BLOG COMMENT: Jimmy Reid, the communist union leader who led the famous “work-in” at Upper Clyde Shipbuilders in the summer of 1971, (wishing to show the viability of the shipyard he persuaded his union members to continue working rather than strike, but they controlled all entry and exit of goods and people to the place) died at the beginning of this month. As so often with recent history his speeches and actions are now being re-considered in more temperate and conciliatory fashion. Although he garnered much support from the likes of Billy Connolly and John Lennon, there was a time when the mention of Jimmy Reid would make establishment figures shudder, as was his intention, and an under-current of real concern that his politicking would set-off a chain reaction of social unrest that could develop into something revolutionary. Certainly the spirit was there and Reid’s powers of oratory were of the highest order in the fashion of so many Glaswegian working class leaders of the twentieth century from Keir Hardie to James Maxton as well as lesser known figures such as Ethel Macdonald the anarchist broadcaster in Barcelona during the early months of the Spanish Civil War.
The Independent newspaper re-printed last week the full text of his speech to students at his inauguration as Rector of Glasgow University in 1972 (the Rector is a prestigious position who represents the students on the university council – the position is crucially elected by the student body so Reid’s election was a serious political issue at the time). The New York Times acclaimed the speech as “the greatest since President Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address”.
What is so notable some forty years later is that much of what he was saying would be considered quite enlightened now. His aspirations for the working population are not bombastic but reasoned and reasonable, particularly in the context of the Scottish belief in the “common weal” or common good that is rooted in its ancient traditions.
Reid moreover was not purely motivated by wanting to progress his fellow workers prospects but also by the shattering humiliation that would befall these men (they were almost exclusively men) if they lost their jobs and the consequent economic waste that went with that. His concerns extended to the social conditions of workers and the psychological effects of their environment. Describing the building of Glasgow’s infamous high-rise council housing blocks as “the architectural representation of filing cabinets” and not being surprised by this as he felt they were bureaucratic political solutions which ignored the concepts of community and society.
He challenged politicians “where and how in your calculations did you quantify the value of community?”. He noted that “Man is a social being. Real fulfilment for any person lies in service to his fellow men and women”.
Last month Harvard professor of Business Adminsitration, Clay Christensen, gave the Commencement Address to this year’s Harvard MBA graduates, and he focused on their eventual success as people will be a function not of how many deals they strike or houses they own but the relationships they create and peoples’ lives they touch. Harvard is not a crucible of socialism but these words are little different from Reid’s words to those different students 38 years ago “A rat race is for rats…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 promotion and self-advancement.”
Reid concluded his address by looking, appropriately at university education and declaring that “the flowering if each individual’s personality and talent is the pre-condition for everyone’s development…the whole object must be to equip and educate people for life, not solely for work or a profession.” Words that governments as well as “talent managers” could still well listen to today.
It has to be noted that Reid’s solution to these issues was distinctly socialist and I imagine would receive little positive recognition in Harvard today. He believed in full state-ownership, “let’s make our wealth-producing resources and potential subject to public control” is not a theory getting much airtime in Cambridge, Massachussetts these days.
