Jimmy Reid's funeral

[faceless]

Jimmy Reid
Scottish trade unionist who led the successful work-in at the Upper Clyde shipyard
Brian Wilson
guardian.co.uk,
11 August 2010

The Scottish trade unionist Jimmy Reid, who has died at the age of 78, will for ever be associated in labour history with the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS) occupation and work-in of 1971-72. It was an event that galvanised working-class consciousness, challenged political moralities and haunted the premiership of Edward Heath. It is difficult to overstate the status that Reid achieved at this time. One of the last great platform orators, he had the ability to convey trade union demands in terms that invoked ethical values and Christian imperatives. This rewarded him with a galaxy of admirers who were more than willing to overlook the fact that he was also an executive member of the British Communist party.

Indeed, Reid's communism reinforced his popular image as a man of unswerving principle, rather than just another politician or trade union leader. Middle-class observers would pronounce him a saint, in the wake of another oratorical tour de force which invoked the Sermon on the Mount or invited them to ponder what it would profit a man that he should gain the whole world and lose his own soul.

When, in the wake of the UCS triumph, as he swept into the elected rectorship of Glasgow University, his rectorial address was printed in its entirety by the New York Times, which compared it favourably to the speeches of Abraham Lincoln. "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."

The Conservative government that came to power in June 1970 had decided that the cost of subsidising shipbuilding on the Clyde could no longer be sustained. By June 1971, UCS had debts of £28m. It was an amalgam of five yards, and Reid worked as an engineer in the most famous, John Brown's, birthplace of the great Cunarders.

Though relative roles would long be disputed, two men emerged as leaders of the campaign in the public arena – Jimmy Airlie and Jimmy Reid, both stalwarts of the Communist party. In general terms, Airlie was the strategist and Reid the rhetorician. The idea of a work-in was very different from the traditional response of strikes or occupations. It was based on the brilliant concept of the right to work, rather than simply the right not to be made redundant. A campaign based around the fate of whole communities proved so effective that by October 1972 it was clear that the Heath government had caved in, and shipbuilding on the Clyde survives down to the present.

Born in the Gorbals, on the south bank of the river, the son of a shipyard worker father, Reid left school at 14 and served a very brief stint in a stockbroker's office. Then he became a shipyard engineer, involved in the apprentices strike of 1960, joined the League of Labour Youth and gravitated quickly towards the Communist party, at the time a major force in industrial Scotland.

Reid's uneasy relationship with the Communist party, where some distrusted his ideological flexibility, predated UCS, but soon came to a head. Already a Communist councillor in Clydebank, he contested West Dunbartonshire, which included the town, in the Communist interest in February 1974, and was widely expected, at least outside the area, to become the party's first MP since Willie Gallagher. In fact, while polling creditably, he was soundly beaten and responded with a vehement speech in which he denounced some of his Labour opponents as Falangists.

Nonetheless, he went on to join the Labour party, and in 1979 stood unsuccessfully in Dundee East against the then leader of the Scottish National party, Gordon Wilson. Reid became close to the leadership of Neil Kinnock, from 1983 onwards, but there was a huge element of mutual distrust between him and a large section of the party in Scotland, which was regularly fuelled by his increasingly unpredictable pronouncements in the media, in both the press and on television.

Part of the difficulty was that Reid was far too intellectually and politically astute to become a kneejerk supporter of all fashionable leftwing causes. He understood the dire predicament of Labour in the early 1980s, and identified the need to regroup rather than constantly look for fresh battles to lose. However, his bitter criticism of the conduct of the miners' strike of 1984-85 and the leadership of Arthur Scargill was regarded by many of his old comrades as an apostasy too far. Mick McGahey branded him "Broken Reid".

Reid's uncomfortable association with Labour came to an abrupt conclusion after Tony Blair took over as leader in 1994. Reid retired to Rothesay, on the Isle of Bute, west of Glasgow, and continued to write and comment while emerging regularly to pursue his myriad interests, ranging from jazz, on which he was profoundly knowledgeable, to support for the Scotland football team. He really was a renaissance man, brought up in the best traditions of the self-educated working class. In 2005 he announced that he had joined the Scottish National party.

Asked in 1979 to comment on Hugh Scanlon's acceptance of a peerage, Reid replied that Scanlon's life should not be judged on "a bit here and a bit there but in its entirety". Reid himself is worthy of that same respect. Few individuals in the political or trade union arena over the past century have raised so many spirits, challenged so many assumptions or offered more vivid glimpses of a different social order. He is survived by his wife, Joan, and three daughters, Eileen, Shona and Julie.

Geoffrey Goodman writes: For a man who possessed the unique qualities of an outstanding political leader, an exceptional humanist poet and compelling orator, the baffling thing about Jimmy Reid is that he never occupied a formal leadership job. Everything Jimmy touched was briefly turned to gold, and then – his unrivalled talents notwithstanding – slipped away in the absence of that crucial essential, a national platform.

We worked briefly together when Robert Maxwell tried to persuade him to become a regular columnist on the Daily Mirror, but he found working with Maxwell impossible. Jimmy was a revolutionary who always found it essential to question everything around him, including his own deepest convictions.

My last meeting with this quite extraordinary man came a few years ago, at the 80th birthday party of a mutual socialist friend. We stayed up until 4am reflecting on the frailties of any revolution in pursuit of perfection. It was Jimmy at his wonderful, incomparable best – an irreplaceable character from a special breed of working-class heroes.

• Jimmy Reid, trade unionist and journalist, born 9 July 1932; died 10 August 2010

--------------

He was a bit before my time, but I'll need to get hold of these speeches mentioned in the video.