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If Jimmy Reid, who died overnight aged 78, hadn’t existed he might have had to be invented. For 40 years now he has been the image of a certain Scotland. The “dignity of labour” is a much abused phrase that often drips with sentimentality, but you didn’t have to share Jimmy Reid’s political views to recognise his virtue*. Nor did you need to be there at the time to appreciate, even all these years later, that there was something noble about the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders work-in back in 1971.
The work-in and Reid’s famous speech have assumed almost mythic status, representing all that was best about the Scottish, and specifically the west of Scotland’s, industrial tradition. Much of it has gone now, of course, and in some respects the UCS dispute was the zenith of this Scotland’s image of itself: hard-working, dignified and proud.
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