"But Chinese fireworks are easily available and cheaper than we could ever make them. The market has been flooded."Yet despite the slump in UK fireworks production, sales remain buoyant, with an estimated 130 million fireworks, worth around pounds 50m, sold last year.Kimbolton Fireworks can no longer make shop fireworks profitably and instead concentrates on displays, many of which are high-level affairs. The vast majority of rockets, roman candles and Catherine-wheels are made abroad, mostly in China. Only one British firm continues to manufacture fireworks for sale in this country. There is concern that the increasing numbers of foreign fireworks flooding the UK are compromising safety standards. The remaining British fireworks manufacturers blame government legislation and cheap labour costs in the Far East for the demise of their domestic competitors. Tighter age restrictions on sales and the deregulation of the fireworks market in 1995, which removed the need for a specialist licence to import fireworks, have increased pressure on a fragile business."It's a tragedy that there are no other British firms," said the Rev Ronald Lancaster, the managing director of Cambridgeshire-based Kimbolton Fireworks, a family business which employs 30.

THURSDAY'S celebration of the foiling of Guy Fawkes's attempt to blow up Parliament will barely be British this year. The fireworks industry once provided manufacturing jobs for thousands in the UK, but now directly employs just 30 people. The company only backed down after intervention from the Japanese Embassy and the Royal British Legion.. Yet the monument two years ago was "disgustingly vandalised and allowed to run down", Mr Davidson said.In other attacks, the head was smashed from a statue in Richmond, and a copper scroll was stolen from a memorial in Hucknall, Nottinghamshire.The group has worked with probation authorities in 11 counties, encouraging the use of community-service orders to clean up monuments. In Yorkshire, the Royal British Legion co-ordinates the work.The way changed circumstances can jeopardise a war memorial was highlighted in 1995, when the Japanese owners of County Hal, in London banned veterans from the building's war memorial.

And the Friends' catalogue of cases illustrates the neglect.This year youths defaced a war memorial in Tullibody, near Stirling, although their parents cleaned up the damage. The Heroes' Shrine at Aldershot, heartland of the British Army, is less than a mile from part of the main garrison. Hundreds of plaques disappeared during railway-line closures in the Sixties, Mr Davidson said.The group has rescued several memorials which are kept at the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, home to many veterans. So many have just disappeared," said Ian Davidson, an ex-marine and founder of Friends of War Memorials "The bronze and brass of the plaques are immaterial It's the names we are concerned about. These people gave their lives."They include plaques and memorials in police stations, churches and factories, which were forgotten when the buildings closed. Monuments and plaques bearing the names of war dead have been discovered in skips and scrapyards.

Thieves also prize them as items to be sold as garden sculpture"War memorials are being damaged and stolen left, right and centre. Most were erected after the First World War, which ended 80 years ago this year, and there are more than 1,000 recalling the Boer War. Three years ago the Friends of War Memorials was founded to clean up and repair the memorials, but despite its efforts, including the recruitment of convicted juvenile offenders, the relentless vandalism continues.Some have been daubed with graffiti, bayonets of soldiers cast in bronze have been snapped off, and other monuments have been taken and melted down. The Imperial War Museum has catalogued 27,000 war memorials across the UK, although it is believed the total, including those yet to be identified, could be around 60,000. While town- centre war memorials, where people will lay their poppy wreaths next Sunday, are mostly well-kept, others are being vandalised, stolen or left to decay, writes Mark Rowe. A CHARITY which repairs memorials to Britain's war dead is struggling to cope with the growing desecration of military monuments. Total bailiff costs for clearing the route of the BNRR are likely to exceed pounds 17,000 a day, and the eviction could take many weeks.Another company, Richard Turner Ltd of Chesterfield, provides climbers to help remove protesters isolated high in trees or on flying walkways.But Mr Turner said he feared his highly lucrative niche could itself be in danger, because the Government's decision to suspend or cancel many of the biggest road schemes meant the era of the direct action anti- road protest was closing."This [the BNRR protest] is the last of the big ones," he said.Work on the 27-mile BNRR, linking the M6 at Cannock, Staffordshire, and the M42 at Coleshill, Warwickshire, is due to start next year and motorists will have to pay pounds 2.50 to use it.The road is designed to ease congestion on the M6, but protesters say it will cut a huge swathe through greenbelt countryside, cross two protected nature sites, destroy scores of homes, blight many others and threaten local jobs.. Authorities spend millions of pounds dislodging the environmental activists from fortified tree houses and underground bolt holes Their specialists can earn up to pounds 850 a day apiece.

But other protesters claim they can be threatening and abusive.The "Men in Black" are recruited by a secretive company named Specialist Group International, based in Redhill, Surrey, which is headed by another former military man, Peter Fauldings. Several companies have capitalised on the recent big anti-road protests. We tell them we are defending our country and we ask if they are." He said the "Men in Black" were committed to safety and non-violence. Incumbents could rest easy; challengers had little hope. Even with the whole House of Representatives up for re-election (all 435 members), one-third of the Senate (34 seats) and 36 state governors, relatively few contests seemed close.