Jimmy Reid, 78, Communist shop steward saved Clyde shipyards, branded Arthur Scargill 'a disgrace’ [telegraph.co.uk]
Hoodoo
Jimmy Reid, who died on Tuesday aged 78, was the Communist shop steward
who, with his colleague Jimmy Airlie, led the work-in at Upper Clyde
Shipbuilders in 1971-72 that forced Edward Heath’s government to abandon
its policy of letting “lame duck” industries go to the wall; the highly
articulate Reid later switched to the Labour Party before throwing in
his lot with the SNP.
Published: 5:57PM BST 11 Aug 2010
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/politics-obituaries/7939512/Jimmy-Reid.html
http://i.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/01694/reid_1694932c.jpg
Reid was the last of the great Communist trade union leaders
The publicly-owned UCS, formed by Tony Benn in 1968 through a merger of
five yards, got into debt and went into receivership in June 1971 when
ministers refused it a £6 million loan. There were calls for a strike,
but Reid and Airlie persuaded the 8,000 workers to stay at their jobs to
prove the yards were viable, rather than let the government padlock the
gates.
“We are not going to strike,” Reid declared. “We are taking over the
yards because we refuse to accept that faceless men can make these
decisions. We are not strikers — we are responsible people and we will
conduct ourselves with dignity and discipline.” He told the workers
there would be no hooliganism, no vandalism and — a phrase that
reverberated round Clydeside — “nae bevvying”.
The work-in struck a chord with the Scottish public, and beyond. Sixty
thousand marched through Glasgow in support, and the Scottish Daily
Express gave friendly coverage. Billy Connolly and Matt McGinn, both
former shipyard workers, entertained the protesters, and a cheque for
£5,000 arrived from John Lennon; one rather deaf shop steward commented:
“It canna be Lenin — he’s deid.” Even one Conservative association
contributed.
Reid and Airlie kept the men working until, in February 1972, Heath
backed down, announcing a £35 million injection into three of the yards:
Govan, Scotstoun and Clydebank. The first two are still building ships
today, as part of BAE Systems.
The UCS work-in not only contributed to Heath’s “U-turn”; it also
heightened economic nationalism in Scotland, accelerated the fall in
Conservative support north of the border and turned Benn from a moderate
radical into a supporter of union militancy, with serious consequences
for the Labour Party. Reid himself later accused Benn of having had
“more conversions on the road to Damascus than a Syrian long-distance
truck driver”.
Jimmy Reid was born at Govan on July 9 1932. He left school at 14 to
work in the yards and led his first strike, of engineering apprentices,
aged 19; before long he was a shop steward. Initially a Labour
supporter, he cut his teeth on rent strikes in Govan, joined the Young
Communist League (serving on its executive with Arthur Scargill) and
became a Clydebank councillor.
Reid came out of the work-in as shop stewards’ convener at the Marathon
rig-building yard, Clydebank — which he remained for several years
despite being a national figure. During the work-in he defeated two
popular Scottish politicians, Peggy Herbison and Teddy Taylor, to become
rector of Glasgow University; his rectorial speech declaring that “the
rat race is for rats” was rated by the New York Times one of the finest
speeches since the Gettysburg address.
In the February 1974 election Reid polled a record vote for a Communist
candidate in modern times: 5,928 in Central Dunbartonshire, finishing
third to Labour’s Hugh McCartney. The campaign was bitter, Reid
denouncing the local Labour machine, with its strong ties to the
Catholic Church, as “Falangists”. In that October’s further election,
with the SNP on a high, his vote fell back to 3,417.
Clydebank’s Labour councillors tried to unseat Reid for not attending
meetings; he fought back, accusing them of corruption, drunkenness and
being Tammany Hall-style politicians interested only in status.
Reid now set his sights on succeeding the Left-winger Hugh Scanlon as
president of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers. But in
September 1975 he was comfortably beaten for the Scottish seat on the
union executive by the moderate Gavin Laird. Then he was defeated by
just 81 votes in a ballot for the union’s Scottish regional officer. He
stayed on the AUEW’s national committee, where he accused other unions
of acting like “industrial pimps” by negotiating redundancies rather
than mobilising to save jobs.
