Jimmy Reid

He died last week. He would have been amused to read the eulogies from the same sources who heaped opprobrium and scorn on his beliefs when he was at his most effective. He is a reminder of just how far our democracy has deteriorated. 

A newly elected Labour MP, asked on Radio 4 whether they would support a campaign by public sector workers to protect their jobs, had a fit of the queasies. It was stomach-squirming stuff. 

Kevin McKenna wrote a powerful piece in the Observer yesterday. "When Jimmy Reid rocked the chinless ingrates of Heath's doomed government in 1971, my father and my friends' fathers claimed him as their own. Here was a man with no formal education and speaking in the benighted Glaswegian working dialect who nevertheless was brighter than an entire rectory of Oxbridge graduates. The UCS work-in was also when Clause Four enjoyed its finest moment. The workers did indeed take over the means of production and saved their families' immediate economic future and that of their surrounding communities. Jimmy Reid had provided a template for how to defeat the avarice of unfettered Toryism and corporate greed. Reid gave us confidence and renewed our pride."

"Would Thatcher have been able to defeat the miners if Jimmy Reid had been her adversary instead of the unhinged Arthur Scargill? Reid would never have faced down the Tories and their police attack dogs without a mandate from his union, nor would he have alienated an entire wing, as Scargill did with his Nottinghamshire members. His oratory, based on reason and a sense of justice and fortified by Christian socialism, would have seduced many more British workers to the miners' cause. Thatcher would not have escaped unscathed."

"Socialism was a vibrant and reasonable political philosophy when Jimmy Reid carried its banner and Clause Four was a decent and logical aspiration. Then the opportunists of Islington – Mandelson, Blair, Balls and the Milibands – killed them both. They have been revealed as the quisling envoys of capitalism sent by the City to do a job on the Labour party from the inside. They succeeded and the triumph of rabid capitalism seems complete."

"The gluttony of bankers brought this country to the brink of catastrophe, yet tens of thousands of honest, industrious families who have always rendered unto the government their portion, will pay with their jobs. Meanwhile, their sons are still being slaughtered in an illegal war, sent there by another government of millionaires. Yet socialism is considered to be a dirty word."

" The conditions once more are ripe for work-ins up and down the country. Can Jimmy Reid's memory light the fire? And would some of those who come to praise him now be prepared to pick up his standard?"