Obituary: Jimmy Reid
Jimmy Reid, who passed away
at the Inverclyde Hospital in Greenock on the night of Tuesday, 10 August, aged
78, was a remarkable working-class leader with a variety of interests and
talents. He was a Clydesider, a shipbuilder, a trade unionist, a fiery
speaker, a self-taught intellectual, a loving family man, a knowledgeable lover
of jazz and a fan of Scotland’s football team. Above all, he was someone who
understood that there was more to life than making profits for shareholders.
Indeed, he was one of a special breed of working-class fighters.
Born in Govan, son of a shipyard worker father, he
left school at 14. After a brief stint at a stockbroker’s office, he served an
apprenticeship as a fitter at Polar Engines.
He joined the League of Labour Youth, but soon
gravitated towards the Communist Party, at the time a powerful force in
industrial Scotland, joining the Young Communist League in 1950. In 1952 he
helped lead the strike by Clydeside engineering apprentices for a living wage,
becoming chairman of the strike committee. In 1956, he moved to London as one of the YCL’s full-time organisers and, in 1959, became its General
Secretary. In 1966, he returned to his native Scotland to become the Scottish
secretary of the Communist Party.
In 1969, he returned to his trade in the Govan
Division of UCS (Upper Clyde Shipbuilders), moving soon after to John Brown in Clydebank.
He rose to national and international fame during
the 1971-72 15-month long sit-in at UCS. To Edward Heath’s Conservative
government, which came into office in June 1970, the only thing that mattered
about UCS, a collection of five semi-nationalised shipyards – John Brown,
Charles Connell, Fairfield, Alexander Stephen and Yarrow – was that they were
loss making. These “lame ducks” had to be closed down as they had debts
of £28 million. With this in mind, the government withdrew trade credits,
pushing them into administration, with 6,000 jobs scheduled to be lost within
three months.
Jimmy Reid and his comrades, Jimmy Airlie and Sammy
Barr – all Communist Party stalwarts – refused to accept the outcome. Under
their leadership, the co-ordinating committee of joint shop stewards galvanised
the workers to resist the closures, which they went on to accomplish with
spectacular success. They had a plan – to organise a sit-in rather than a
strike, emphasising the workers’ right to work rather than the right not to be
made redundant under this scheme. The workers would prove that they could build
fine ships and demonstrate that their yards had a future.
Reid’s speech announcing
the work-in, broadcast around the world, was a memorable event by all
accounts. He addressed his fellow workers thus:
“We are taking over the yards because we refuse to
accept that faceless men can make these decisions.
“We are not going on strike. We are not even
having a sit-in strike.
“Nobody and nothing will come in and nothing
will go out without our permission.
“And there will be no hooliganism, there will be
no vandalism, there will be no bevvying, because the world is watching us”.
The men rallied around this call, working for
nearly 15 long months as Glasgow swung into their support. Children held
fundraising street corner sales, poor pensioners donated from their meagre
funds and thousands marched to Glasgow Green to show their support.
The leadership of the shop stewards managed not
simply to keep the workforce at the yards united, but also successfully built a
wider alliance, in which the Scottish Trade Union Congress and the Convention
of Scottish Local Authorities were closely involved. In this way, the question
of the jobs of shipyard workers was transformed into a wider struggle which
helped mobilise the entire British trade union movement. Two one-day strikes
paralysed industry across Scotland and in the succeeding 12 months about 200
other occupations to stop redundancies occurred throughout Britain.
Jimmy Reid played an inspiring role throughout the
long work-in. He electrified his audiences, as well as the wider world, when
he told the UCS workers in 1971 as they began the long fight to save their
jobs: “We don’t only build ships on the Clyde. We build men”.
As the work-in progressed, while the support for
the UCS workers swelled, the popularity of the Heath government hit rock
bottom. The resolve of the UCS workers, and the popular support that their
struggle garnered, obliged even the TUC and the Labour Party to associate
themselves with the “unofficial” action of the UCS workforce – an action
which they had previously condemned as “illegal”.
In the end, in October 1972, the Conservative
government caved in, being forced to announce £35 million in support of the
very yards it had condemned as lame ducks. Within three years, ship building
on the Upper Clyde had received £101 million in public grants and credits.
This was Jimmy’s finest hour. The boy from Govan had spearheaded a struggle
which bloodied the nose of the establishment.
The workers’ victory at UCS was no accident. It
happened because the leadership of this struggle was in the hands of people who
were communists, who as such had a clear understanding of the basic interests
of the two hostile camps – the working class and the bourgeoisie – and were
able, while uniting the workers, to take advantage of the contradictions in the
camp of the ruling class and its agents within the working class.
The fact that Jimmy Reid was a prominent communist,
instead of detracting from his leadership, only served to reinforce his
charisma and intellectual integrity as a man of principle.
In the wake of the UCS struggle, Jimmy Reid was
elected to the rectorship of Glasgow University in a contest in which he
defeated the Tory MP Teddy Taylor and Margaret Herbison of Labour. Following
his elevation to rectorship, he made his greatest speech, which even the New
York Times thought fit to publish in full. Asking the students to reject
individualism and greed and always keep in mind their common humanity, he
addressed them with the following stirring words:
“A rat race is for
rats. 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 are 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?’”
He went on in the same speech to declare: “From
the very depth of my being, I challenge the right of any man or group of men,
in business or in government, to tell a fellow human being that he or she is
expendable”.
Being already a Communist councillor in Clydebank, Reid fought the Dunbartonshire Central seat in the 1974 General Election for the
Communist Party, polling an impressive 5,928 votes but losing all the same. Conceding
defeat, he made a spirited speech denouncing his Labour opponents as Falangists
[Franco’s fascists during the Spanish Civil War].
Then began the downhill march that sadly this fiery
working-class fighter was destined to traverse.
In 1976 he caused a sensation by quitting the
Communist Party. In 1979 he joined the Labour Party – the same pack of
Flangists that he had denounced in February 1974 – and contested Dundee East
for Labour, but losing to the SNP (Scottish National Party) leader Gordon Wilson.
From 1983, he became close to the windbag and scab
Neil Kinnock, the then-leader of the Labour Party. He went on to write columns
for various bourgeois newspapers, including that crook Robert Maxwell’s Mirror
and the union-bashing Rupert Murdock’s scandal sheet, The Sun. In 1984,
he produced documentaries about the Soviet Union, which, as they were critical
of the USSR, naturally won the BAFTA award. He bitterly criticised the heroic
NUM coal strike of 1984-85, making a special target of the NUM leader, Arthur
Scargill. Not without reason did Mick McGahey, the vice-president of the
Scottish coalminers, and a prominent leader of the Communist Party,
characterise him as “Broken Reid”.
In the 1990s, he became critical of Blair and the Iraq war. In 2005, he joined the SNP.
It is a measure of the demoralisation and
degeneration that the working-class movement went through under the combined
onslaught of Khruschevite revisionism, the hold of counter-revolutionary social
democracy and the suffocating and reactionary conditions wrought by finance
capital in the centres of imperialism, that a fine working-class fighter such
as Jimmy Reid could end up effectively collaborating with the very class that
he had fought so hard against earlier on, that he ended up succumbing to the
very “insidious pressures in society” against which he had so eloquently
warned the students in his rectorial lecture.
Proletarian revolutionaries can, and must, learn
from Jimmy Reid’s positive and negative example. While emulating and honouring
this remarkable man for his earlier contribution to the upliftment of the
working class, they must reject his subsequent renegacy and stand firm on the
ground of Marxism-Leninism.