Blond from Blond

Posting about the Continental cinema in Egremont (or Liscard - the place was on the border of the two districts as I recall) in Wallasey yesterday spurred me to check on the Web some other adolescent memories. I had been told that the traditional Continental was owned by the same man as had built our local lovely little Phoenix cinema. This had replaced the Cosmo, destroyed by a stray WWII German bomb (Wallasey suffered some collateral damage from German attacks on the docks in Liverpool and Birkenhead).

It turned out that my memories were only part of the story. The Cosmo had been renamed, and was the Coliseum when the bomb hit it. It had not been totally destroyed, and the Phoenix rebuild had made use of the side walls which had remained standing. The chain of cinemas was more than just the two in Wallasey, being based in Hope Street, Liverpool and the property of Leslie Blond. It has been difficult to find much about this man, who is said to have brought art-house cinema to Merseyside. At one time, Leslie Blond and Associates may have owned around ten cinemas, including the Everyman which has had a more famous afterlife as a theatre. It was Blond who coined the name (it was previously the Hope Hall cinema) after the Everyman in Hampstead. It appears that he exited the cinema business at the right time, because the family charity has a multi-million pound turnover. I would love to know more about this intriguing character.

His grandson Phillip is as fascinating, as this Liverpool Echo article shows. He is clearly in a tradition of "one-nation Tories" going back to Iain Macleod, who coined the term, and before Macleod to Disraeli, Churchill and Macmillan. One wonders whether, with the increasing power of reaction within the Conservative party he might be happier talking to the Lib Dems. He is firmly against a break with the European Union, for instance, as this piece on the web-site of his ResPublica think tank demonstrates. Published four months after the 2016 referendum, it is in parts prophetic:

Despite appearances all is not yet lost, I suspect that Brexit will be hugely damaging economically for both the UK and the EU. At the moment Britain has not yet left and the fall in the pound (while welcome on many levels) is but an early indicator. I think foreign direct investment will fall and jobs (especially in the areas that voted to leave) will go. By the same token Brexit will prove very damaging to the long term financial stability of the EU and it may tip the disastrous Euro experiment into full meltdown.

In the event, the euro has been affected, but not by as much as the pound has suffered. So far, the EU's finances have remained stable. However, I would agree with a point that he also makes in the article that the EU (including the UK) needs to take collective and more discriminating action over immigration than individual nations have shown so far.