Reid All About It

I know, I know. But the titles are by far the hardest bits to write.

How was it remarkable that Jimmy Reid was intelligent, well-informed and eloquent? The same backhanded insult is also routinely paid to Arthur Scargill, among others. Yet such is entirely to be expected of products of the society and its culture destroyed by the Queen of the Night, with its Workers' Educational Association and its Miners' Lodge Libraries, with its trade unions and its co-operatives, with its pitmen poets and pitmen painters, with its brass and silver bands, with its grammar schools and its Secondary Moderns so much better than what has replaced them, and with so many other wondrous features besides.

There is no cause to marvel that a man with a Scots, Welsh, Irish, Northern, Midland, Cockney or whatever sort of accent can form words with his mouth, arrange those words into sentences, and arrange those sentences into arguments. Yet marvel they do. And they imagine themselves to be on the Left when they do it. Just read the tributes to Jimmy Reid.

As to Reid's record, his victory over Ted Heath was real and significant. But it was only a victory over Heath, who was hardly the toughest of nuts to crack, any more than Thatcher was. If he had ever beaten Jim Callaghan, in particular, then that would have been a much bigger story. "Red Clydeside" was always overstated, and the municipal and parliamentary voting figures in Glasgow and its environs from those days fully indicate that Reid must have engaged a substantial body of working-class Tory support, in addition to the variously Radical Liberal, Tory populist, Christian Socialist and Social Catholic Labour Movement to which Reid's Communism was peripheral, extraneous, abhorrent, and organisationally proscribed.

Paradoxically, that demonstrated that he had the mentality and approach of the CPGB, rather than those of a Trotskyist groupuscule, or those of Arthur Scargill which so antagonised the Communist Party members near the top of the NUM, the most senior of whom successfully negotiated a settlement with Willie Whitelaw, only to find it rejected out of hand by their respective bosses, who may have deserved each other, but whom everyone else could more than easily have done without.

Unlike many, not least among those, one of them his namesake, who have gone on to enormous prominence right down to the present day, Reid broke with the Communist Party and recanted his former support for the Soviet Union well before the latter had ceased to exist; numerous key figures from the Blair years have never, to this day, said that their pro-Soviet activities were wrong at the time.

But the remainder of his political journey was that of certainly the most vocal section of the Scottish Left up the blind alley of separatism, throwing to the winds the prescience of Tam Dalyell and of the Buchans about the Balkanisation of Britain and the weakening of trade union bargaining power by means of fragmentation, wholly accurate warnings echoed in England by Eric Heffer and in Wales by Leo Abse and by the young Neil Kinnock, rumoured to be of much the same mind again now that he has seen the thing in action.

That way lay, and lies, alliance with or even active membership of what, since the demise of the Irish Republic's Progressive Democrats, is the most fiercely neoliberal party in these Islands, a wholly owned subsidiary of big business in general and of big oil and big finance in particular. As that party's indolent and ineffective effort at government limps to its conclusion, perhaps the Left will wake up, not only to the problem with the SNP, but also to the problem with the separatist cause itself. Alas, that awakening, if it comes at all, will come too late for Jimmy Reid.