Enemies of Promise

Angus Calder

• Breach of Promise: Labour in Power 1964-1970 by Clive Ponting
  Hamish Hamilton, 433 pp, £15.95, February 1989, ISBN 0 241 12683 5
• James Maxton by Gordon Brown
  Fontana, 336 pp, £4.95, February 1988, ISBN 0 00 637255 4
• Forward! Labour Politics in Scotland 1888-1988 edited by Ian Donnachie, Christopher Harvie and Ian Wood
  Polygon, 184 pp, £19.50, January 1989, ISBN 0 7486 6001 1

Just seventy years after Friday, 31 January 1919, when troops and tanks stood by to quell a mass rally, in Glasgow’s George Square, of West of Scotland workers campaigning for a forty-hour week, the event was remembered in the People’s Palace, the museum of labour history on Glasgow Green. A bronze bust of Willie Gallacher by Ian Walters was not so much unveiled as proclaimed. It sits at the top of the building, in the room where Ken Currie’s controversial Rivera-style murals of working-class history can be seen around the ceiling: but the speeches were made in the Winter Garden downstairs, where heavy rain dripping through the glass roof and a chill which gnawed one’s bowels did not dismay the two hundred people who had gathered to honour the man who from 1935 to 1950 was Honourable Member for West Fife (Comm.), and an activist long before that on the Clyde Workers Committee.