In 1976 he quit the Communist Party — a “heart-wrenching decision” — in
protest at its rigid laying-down of policy, saying: “The Left should be
the custodians of democracy.” Eighteen months later he applied to join
the Labour Party. His local branch, recalling his earlier jibes,
rejected him but the Central Dunbartonshire constituency let him in. He
immediately proved his worth by swinging votes to Donald Dewar in a
by-election at Garscadden that Labour looked set to lose.
In June 1978 he was selected as candidate for Dundee East, a
traditionally Labour seat which the SNP had taken in 1974 by 6,933
votes. Labour’s national executive had to bend a rule requiring
candidates to have belonged to the party for two years. When the 1979
election came he pulled back some support to Labour, but with some
Tories switching to the SNP to keep him out he lost by 2,519 votes.
In the party strife that followed Labour’s defeat by Margaret Thatcher,
Reid allied himself with the Bennite Left. Indeed, he was the framer at
the start of 1981 of a “manifesto” that coincidentally became the
platform for Benn’s challenge for the deputy leadership.
By now he had left the yards for journalism, writing for the Daily
Mirror, Glasgow Herald, Sun and Scotsman and launching the short-lived
Seven Days Scotland. Reid presented a chat show for Grampian Television,
and a Channel 4 series on life behind the Iron Curtain.
His most memorable broadcast was for Channel 4, in the early evening
comment slot, when he attacked Arthur Scargill over the miners’ strike
in a way few who heard him will ever forget.
Not a man to mince his words, Reid accused Scargill of betraying his
members: “Arthur Scargill’s leadership of the miners’ strike has been a
disgrace. The price to be paid for his folly will be immense. He will
have destroyed the NUM as an effective fighting force within British
trade unionism for the next 20 years. If kamikaze pilots were to form
their own union, Arthur would be an ideal choice for leader.”
While he could readily see fault in former comrades, Reid disapproved of
Labour’s moves under Neil Kinnock to recapture the middle ground. After
its failure to regain power in 1992, he observed: “During the recent
election it was easier to spot the ball than spot a trade union boss on
a Labour Party platform.”
Reid supported Labour up to the 1997 election, but became an early
critic of Tony Blair, urging the unions to stop funding Labour and
encouraging voters to support the SNP or the Trotskyist Scottish
Socialist Party. In 2001, to encourage alternative thinking, he helped
launch the Scottish Left Review.
In April 2005 he joined the SNP, inspired by Alex Salmond’s return from
Westminster to lead it. “When New Labour came to power we got a
Right-wing Conservative government,” he commented. “I came to realise
that voting Labour wasn’t in Scotland’s interests any more.” Later he
added: “Any doubt I had about that was cast aside for ever when I saw
Gordon Brown cosying up to Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street.” He
played a part in the Glasgow East by-election of July 2008, when the SNP
captured one of Labour’s safest strongholds.
Reid published his memoirs, Jimmy Reid: Reflections of a Clyde-built
Man, in 1976. Latterly he lived on the isle of Bute.
Jimmy Reid’s wife, Joan, remained in the Communist Party for a while
after he left it; she and their three daughters survive him.
--
ROY LIEBERMAN,
who may be seen at
<http://www.surfwriter.net/roy%27s_world.htm>,
is a LIAR.
Hoodoo
Scottish trade unionist who led the successful work-in at the Upper
Clyde shipyard
Brian Wilson
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 11 August 2010 19.17 BST
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/aug/11/jimmy-reid-obituary
http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2010/8/11/1281548021380/UCS-SHOP-STEWARDS-PRESS-C-006.jpg
UCS SHOP STEWARDS PRESS CONFERENCE Jimmy Reid (front left) and Jimmy
Airlie (right), both stalwarts of the Communist party, address the press
in 1971 at the height of the shipyard dispute
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
Hoodoo
Clyde which reversed government policy on the docks
Thursday, 12 August 2010
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/jimmy-reid-inspirational-trade-unionist-who-led-the-workin-at-upper-clyde-which-reversed-government-policy-on-the-docks-2049987.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00430/pg-8-reid-pa_430195s.jpg
Jimmy Reid gripped the nation's imagination when he became the public
face of working class opposition to Conservative Party policies in the
early 1970s. Along with his friend and colleague Jimmy Airlie he led the
"work-in" at the Upper Clyde shipyards in 1971 and 1972 which helped
reverse the government's decision to close the yards.
