Free Radical

by Cable, Vincent

  Olympia and I also began to savour the, then, largely unsung treasures of the city. It was but a ten-minute drive to a concert hall to listen to Rubinstein, Menuhin, Claudio Arrau, Victoria de los Ángeles and others, or to hear Kiri Te Kanawa or Janet Baker sing at the increasingly acclaimed Scottish Opera, or to see plays at the innovative and lively Citizens Theatre. It didn’t take me long to discover, too, that the big Glasgow football matches had an intensity and passion that I had never previously experienced at Elland Road in Leeds or Bootham Crescent in York. The first England vs Scotland international I attended at Hampden Park, with over 100,000 souls singing with one voice (I seemed to be the only Englishman there), was given added edge by the fact that England had recently won the World Cup but needed to be taken down a peg or two. Old Firm games had the intensity without the unity and as a neutral I struggled to comprehend quite how my tolerant, moderate Glasgow friends could mouth the sacrilegious banter and hymns of hate with such conviction. My enjoyment of these events came abruptly to an end at Ibrox on New Year’s Day in 1971 when, in the excitement generated by two goals in the last few minutes, there was a sudden surge in the densely packed departing crowds. A few minutes later, a few yards from where I was standing, a hundred people were trampled or suffocated to death. The disaster deeply shocked the city. Olympia banned me from attending future matches.

  It was in Glasgow that I seriously engaged in politics for the first time, in Woodside, a largely working-class ward wedged between the Great Western Road and Maryhill Road. When we first came to Glasgow, Olympia and I had rented a top-floor flat in a gloomy grey sandstone tenement in a rather elegant Victorian crescent, then somewhat dilapidated, though subsequently refurbished in the interests of conservation and enhanced property values. Our neighbour, John McFadden, was a Labour activist who enrolled me to help revive the local party and contribute the occasional day’s campaigning in Argyll, where he was the parliamentary candidate. His wife Jean formerly apolitical, joined in as the first step on a long road to becoming Labour leader in Glasgow. He gave me a crash course in Glasgow politics, including the problems (and opportunities) presented by his Catholic religion.

  The Labour rooms were gloomy, smelly and also small, which was just as well since even a well-attended constituency – let alone ward – meeting rarely reached double figures. Even these events depended on whether the party secretary, an elderly Irish lady, Mrs McCrory, was sober and remembered to appear with a key. The rooms had, however, been the scene, a few years before, of one of the more controversial parliamentary selection meetings of the period, chronicled in Paul Foot’s The Politics of Harold Wilson, when the sitting MP, Neil Carmichael, was chosen.

  The overall position of the Labour Party in Glasgow at that time was abject. Labour had dominated the city for half a century or more since the decline of the Liberals. In 1968, however, the council had been lost for the first time in decades to the Conservatives and their allies, the Progressives. A succession of Labour councillors appeared in court for fiddling expenses or taking backhanders. The Labour government of Harold Wilson was deeply unpopular in the wake of the 1967 currency crisis and subsequent austerity measures. There were factory closures and rising unemployment; and there was a Scottish dimension to the wider grievance about the North–South divide, with the SNP making deep inroads in working-class areas.

  At this time the face of opposition to Labour was changing. Labour’s traditional foes on the right were led by a group called the Progressives who depended on the wasting asset of politicial Protestantism. But in the late 1960s they were replaced by a new breed of Conservatives who managed to escape from their party’s image, in Scotland, of plummy English accents and double-barrelled names, thanks to a group of smart young lawyers led by Len Turpie in Glasgow and Malcolm Rifkind in Edinburgh, and a formidable Glasgow Tory MP, Teddy Taylor. In later years, representing Southend, Teddy became a rather lonely and comic figure, but in Glasgow his populist instincts and sophisticated modern campaigning techniques frightened the Labour Party to death and he hung on, for an indecently long time, to a seat based on Europe’s largest council estate. More important in the longer term were the SNP. They were then in the process of transforming their image from ‘Tartan Tories’ and eccentric men in kilts spouting Gaelic to a left-wing nationalist party appealing to the Clydeside working class. Some of their new cadres were seriously alarming and in England would have gravitated towards the National Front or the BNP. The SNP was beginning to establish a strong urban base which now, over three decades later, represents the main opposition to Labour.

  All of these factors led the Glasgow Labour Party to look favourably on any new, positively motivated – even English – talent that could revive its battered fortunes. My energy and enthusiasm were seized upon and I was given responsibility for managing the next (1969) council election campaign in my ward (elections took place annually, by ‘thirds’). My candidate was to be a tough shop steward from the Albion engineering works, Jimmy Gunn, for whom getting on to the council was to be the culmination of a career on the industrial wing of the Labour movement. He initially regarded me as some kind of strange extraterrestrial creature and I failed utterly to penetrate his particularly thick Glasgow accent. But we developed a rapport based on fatalistic humour as we lurched from one disaster to another.

  Our election literature was made up of badly typed manuscripts which were reproduced on a hand-operated Gestetner machine and emerged hopelessly smudged, while I forgot the need for posters to have a legal imprint. My idea for injecting wit and novelty into the campaign was a slogan that captured the revolutionary spirit of the time: Ho! Che! Gunn! In the absence of a better medium we reproduced the slogan in chalk on Woodside’s pavements and hoped that rain would hold off until election day. It did, but, in the gathering gloom on election eve, we hadn’t realized that our most lavish display of electoral graffiti was located outside the front door of the Catholic church. After a call from an incandescent Father Murphy, Jimmy and I were set to work scrubbing the pavements the following morning while the bemused voters walked past to the polling station.

