Communist, socialist, trade unionist, Scottish Nationalist.
Some people just have to belong to things.
Jimmy Reid has passed away, aged 78, Methuselah-years for a working-class Govanite. A couple of things:
Some time after the sort-of successful work-in which he led at Upper Clyde Shipbuilders I saw him on the telly, may have been Question Time, one of those, anyway. What sort of society would you like to see? Was the question. Wull, see, ye've a class a weans, schoolchildren. And the teacher, up the front, sez: If a man buys ten oranges fer a poond and sells them fer ten poonds, wodduzeget? and all the children shout oot, Six months. That's the kind of society I'd like tae see.
And Tearful Tommy Sheridan, whose cock and gob and ego destroyed the Left in Jimmy Reid's Scotland. That's the other thing.
11 comments:
I came to respect Jimmy Reid in the end. Scotland has lost a good man. RIP Jimmy Reid.
Aye, one of our more genuine characters, Mr DL, was Mr Reid; I just regret the ease with which so many - even he - become media's creature.
It agree, it is the amusing answer
Aye, well 'twas a great victory for socialism or communism or whatever, that Reid successfully kept the yards open by forcing the government to bung 'em loads a' money.
I mean, where would the working man and socialism be if we didn't have filthy capitalists bailing us out so we can build cruise liners for filthy capitalists to lounge around on?
Aye, one day in the socialist paradise we'll 'a be free to do a honest day's work keeping capitalism afloat.
I hear Red Robbo wanted Leyland to have a luxury car strategy.
Me, I just don't understand the great industrial men of the 1970s.
Morning, mr yaic. That is always the contradiction, demanding a right to work at dangerous and unhealthy occupations, like mining and shipbuilding and construction but it is quite proper, nevertheless, for working people to organise in an attempt to improve their position and I think that Reid was just articulating folks' desire to continue working and not to be scrapheaped. I don't think there was ever any suggestion of institutionalised sabotage, as at Jaguar and Longbridge.
Despite the unavoidable contradiction which you highlight I don't think the UCS experience was comparable to the dreadful industrial relations fuck ups which characterised the UK's seventies motor industry. Aren't clever managers or HR as we now call personnel, supposed to be able to identify people like RR and get them onside and doesn't Leyland's failure to do so just prove that not only were their designs shit but their man management was shit, too?
Finally, I am not sure that using public money to keep people in productive work is always a cardinal sin; the current evidence of our own eyes should convince us that massive unemployment is not, actually, a price worth paying.
I worked in contracting on the Clyde and Tyne when ships were still being built there. The technology and by the looks of it the yards hadn't changed that much since they were using wood insted of steel much has working practices had. I am not sure that detractors of Mr.Reid would suggest that a shipwright or welder (working on the premise that when you are up to your arse in alligators you tend to forget that your real purpose of being there was to drain the swamp) could influence the purchase of new machinery and plant. On the other hand unemployment is a price worth paying providing that traitors like Mandelson can have a holiday on a Russian billionaires yacht. I for one miss him and did you see him destroy Kenneth Williams on Tee Vee with Parkinsons disease show in 1973 with good old fashioned working class (well when there was one)logic?
There is nothing wrong with being a mad Marxist, frothing-at-the-mouth and spouting yer dogma. The test is whether you can do so honestly and when experience and evidence undermine your belief system, do you let it go or do you la-la-la, fingers-in-my-ears, can't-hear-you. Reid at least was not this last, an honest man he was, and he got his lads a few more years work at a knockdown price to the rest of us. It is little enough but more than the rest of us usually manage.
Aye, Mr I, it's an interesting proposition. Need government support be a road to ruin? Well, I suppose if you've got it, it might because you are already bust.
It is true that an industry that washes considerable cash through the local economy might be worth just propping up for good, as long as it can sell what it makes.
I suspect that the UK's problem was multi-layered. Too much of the economy was nationalised by 1979. From British Road Services to British Leyland.
There are sensible bloggers who claim 45 percent of Government income in '79 was spent propping up industry. Can this be right?
A giant giro scheme that might have worked had the products and services been up to scratch.
Without the twin evils of the mindless conservatism of union cliques, the working Brit's notorious lack of appetite for change and large outbreaks of engineering incompetence, the big industries might have thrived on a government bung.