The Amalgamated Engineering Union in those days had developed a
"two-party system" of left and right. Even the right-wing general
secretaries, Jim Conway from 1964-75 and Sir John Boyd from 1975-1982,
exasperated though they might have been, developed a respect for the
left wing of the union. In turn the left-wingers like Hugh Scanlon and
his young Clydeside friends also developed respect for the tradition of
the right. This meant that the union was a formidable force. Tony Benn
told me yesterday that Jimmy Reid inspired the work-in and by his
oratory created worldwide interest, with vivid pictures of him
addressing mass rallies on Clydeside.
The ideas of Reid and Airlie were not only anathema to the government of
Ted Heath, but also at first to Harold Wilson. Benn recalls that as a
shadow cabinet minister who had been minister of technology, a huge
government department, he went to Clydeside and pledged his support.
"Harold was furious," Benn told me, "but then decided that he had better
go up to Clydeside himself and see what was happening rather than rely
on political colleagues such as the Shadow Secretary of State for
Scotland, William Ross. The ex-prime minister, by then leader of the
opposition, changed his tune and realised that the work-in led by Reid
and Airlie was an extremely important event."
What Reid had done was to initiate a form of constructive protest which
was far more difficult for governments to deal with than simply walking
out away from the job. The hallmark of what Reid said in his moving
speeches was that the dignity of workers demanded discipline and that it
was their duty to continue production as far as they were able to do so.
This attitude at the time was novel, and made a tremendous impression
among those who would normally have been quick to condemn strike action.
Reid, always a generous man, repeated time and again that the organising
brains were that of his friend Airlie, who in 1983 was to become the
executive member of the AUEW responsible for Scotland. But it was Reid
who supplied the necessary ingredient of oratory. He was far too
intelligent ever to be a ranter and that was what gave him such a
lasting impact. Years later, when Upper Clyde shipbuilding had ceased to
exist, the memory of what Reid had set in motion became indelible in the
history of the trade union movement.
I go back a long, long way with Jimmy Reid. In 1962 as Labour candidate
at a by-election in West Lothian, I was opposed by the charming and able
communist nurse, Irene Swan. At one of the hustings her supporting
speaker was the young Jimmy Reid, then secretary of the Young Communist
League, but well known in Scotland at that time for having led a much
publicised strike of apprentices in the shipyards of the Clyde. After
the hustings Swan and Reid came to talk to me and apologised for
standing against me. "We would not have stood against you if we thought
that there was any chance of your losing to the Tories," Reid told me,
"but we think that it is our duty to the [communist] Party to stand in
this democratic election." All his life Reid was personally courteous to
those with whom he disagreed.
Some 40 years later my wife and I were invited to his 70th birthday
hosted by himself and his ever-supportive wife, Joan, at the golf club
at Haggs Castle in Glasgow. We found a number of guests who we never
expected to see at the festivities of a great left-wing tribune. It
revealed his capacity for friendship across political divides and the
interests he displayed in cultural matters – far beyond those that might
be expected of one who to so many was undeservedly a left-wing bogeyman.
At the 1964 general election I was opposed by Gordon MacLennan, later
general secretary of the British Communist Party. Reid again came as
supporting speaker and in conversation afterwards told me in very polite
terms what he expected of the 1964 Labour Government. He was deeply
serious and thoughtful and emphasised that in his opinion youth
unemployment was a sin. However it was only later that he was to join
the Labour Party.
