ago – 1930 was closer to 1959 than 1959 is to now – but such complete ruination, weeds replacing work, was one of the things that made my parents and so many others of that place and generation seem like survivors from a previous British age. Of course, nobody then had any idea of how much of this there was to come.