It did work at Rolls aero engines. They went bang but had just finished the mega engine that was due to be fitted to the Tristar. The Grocer bunged 'em a wad to tide the company over and it took flight again.
By god, Mr I, did you see 'HowToBuildaJetEngine'? The RR engineering in modern jets is just mind-boggling. In fact, they monitor the performance of all the engines they make, live, in the factory and can call the operator and tip them off.
This was not the case for much of rest of what was nationalised. By '79, most of it was on a bung and UK PLC was bust. Had Wilson and Callaghan not nationalised so much, maybe some could have survived.
But take the car industry. As a member of the EU meant foreign cars could be sold in the UK from '74 with no extra taxes. Brit products were pretty bad.
BL had huge money even during the Thatcher years.
Labour paid for the Metro, a neat thing for a few years, but it took ages to be finished and cost us a bomb for what was a Mini with a new body and zooped-up engine.
(Hiliary Benn still drives a Rover 100, the last version of Metro his father paid for, on our behalf.)
In the end, though, BL/ARG just couldn't build anything decent themselves. Of course the small Rover in '89 was great, but it was a Honda design and the licencing fee meant, despite selling well, it never made any money.
I suppose had Red Robbo marched because BL's engineering was rubbish and its product planning even worse, then I might have marched with him.
It was only fixing that which would have kept the workers in jobs, had they been able to resist striking over the most minute procedural change.
Reid seemed halfway there with his demand for good behaviour during the work-in. Perhaps had he been involved at board level, seen the books and the competition he might have been in command of both sides of the story.
In the end, you've got to sell stuff, bung or no bung.
Aye, Mr I, it's an interesting proposition. Need government support be a road to ruin? Well, I suppose if you've got it, it might because you are already bust.
It is true that an industry that washes considerable cash through the local economy might be worth just propping up for good, as long as it can sell what it makes.
I suspect that the UK's problem was multi-layered. Too much of the economy was nationalised by 1979. From British Road Services to British Leyland.
There are sensible bloggers who claim 45 percent of Government income in '79 was spent propping up industry. Can this be right?
A giant giro scheme that might have worked had the products and services been up to scratch.
Without the twin evils of the mindless conservatism of union cliques, the working Brit's notorious lack of appetite for change and large outbreaks of engineering incompetence, the big industries might have thrived on a government bung.
It did work at Rolls aero engines. They went bang but had just finished the mega engine that was due to be fitted to the Tristar. The Grocer bunged 'em a wad to tide the company over and it took flight again.
By god, Mr I, did you see 'HowToBuildaJetEngine'? The RR engineering in modern jets is just mind-boggling. In fact, they monitor the performance of all the engines they make, live, in the factory and can call the operator and tip them off.
This was not the case for much of rest of what was nationalised. By '79, most of it was on a bung and UK PLC was bust. Had Wilson and Callaghan not nationalised so much, maybe some could have survived.
But take the car industry. As a member of the EU meant foreign cars could be sold in the UK from '74 with no extra taxes. Brit products were pretty bad.
BL had huge money even during the Thatcher years.
Labour paid for the Metro, a neat thing for a few years, but it took ages to be finished and cost us a bomb for what was a Mini with a new body and zooped-up engine.
(Hiliary Benn still drives a Rover 100, the last version of Metro his father paid for, on our behalf.)
In the end, though, BL/ARG just couldn't build anything decent themselves. Of course the small Rover in '89 was great, but it was a Honda design and the licencing fee meant, despite selling well, it never made any money.
I suppose had Red Robbo marched because BL's engineering was rubbish and its product planning even worse, then I might have marched with him.
It was only fixing that which would have kept the workers in jobs, had they been able to resist striking over the most minute procedural change.
Reid seemed halfway there with his demand for good behaviour during the work-in. Perhaps had he been involved at board level, seen the books and the competition he might have been in command of both sides of the story.
Aye, Mr I, it's an interesting proposition. Need government support be a road to ruin? Well, I suppose if you've got it, it might because you are already bust.
It is true that an industry that washes considerable cash through the local economy might be worth just propping up for good, as long as it can sell what it makes.
