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“... disaster that it is probably no longer even part of the folk memory. It is hard now to associate Jimmy Reid the benign television guide to the inhabited ruins of industrial Glasgow with the compelling CP shop-steward of 1971. Yet as Foster and Woolfson argue, the work-in was a definite moment in Scottish history and not just a symbol. The strength of ...”

“... is about wasted lives, the strangled destinies of ordinary people. Last summer, I went to Jimmy Reid’s funeral in Govan. Billy Connolly, once an apprentice in the same shipyard, told a story about going for walks with Reid in Glasgow. ‘He’d point to a tower block and say: “Behind that window is a guy ...”

“... He has come a long way. Born the Hon. Anthony Wedgwood Benn, he inevitably became by public-school nickname ‘Wedgie’ and later, by his own socialist deed-poll, plain ‘Tony Benn’. Today he is more often referred to simply as Benn – a hard word spat out like ‘Lenin’. Benn puzzles and alarms people because he is at the same time frightfully English and frighteningly un-English ...”

“... so gay in public.’ Generations of working-class orators – McGarvey even quotes the late Jimmy Reid – would disagree. He also worries that the left conflates ‘legitimate concerns’ about immigration with racism. This is odd, given that the prevailing attitude of the left towards anti-immigration sentiment is, if anything, frighteningly ...”

“... was set up in 2005 to act as trustee, with directorships given to two royal family officials (Alan Reid and Michael Stevens) and, most recently, the duke of Buccleuch, Scotland’s second largest private landowner. The Balmoral estate has been valued at £80 million – assets include the 167-room castle, 81 residential properties, commercial forestry ...”

“... for the Daily Worker, remembers him as ‘very bright, always articulate’. Others, like Jimmy Reid, the Clydeside shipworkers’ leader, a hostile colleague on the YCL executive, could see no ‘great potential, politically’. Later, Scargill boasted that he had increased the YCL’s membership tenfold. During the strike itself, he would claim ...”

“... as they occupied their yard in protest against redundancies, led by the charismatic Communist Jimmy Reid (now a columnist for the Sun). On a visit to Glasgow, in spite of a few reservations about supporting an illegal occupation, he told the workers that ‘I supported them 100 per cent, it was the stuff of which great events were made and I gave ...”

“... speech on becoming Glasgow University rector in 1972, the trade unionist and communist poster-boy Jimmy Reid connected his triumphant resistance to the closure of Upper Clyde Shipbuilders to this wider spirit of faceless rationalisation: ‘In a few years, when asked, “Where do you come from?” I can reply: “The Western Region” … where and how ...”

“... the time, they act out fictional lives. It’s nice work and reasonably well-paid. Also, if Beryl Reid and Candice Bergen are to be believed, they get to meet a regular mixture of super-rotters and superstars in far-flung corners of the world. But it must be devilishly frustrating. There are chat-shows, of course, and autobiographies (often complementary) to ...”

“... in the third person. (I grew anxious about one of my own heroes when he started saying: ‘Jimmy Reid would never agree to this or that.’ And why is it men, almost never women, who do this?) Gorbachev has – or had then – a hot affection for the public image that walked at the head of his procession. Not many people change the world. Fewer ...”

“... period from January 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974. Nixon himself had controversially pardoned Jimmy Hoffa, the former president of the Teamsters Union, who had been convicted of jury tampering, on condition that he stay out of union politics; and Ford was succeeded by Jimmy Carter, who commuted the 20-year sentence on ...”

“... stone-breakers and mendicant old soldiers, where a small boy could take lessons from ‘Dancy Reid, one of the last travelling Highland dance teachers’. Eventually, Henderson’s mother took a position as a cook-housekeeper in a large house near Yeovil: a part of Somerset still rich in traditional song. She managed to send Hamish to board at a small ...”

“... on him the melting look of a senior sponsor for the protégé who has fulfilled every hope. Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader – who is widely blamed for the mismanagement of healthcare but likely took the hit for many wrong calls by the White House – was another early admirer. He noticed how bored Obama was in the Senate, and told him to run for ...”

“... had viewed the Departed.’After the funeral, Ruttledge has a conversation with the undertaker, Jimmy Joe McKiernan, a version of John Joe McGirl, a former IRA leader and a local undertaker and auctioneer in County Leitrim. McKiernan, in the novel, has overseen Ruttledge’s purchase of his small house and farm. McGirl must have done as much for ...”