Jimmy Reid

Jimmy Reid was a major presence in British public life in the 1970s and 1980s and remained a notable figure in Scotland until his death in 2010. Bill Knox and Alan McKinlay have written a fine biography of him. Born in 1932 in Govan, a shipbuilding district south of the River Clyde in Glasgow, Reid was a communist, trade unionist, skilled engineer, and remarkable rhetorician. Knox and McKinlay are well qualified as his biographers. Their lengthy scholarly partnership has focused on the workplace politics of Reid's tribe: skilled, male, Scottish engineering workers and trade unionists. Their research has enriched understanding, among various issues, of the “culture clash” between the expectations and practices of Scottish engineering workers and those of the dozens of US multinational firms that operated as major employers in Scotland from the 1950s to the 1980s.Knox and McKinlay use this expertise to examine Reid within a sensitive study of twentieth-century Scotland's history. They synthesize political party, union, employer, and government records with the oral testimonies of more than sixty of Reid's family members, friends, comrades, workmates, and associates. They show how Reid was formed by the Clyde: the engineering workshops he entered as a young man in 1950, leading a major generational rebellion of young, apprenticed workers in 1952. He did so after the foundational social experience of childhood in Govan, where single-room households, unsanitary living conditions, and high levels of infant mortality were commonplace. Govan also provided Reid with a positive learning environment where he developed an understanding of how the injustices of capitalism could be overturned in a world remade. There were good local-authority schools and a well-provisioned public library, which young Jimmy visited frequently. He joined the Young Communist League in 1946, graduating in adulthood to the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), which he served as a full-time officer from the mid-1950s before rejoining the industrial workforce in 1968 to support his family.Reid is best known for his activism and leadership in defense of shipyard production and employment, during the famous work-in of 1971–72 across four yards in Glasgow and nearby Clydebank. Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS), Reid's employer, was forced into liquidation when the United Kingdom's Conservative government refused to extend a credit loan of £6 million. UCS had debts of £28 million but a two-year order book worth £90 million. The 8,400 workers refused to accept the fact of redundancy, reporting for employment each day and continuing production on vessels already under construction. The work-in was a collectively led rejection of market economics. Knox and McKinlay detail the vital contributions of other workplace leaders, notably Jimmy Airlie, Sammy Barr, Stewart Crawford, and Finlay Hart. All were members of the CPGB. This was significant, shaping the discipline of the work-in and the clarity of its political communications. Reid and his comrades nevertheless kept the party at careful distance, recognizing its compromising potential as they constructed a broad social alliance to protect the yards. They articulated powerful criticisms of the injustice and illogic of market economics, distilling broader unease in Scotland about the management of deindustrialization by UK policymakers. The work-in attracted widespread national and international support, forcing the UK government into a humiliating policy reverse. UCS debts were cleared, and the yards recapitalized through public expenditure amounting to £35 million. Two-thirds of the jobs were preserved, and in the 2020s there remains a shipbuilding presence on the Upper Clyde.Knox and McKinlay show how this successful campaign pushed Jimmy Reid into a condition of substantial celebrity, which he relished. He stood unsuccessfully for election to Westminster as a CPGB candidate in his hometown of Clydebank in 1974 and then in 1979 as a Labour Party candidate in the engineering city of Dundee, which was also the location in Scotland of Timex, NCR, and other US multinationals. In 1976 Reid had left the CPGB, which he found intellectually as well as politically constraining. Reid then moved his ambitions from a career in political office to media commentary, with columns in mass circulation tabloid newspapers and regular appearances on radio and television. Reid used this UK-wide platform initially to criticize the assault on working-class institutions and economic security perpetrated by Margaret Thatcher's Conservative governments after 1979.Then Reid broke irrevocably from many of his allies in the trade union movement. During the miners’ strike of 1984–85, a mass mobilization in coalfield communities across England, Wales, and Scotland against the government's program of pit closures, Reid used his media platform to attack the leadership and strategy of the president of the National Union of Mineworkers, Arthur Scargill. There was an obvious similarity between Reid's own experience in the shipyards, helping others through direct action to safeguard their jobs and community security, and the courageous effort by miners and their families to preserve union voice and large-scale employment in the coal industry. Reid ignored this similarity, insisting instead that the key issue was Scargill's opposition to a pre-strike national ballot of union members. This argument was very close to an endorsement of the position adopted by Thatcher's government and its anti–trade union allies, that the strike was undemocratic and illegitimate. Such apostasy was neither forgotten nor forgiven, particularly in the coalfields. Perhaps overgenerously, Knox and McKinlay close by arguing that Reid nevertheless retained a respected position in Scottish civic society and on the broad Left, not least because of his critique in the late 1990s and 2000s of Tony Blair's New Labour governments, which he saw as reinforcing the immoral and inefficient market economics of Thatcherism. Reid joined the Scottish National Party in 2005. Following his death in 2010, various figures and forces on the Scottish Left established the Jimmy Reid Foundation, which still campaigns in his trusted radical name for social, economic, and environmental justice

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