A Man of the Clyde

by New Worker correspondent

Len McCluskey speaking

Jimmy Reid: A Clyde-Built Man by WWJ Knox and Alan McKinlay. Published by Liverpool University Press (2019).

Last Friday saw the launch of a new biography, authorised by his family, of Jimmy Reid: A Clyde-Built Man by WWJ Knox and Alan McKinlay, and published by Liverpool University Press for £24.95 for the paperback edition. Held at the Glasgow HQ of Unite the Union, it began with a ‘light lunch’ of steak pie with roast potatoes followed by chocolate pudding. The vegetarian option was macaroni and cheese, a very 1970s meal to commemorate the life of the leader of the 1971–72 Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS) work-in.

 Present-day leader of engineering union Unite Len McCluskey described Reid as a “working class hero” who inspired him in his youth and compared his speech on his becoming rector of Glasgow University as being like the Gettysburg Address. One of the two authors described Reid as being one of many “Philosophers in Overalls” on the Clyde. Knox said that Reid’s political life was a “life in three acts”. That indeed was true. Soon after the work-in that was successful in saving some shipyards, albeit at the expense of others, Reid rapidly went downhill.

Jimmy Reid’s leading role in the workers’ occupation of the Clyde shipyards threatened with closure made him a national figure during the UCS “work-in”. Backed by other unions at home and abroad, the UCS workers were publicly backed by famed Scottish comic Billy Connolly and the former Beatle, John Lennon. Reid was a leading member of the old Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and he soon achieved iconic status in the party led by a fellow Scot, John Gollan.

But Reid’s fame was illusory. His hopes of entering parliament on the CPGB ticket were dashed at the general election of February 1974. Although he did get 14.6 per cent of the vote, the best communist vote for years, he predictably lost to the sitting Labour candidate. His support plummeted at the second snap poll in the autumn of the same year.

In 1975 he left the CPGB to seek his fortune in the Labour Party, which only the previous year he described as “Falangists”. A career in print and broadcast journalism followed. He wrote for the {Glasgow Herald, The Scotsman}, the {Daily Mirror} and tellingly, the {Sun} when it was a rabidly Thatcherite Tory rag.

During the 1984–85 miners’ strike he launched a vicious attack on Arthur Scargill in the Tory {Spectator} magazine at the behest of the Labour leader Neil Kinnock, who wanted his own hands kept clean. A former comrade, Scottish miners’ leader Mick McGahey, somewhat aptly called him “the broken Reid”.

Some charitable souls suggested that Reid was simply desperate for cash to acquire the vast quantities of a noted Scottish beverage that had long been a feature of his life. Soon after Tony Blair came to power he urged support for the Scottish Socialist Party in the first Scottish Parliament elections, but he soon found a home in the Scottish National Party (SNP). He died in 2010 and he is remembered in the Jimmy Reid Foundation, the publisher of the {Scottish Left Review}, a journal of the left in Scotland.

Honda workers march for jobs

McCluskey says Unite will fight!

By Alex Kempshall

Thousands of Honda workers and their families along with trade unionists from across the country marched and rallied in Swindon last Saturday to protest and fight against the proposed closure of the Honda plant in the Wiltshire town. They called on the Japanese company to continue production at the Swindon plant that employs over 3,500 workers.

At the rally Len McCluskey, the Unite General Secretary, said his union had no intention to allowing the company to close this significantly profitable plant. He said that the company would never have dreamt of doing this to workers in Japan and that Honda should show the same dignity to their Swindon workers as they would do to Japanese workers.

There are 3,500 Swindon workers and thousands more in the supply chain wondering what their future is, and this in a town with only 10,500 manufacturing jobs. The Honda plant is vitally important to our manufacturing base in general, and he demanded that the government step up to the mark and get Honda to treat the workers with respect.

He thanked those who had come from all over the country and from Europe to show their solidarity with the Swindon workers. That solidarity builds hope. When working people come out on the streets to make their voices heard then people do sit up and take notice, and Honda will be made aware that we won’t lie down and allow them to walk all over us.

John Cooper, Chair of Unite’s Automobile National Industrial Sector Committee and also the Unite Convenor at the Vauxhall Plant at Ellesmere Port, said that Unite’s 100,000 car workers would fight to save every job and fight to stop Honda ripping the heart out of Swindon.

He said that we will not allow it because we remember one of the oldest slogans of our union – “an injury to one is an injury to all” – and warned that if we allow Honda to walk away from Swindon then every boss in every boardroom will think they can do the same, and every car worker from Vauxhall in Ellesmere Port to BMW in Cowley to Nissan in Sunderland will be the weaker for it.