One of the proofs that Reid was his own person was the huge anger he
displayed against what he saw as the recklessness and foolishness of
Arthur Scargill during the miners' strike. In 1959 Reid, as secretary of
the Young Communist League, was one of those involved in a summer school
attended by Scargill as a young man from the Yorkshire coalfield.
Reid recalled: "I have got no recollections of thinking, 'this is of
great potential politically'. Scargill wasn't on very long. I cannot
remember any significant contribution." The one thing he could remember
was Scargill's passion for cars. "Scargill has always been fascinated
with big cars," he told me with a smile. "He had bought a second-hand
Jaguar and couldn't afford to run it." Reid added that Scargill's
fascination did not evidently run to orthodox communist theory. "I have
never seen Arthur Scargill, while he was in the YCL or subsequently,
revealing any evidence of having studied Marx."
In 1984 there was a huge fall-out between the two ex-comrades. Reid made
the interesting parallel between Scargill and Mrs Thatcher. "Those two
deserve one another," he told me. "She has closed her mind to the
possibility of being wrong; Scargill never admitted to having any doubts
at all. He has that frightening certitude, like Mrs Thatcher. Although
they are both apparently poles apart, politically, philosophically and
ideologically, they are both dogmatists. The difference is that she has
the whole state machine at her disposal."
In a devastating critique that confirmed the total political break with
his former comrade, published some weeks before the end of the miners'
strike, Reid wrote: "I reject the notion that Scargill is leading some
crusade against Thatcherite Toryism. Beneath the rhetoric Scargillism
and Thatcherism are political allies. I would put it this way: the
political spectrum is not linear but circular. In my experience the
extreme left always ends up rubbing shoulders with the extreme right.
They are philosophically blood brothers."
Things might have been different, Reid believed. He said, "If only the
manipulative Joe Gormley, president of the NUM, had allowed himself to
be succeeded by Mick McGahey and not the hot-headed Arthur Scargill, the
miners would have had more success and the British coal industry would
have been saved. Whatever you think of the old communusts, they
understood discipline, and what was possible and what would end in failure."
In 1979 he contested for Labour the Dundee East seat held by the
parliamentary leader of the SNP, Gordon Wilson. Unexpectedly, because
the SNP lost 10 seats that year, Reid went down by 20,497 votes to
17,978 with the Conservatives gaining 9,072, and the Liberals 2,317.
In the 1980s I and others tried to persuade Reid to put himself forward
again as a Labour candidate. He declined, partly because he wanted to
remain with his family in Scotland and partly because he had become an
extremely good and well-read columnist. Harry Reid (no relation), one of
the great editors of the Glasgow Herald, for whom Jimmy wrote a column
and was television critic, told me: "Jimmy had the Glasgow way with
words: he could make you laugh and cry and think in one sentence.
Admittedly, he was sometimes fancy-free with the facts."
Reid remained a cult figure and was elected by the students as rector of
Glasgow University. His rectorial address was hailed by the New York
Times, who printed it in full, as "the greatest speech since the
Gettysburg Address"
"A rat race is for rats," Reid said in his speech. "We're not rats.
We're human beings. Reject the insidious pressures in society that would
blunt your critical faculties to all that is happening around you, that
would caution silence in the face of injustice, lest you jeopardise your
chances of self-promotion and self-advancement. This is how it starts
and, before you know where you are, you're a fully paid-up member of the
rat pack. The price is too high. It entails the loss of your dignity and
human spirit. Or as Christ puts it, 'What does it profit a man if he
gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?'"
In the evening of his life Reid was a fierce opponent of the war in Iraq
and warned that no good would come of military involvement in
Afghanistan. It was partly on account of his exasperation with New
Labour, particularly on foreign policy, that he left the Labour Party
and in 2005 became a card-carrying member of the Scottish National
Party. This in no way injured the friendship that many of us in the
Labour Party had towards him. He was a human being enormously
intelligent, and lovely in his personal relations.
Tam Dalyell
James Reid, trade union activist, politician, journalist and
broadcaster: born Govan 9 July 1932; married Joan Swankie (three
daughters); died Greenock 10 August 2010.