END OF WELSH UTOPIA

REVIEWED Graham Humphrys 'South Wales' in the 'Industrial Britain' series ends on the now-familiar and therefore tedious plea for more investment in the principality.

He couples it with an equally-tedious "Plan plea for yet another involving a complicated "shuffle' of service industry personnel out of south-east Wales to the west to make room for other office workers lured to the area from London.

Prudent, government-guided investment, mainly light manufacturing and mainly on Severnside, would open up a 'new era of success and prosperity for the region' There is nothing original in this. Successive governments and the Welsh lobby have been urging the same thing since Wales was first given special area status in 1946.

The only difference is that this Utopian pipe-dream is being peddled in vastly different circumstances today. It is not merely that notions of restructuring have less chance of pulling regional economies out of the mire-there is no chance.

One of the few merits of Humphrys' book, which could feasibly be ended at two expanded first chapters, is that it shows, unintentionally but plainly, that in South Wales restructuring and modernization has shot its bolt. character aragerat sign fanne for the under capitalism, 90 per cent of the rationalization of coal, steel, railways, bus services, police, fire-fighting units, schools and hospitals was ruthlessly carried out by state industries or public bodies.

Of 300 pits taken over by the Labour government after the war, in 1970 only 52 remained employing less than 40,000 of the original 100,000 miners.

Of 20 small steelworks and 20 small tinplate works taken over in 1946, only five and one respectively are left, augmented by two new steel works turning out 75 per cent of the region's total output.

If anything, this process was intensified by the 1964 Labour government and local Labour and trade union bureaucrats have connived at massive closures and redundancies over the years almost without even a whisper.

Without workers' control and outside a socialist economy, successive government's OOVER SOLUTION A Tory ex-councillor and leading Midland Orangeman has revealed that he is arranging for guns and money to be sent to Protestant extremists in Ulster if the need should arise'.

Sidney Forster is visiting Northern Ireland to meet heads of the Ulster Defence Association to plan the operation. He also declared that UDA sympathizers could start drilling In Birmingham to go to the province if necessary.

He said one of the men who had offered money for arms was another Birmingham excity councillor.

Forster is an honorary deputy grand master of the Loyal Orange Institute of England and treasurer of the institute's West Midlands Province. He made clear in an interview with the 'Birmingham Post' that his weaponcollecting activity would be done in his capacity as an Ulster Loyalist, not as an Orangeman.

There were, he said, men drilling in Liverpool and Gla: gow to go to Ulster if necessary; on a smaller scale, this , could be organized in Birmingham.

'Don't forget, Birmingham drilled in a hall I won't name in 1912, in Carson's time. There is a movement to start again if the need arises.' And his 'solution' for Ulster?

'Either the British army must put an end to the no-go areas, or it must move out and leave it to the Protestants.' In many parts of the country a That'll teach tr try to undermine ation! !

SILENCE One of the features of the present economic crisis is the spirited attempts by some financial writers still to maintain that things aren't as bad as they seem. Well, although the hacks might be unaware of the crisis, the investors certainly are not.

Do you realize, for example, that last week the London stock market had its quietest trading for 16 months. It was the lowest for a normal five-day trading since the despondency which hit the market in the aftermath of the RollsRoyce collapse.

BREAK There have been a number of mysterious getaways from Prince George's county jail in Maryland, USA. But Sheriff Don Ansell has just 'modernized' one special cell. The windows have been replaced with steel plate. Who is the celebrity being penned there? Arthur Bremer, the man accused of shooting George Wallace. He's one that the Maryland cops won't let get out. NEW PATTERN The £320m Joseph Lucas group is to import a comprehensive range of electrical parts for Continental cars in liz-