I suspect that the UK's problem was multi-layered. Too much of the economy was nationalised by 1979. From British Road Services to British Leyland.
There are sensible bloggers who claim 45 percent of Government income in '79 was spent propping up industry. Can this be right?
A giant giro scheme that might have worked had the products and services been up to scratch.
Without the twin evils of the mindless conservatism of union cliques, the working Brit's notorious lack of appetite for change and large outbreaks of engineering incompetence, the big industries might have thrived on a government bung.
It did work at Rolls aero engines. They went bang but had just finished the mega engine that was due to be fitted to the Tristar. The Grocer bunged 'em a wad to tide the company over and it took flight again.
This was not the case for much of rest of what was nationalised. By '79, most of it was on a bung and UK PLC was bust. Had Wilson and Callaghan not nationalised so much, maybe some could have survived.
But take the car industry. As a member of the EU meant foreign cars could be sold in the UK from '74 with no extra taxes. Brit products were pretty bad.
BL had huge money even during the Thatcher years.
Labour paid for the Metro, a neat thing for a few years, but it took ages to be finished and cost us a bomb for what was a Mini with a new body and zooped-up engine.
(Hiliary Benn still drives a Rover 100, the last version of Metro his father paid for, on our behalf.)
In the end, though, BL/ARG just couldn't build anything decent themselves. Of course the small Rover in '89 was great, but it was a Honda design and the licencing fee meant, despite selling well, it never made any money.
I suppose had Red Robbo marched because BL's engineering was rubbish and its product planning even worse, then I might have marched with him.
It was only fixing that which would have kept the workers in jobs, had they been able to resist striking over the most minute procedural change.
Reid seemed halfway there with his demand for good behaviour during the work-in. Perhaps had he been involved at board level, seen the books and the competition he might have been in command of both sides of the story.
For those of us who can, perforce, in some areas, only intuit a belief, an understanding, mr YAIC's post, above, is well worth reading three times; it seems to be a clear explanation of some of the causes of what we see as our industrial decline, although giving scant or no regard to the sultural and recent historical difference of the UK and her competitors, European and Oriental. Post-war British industry was at a disadvantage, it's labour force differentiated by victory, ny empire, by expectation, its plant antiquaited and its management often like the current front bench, privileged, elitist and out of touch.
But illuminating as it is Mr YAIC's short essay is valid only as history; in the Internet age, the compliant workforce, tired but happy, docile, mortgaged, carefully managing its credit cards is a conceopt as anachronistic as the Mini Metro. It seems to me that the suggestion that the planet may continue to be run for the advantage of one or other group of sharehoilders and the notional pensions which they wish to control has just recently been exposed as the rip-off scherme it always was and that another way must be found to feed, clothe and shelter the billions otherwise en route to Armageddon. Energy, water, food and shelter being the playthings of a handful of speculators- or do we call them investors, wealth creators, maybe - this is surely what we should call EarthCrime, isn't it? AndaAs we now deplore child chimney sweeps and mine workers shouldn't we also damn the child sweatshops of India and the Orient? SHould w enot be trying to raise their wages, rather than cut our own?
The aspiration, fostered by Power, that an ever rising house price can fund an ever more Ruinous level of consumption by several generations of the same family, each of them living for longer and longer seems to me to be as unattainable, as contradictory as does the cry: A fair day's work for a fair day's pay!
There is no fairness to be had within the current global economic system; Reid, drawn to the light of celebrity spokesmanhood overlooked this and eventually succumbed to it's emasculating embrace, a parody of himself and his comrades, stooging, latterly, for Scotland's current, Wee, Fat Mr Big; Reid was as I captioned him, having to belong to something, to be somebody, even if, at the end it was one of Alec Salmond's McArselickers, wilfully oblivious that Salmond, himself, is one of those bankers' boys, a former RBS economist who, quicker than Grocer Heath, without a moment's hesitation, would have sold Jimmy and his lads down the Clyde.
Scotland, more bruised than most by Money's beatings, needs proper, lifetime heroes; Reid's achievement is as mr mongoose fairly describes it, little enough yet vastly more than most of us manage and his decline into personalityhood, usedtobe-ness, should not diminish his youthful boldness, shame that it does.
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