Dancing with a stranger
Kenneth Roy
A woman has died, and with her the last hope of solving a legendary Glasgow murder
Also on this page:
Bob’s People
The horse that bolted
The speech of his life
Chik Collins
on the greatest oratory of Jimmy Reid: not the rectorial address
Also on this page:
The Cafe
Stewart Hendry and Mike Bailey
A juicy story
David Harvie
How it was discovered that lemons are good for you
Also on this page:
The Cafe
David Mackenzie and
Miller Caldwell
Transferable skulls
Robin Downie
Can we all be managed in the great cause of efficiency?
Also on this page:
Rear Window
Ian Mackenzie on a man who
broke all the rules
The Cafe
Sorry but I don’t get why the presence of Ed Miliband at Jimmy Reid’s funeral impressed Kenneth Roy so much. Tony Blair was at John Smith’s funeral and look how he turned out. Admittedly Blair was caught on camera looking around for who to impress next. Maybe Ed is a more balanced person than Tony, in fact I think that to be the case.
Kenneth points to Ed going out with the people on the street, but that could be compared to kissing babies. Perhaps uncharitable, however. Any politician of his standing would know what he was doing and all in the public eye. Maybe he’s a better operator than our Tony.
So far all I can say from my observations of the two brothers is that Ed seems to have better people skills, possibly the more relaxed of the two.
On ‘Call Kaye’ this morning Brian Taylor’s explanation of ‘Ed getting Scotland’ was that he understood that the leader of Labour in Holyrood should be made the leader of the party in Scotland. Some might say that this showed he was more interested in the Labour Party’s appeal to the voters than anything that would be beneficial to Scotland.
Stewart Hendry
In Scottish Review (SR 308) Jill Stephenson writes:
What used to exercise me rather more was the practice in some French towns of placing loudspeakers high on walls on town-centre streets and playing either pop music or muzak through them. Compulsory listening to the kind of thing that I would not listen to voluntarily seemed intolerable. Thank goodness we do not seem to have gone down that road here (yet).
Sadly, we have gone a fair way down that road with branches of the Bank of Scotland providing ‘background music’ in their open-plan banking halls to ‘ensure privacy while transacting your business’.
I complain at every visit, to no avail.
Mike Bailey
The speech of his life
Chik Collins
Jimmy Reid by Bob Smith
In the mid-1980s, as a student at what was then Paisley Tech, I got interested in the role of language in social and particularly political change. In search of some relevant case to examine, I turned my attention to the UCS work-in of 1971-72.
John Foster and Charles Woolfson were then about to publish what remains the definitive account of that event – ‘The Politics of the UCS Work-In’. They were suggesting that the language of the shop stewards who led the work-in – particularly a certain Jimmy Reid – had played a vital role, not just in a government abandoning its plans to close some famous shipyards, but in its abandonment of a whole (neo-liberal) policy agenda.
This was Edward Heath’s ‘U-turn’. It was one of the definitive events of post-war British politics – perhaps most clearly signalled by Margaret Thatcher’s description of herself as ‘the lady’ who was ‘not for turning’. But could one man’s language really have been so crucial to such a seismic event?
Back in the days when a student could still sign on ‘the buroo’ over the summer, I took myself off to peruse the evidence. Duly, I concluded in the affirmative. Had Reid not spoken as he did in defining what the work-in was about – human dignity, the right to work, responsibilities to communities – and, crucially, had he not framed as he did the responses to the various waves of attack launched against the work-in over its 14-month duration, then the outcome would almost certainly have been very different.
In the wake of Reid’s death last month was much written about his oratory. His 1972 Glasgow University rectorial address was reprinted in the Herald. And of course the ‘no bevvying’ speech was widely mentioned.
Some of those who attended the meeting speak of a reaction to Reid’s oratory which was as much physiological as intellectual.
But, for my money, the speech of Reid’s life was made a couple of months into the work-in proper – to be precise, on Friday the 24th of September 1971. At that point jobs were, in effect, being promised to 2,500 of the 8,500 UCS workers, but only if they would ‘co-operate’ and ‘negotiate’ with government. This meant abandoning the work-in altogether and ‘negotiating’ over the detail of what the government had been seeking to secure all along – the immediate closure of two of the four UCS yards, with some 6,000 redundancies and all the knock-on effects in the wider economy of the west of Scotland. Failing this, government ministers threatened, everything would be lost.
All the government needed was for the workers who would be amongst the ‘lucky ones’ to abandon their fellows. The work-in would be stone dead, and just about everyone – the government, the official union leaders, the media – believed that was about to happen.
A mass meeting was called where Reid responded by contrasting the government’s apparently caring public language of ‘co-operation to save what can be saved’ and ‘making the best of a bad situation’ with the brutal private language of its policy strategists. The latter had, since 1969, been planning specifically to ‘butcher’ the UCS and to sell its assets ‘even for a pittance’. Reid peeled away the veneer of civilised politics to reveal the sneering disregard of a ruling elite for the ‘expendable’ lives of ordinary working people.
Some of those who attended the meeting speak of a reaction to Reid’s oratory which was as much physiological as intellectual – ‘you could feel the hairs standing up on the back of your neck’, said Bob Dickie, another of the stewards.
‘It’s like a murderer who wants to murder us,’ declared Reid, ‘we’ve found out, we’ve defended ourselves against the murder and people say "please negotiate with the murderer, you might stop him from piercing your heart, but he can cut off your legs and arms and there’s a sensible compromise". And when you’re lying bleeding they will tell you in a year or two, wi’ you minus the legs, why aren’t you standing on your own two feet?’
Thus was revealed the wild-eyed hatchet-man lurking behind the government’s ostensibly caring public face. Co-operate with him if you like, Reid said to the relevant workers, and they promptly declined. Without this speech, the work-in would most probably have collapsed that weekend. Heath would not have made his U-turn. Margaret Thatcher would not have been ‘the lady’ who was ‘not for turning’. Reid’s oration changed the course of events – history – and he became a celebrated figure.
Do not accept the unacceptable – that decisions can be made that devastate lives unjustly and with impunity – because it’s not just the dignity of those worst affected which is at stake.
There were glowing tributes to Reid after his death. But they could perhaps have done more to reflect the striking relevance today of what he said and wrote in the early 1970s. His key themes can be seen clearly to frame the question of our response to a contemporary neo-liberal agenda which betrays a very similar contrast between the appearance of civilised political discourse – ‘we’re all in this together’, ‘the big society’, ‘progressive cuts’ – and an underlying disregard for the ‘expendable’ lives, not just of the hitherto ‘socially excluded’, but of the many soon-to-be unemployed and otherwise impoverished.
Reid’s recommendation to the UCS workers was for a response of solidarity and non-co-operation. Complicity was beneath their human dignity. In a sense, this idea was – in essence – ‘the speech of Jimmy Reid’s life’. Do not accept the unacceptable – that decisions can be made that devastate lives unjustly and with impunity – because it’s not just the dignity of those worst affected which is at stake.
Almost four decades after the work-in, when my students at what is now the Paisley campus of the University of the West of Scotland look themselves at how Reid made this case, not a few of them tell me that, like Bob Dickie long before them, they too feel the hairs standing up on the back of their necks.
A shorter version of this article appears in the current edition of the
Scottish regeneration policy journal, Scotregen.
Chik Collins is a senior lecturer in the School of Social Sciences at the University of the West of Scotland
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