Of hearts and heads

Like most trade unionists in the 1970s and 80s I worked with a fair few communists. Men like Dickie Lawlor, Jock Cowan and Maurice Styles, postal workers for whom all events were viewed through the prism of ‘scientific socialism’. Communism gave them a philosophy by which to live their lives, and they were respected as men of principle even by those who abhorred their politics.

Marx may have disparaged religion as the opiate of the people (and, in an even more memorable phrase, the sigh of the oppressed), but it was difficult to avoid the term ‘religious zeal’ when describing the way men like Dickie, Jock and Maurice approached their union work.

By the time I knew them they’d long passed the stage of seeking converts. Indeed young commies were a rare species — and the number of communists I knew was far exceeded by the number of ex-communists.

When I asked Tom Jackson, my avuncular (and lavishly bewhiskered) general secretary and mentor at the Union of Post Office Workers, about his previous membership he adapted the aphorism attributed to Burke about republicanism: ‘If you weren’t a communist at 20 there was something wrong with your heart: if you were still a communist at 40 there was something wrong with your head.