John said that together let’s build a wall of solidarity, let’s build a political and industrial campaign that protects the jobs put at risk by Honda's intention to exit the UK.

Rebecca Long-Bailey, Labour’s Shadow Business Secretary, told the rally that the Swindon workers were a world-class work force and that the plant was a world-class plant that’s worth fighting for.

She went on to remind us that the wider economic consequences of the closure would be absolutely devastating, with £15 billion knocked of Britain’s GDP [gross domestic product], £48 million lost in tax that could be going to our NHS and public services.

Rebecca promised that Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell would fight with the Honda workers. It’s not only about keeping one plant open, it’s about recognising that manufacturing is not just in our national DNA but key to our economic destiny. Over the last few decades it’s manufacturing, not services, that has led the productivity growth in our economy. With the right support, the right investment in manufacturing, we could transform our economy. We need to re-industrialise not de-industrialise Britain.

She went on to say that if Honda want an electric vehicle market, well let’s give them one. We invest in the infrastructure that will spur on that investment with vehicle charging points in every village, town and city. We incentivise people to buy electric vehicles and other low carbon vehicles. We should use the huge power that government and our public services have to buy their vehicles from Honda and other British manufacturers. The biggest thing that governments can do is to support our own industry and workers here in Britain. We need government support to go across the supply chain especially in relation to battery technology, we don’t want those jobs to go overseas, we want to make those batteries here. To create more jobs, a bigger supply chain with a better future for all.

Honda said in February that it was going to close the Swindon factory in 2021 as part of restructuring plans. Production started in 1989 and the plant makes 150,000 vehicles per year.

A Welcome Victory

 Jennie Formby has won the race to be the next general secretary of the Labour Party. Ms Formby, a full-time officer of Unite, has been a Labour activists for years. Supported by Jeremy Corbyn, and backed by Unite and the GMB, she defeated her nearest rival in a secret ballot of Labour’s executive committee members by 35 votes to two.

Though the post is administrative and not political, the general secretary oversees Labour’s national campaigns and in the past the general secretary has used the powers of the post to apply the rule book as he or she sees fit. The previous incumbent, Iain McNicol, was directly in charge of the unelected and discredited “compliance unit” that purged thousands of pro-Corbyn members from the party, including prominent activists such as former London Mayor Ken Livingstone and others, on trumped-up charges of “anti-Semitism”.

One victim, former Momentum vice-chair Jackie Walker, who has been suspended by Labour for almost two years, welcomed the result saying: “Things are definitely changing in the party, but they are not changing fast enough for a lot of members who remain suspended or expelled based on trumped-up or false charges or simply because they are active supporters of Corbyn.”

That’s certainly the case. The wounds inflicted by the despicable Blairite rump in the Labour Party can only be healed with an end to the witch-hunt and the return to Labour’s ranks of all those unjustly suspended or expelled over the last few years.

The Blairites bleat on about another “hard-left” victory as part of a hysterical bourgeois media smear campaign that’s been launched to try and stave off another Tory defeat in the local government elections in May.

But as communist leader Mao Zedong said during the Chinese civil war in 1939: “I hold that it is bad as far as we are concerned if a person, a political party, an army or a school is not attacked by the enemy, for in that case it would definitely mean that we have sunk to the level of the enemy. It is good if we are attacked by the enemy, since it proves that we have drawn a clear line of demarcation between the enemy and ourselves. It is still better if the enemy attacks us wildly and paints us as utterly black and without a single virtue; it demonstrates that we have not only drawn a clear line of demarcation between the enemy and ourselves but achieved a great deal in our work”.

The Blairites say Corbyn’s left policies make Labour unelectable but what they really fear is that Labour will be returned to office on a programme of trade union rights, public ownership and social justice that they so bitterly oppose.

The Corbyn leadership victory shows that the Labour Party is still a potentially strong weapon for our class and has vindicated the New Communist Party’s long held electoral position. Although the New Communist Party (NCP) has never confused the Labour Party with a revolutionary party or imagined that we can gain a workers’ state through parliamentary elections, a Labour government, with its organisational links with the trade unions and the co-operative movement, offers the best option for the working class in the era of bourgeois parliamentary democracy. Our strategy is for working class unity and our campaigns are focused on defeating the right-wing within the movement, and strengthening the left and progressive forces within the Labour Party and the unions. Day-to-day demands for reform, progressive taxation, state welfare and a public sector dedicated to meet the people’s needs are winnable under capitalism, particularly in a rich country such as Britain today. We support these demands, and back those within the Labour Party and the trade union movement who are campaigning for greater social justice.

But social democracy, left or right, remains social democracy whatever trend is dominant within it. It has never led to socialism. So, at the same time, we must build the revolutionary party and campaign for revolutionary change.