  Election day ‘ knock-up’ technology – which, these days, requires a Cray computer at least – relied exclusively on a loud-hailer which was supposed to have the effect of driving the voters out of doors in order to save their ears from further punishment. We didn’t win, but came surprisingly close on a bad night for the party in the city, and I acquired an unjustified reputation for electoral wizardry.

  Shortly afterwards, the candidacy for the parliamentary seat of Hillhead became vacant. Hillhead became famous in the 1980s for Roy Jenkins’s by-election victory, but was regarded in the run-up to the 1970 election as a safe Tory seat where Labour came a respectable second (and the SNP and Liberals aimed to save their deposits). The one glimmer of hope was the Tory MP, Tam Galbraith, who was rarely seen and had recently been identified in the press with a scandal. It involved an unusually intimate correspondence with the traitor John Vassall, which suggested at least the possibility of a homosexual relationship. Homosexuality had just been legalized and was still barely tolerated. Hillhead was a good place for an aspiring Labour politician to start, and the constituency party already had one in the form of a local schoolteacher. I turned up at the selection meeting more in hope than expectation and, to my considerable surprise, won. Unfortunately, I thereby made an enemy of the schoolteacher and his friends, who went on strike. More seriously for my long-term career prospects, I concluded, quite incorrectly, that the way to win a parliamentary nomination was to turn up on the night and wow the activists with a good speech.

  The campaign was, however, enjoyable and rewarding. The constituency was small, densely populated and easy to cover on foot. It comprised three wards – Kelvinside, Partick West and Whiteinch – bordered by Byres Road to the east. I thought of it as representing a geological cross-section of Glasgow society. At the top of the hill, overlooking the Clyde, in Kelvinside – Glasgow’s Morningside
– was a stratum of grand red sandstone tenements of the respectable middle class, immaculately clean, with ornate stained-glass windows to brighten up the otherwise bleak stairwells. I believe the area has now acquired some social leavening, but it then seemed to be inhabited almost exclusively by elderly ladies in mink coats who voted Conservative with unswerving loyalty regardless of political context or candidate – even the seemingly ‘gay’ Galbraith. As one moved down the hill through layers of social stratification, the tenements were less salubrious and the mink coats were gradually replaced by scruffy children and loud Glasgow grannies. At the bottom of the hill there were the worst and most squalid tenements, some already boarded up and waiting for clearance.

  I suffered acutely from ‘candidatitis’, the candidate’s disease of believing that victory is within reach, even when electoral arithmetic and political logic suggest otherwise. The illness was inflamed by an exceptionally committed team – led by another academic, Pat Shaw – and the national publicity I received for being the party’s youngest candidate in Scotland. In the event, we managed not to go backwards on a bad night for Labour. And I received an unexpected boost as a result of putting my name on the ballot paper for one of the safe Conservative wards in the municipal election, which occurred simultaneously. By dint of knocking on large numbers of doors, or name recognition, or a fluke, this ward happened to achieve the biggest pro-Labour swing in the city. On the strength of it, I received a call from the Glasgow Labour leader, John Mains, a wily machine politician who had no interest in the parliamentary election whatever but cared passionately about winning back the council, where the real power lay. He told me that 1971 would be the Big Push and I was to be a key part of it.

  He encouraged me to stand for a vacancy in the ward of Maryhill, potentially one of the safest in the city after Mains’s own Gorbals seat. I duly appeared at a selection meeting at the Labour rooms, which were even bleaker than those in Woodside, and was invited to address a small huddle of mostly elderly people. The competition consisted of two sharp, assertive, snappily dressed young men, John McInespie and Gordon Kane. Both had a reputation for cutting corners and both, I believe, went to Barlinnie prison for expense irregularities some years later when they were councillors. I won the vote, but there was some soul-searching by the activists who couldn’t quite reconcile me with their image of a Glasgow councillor. I was told later that the decisive factor was the vote of several Catholics who had been told that my wife taught at St Pius’s and who assumed that my name, Vincent, identified me as one of them. This misunderstanding came back to haunt me years later.

  I joined a team of two rather elderly but delightful and welcoming colleagues: Phil Stimson and Martha Johnson. The MP, Willie Hannan, was a peripheral figure, reflecting the peculiarly low status that MPs had in the city. They were mostly obscure figures, kicked upstairs to the Commons from the council or their trade union in reward for loyal, if undistinguished, service. Someone like Neil Carmichael, who had achieved the dizzy heights of parliamentary undersecretary for the Navy, was, in this company, a towering statesman.

  I set about campaigning in Maryhill, though, in truth, the election was a formality in which I received over 60 per cent of the vote and a majority of more than four thousand over the SNP. But the significance of the 1971 election was that it was a landslide sweeping Labour back to power, helped by the fact that there was now a Conservative government in London.

  The Class of’71 also included the former Speaker of the House of Commons, Michael Martin, and a clutch of new politicians who would come to dominate the city, including Jean McFadden and Sir Michael Kelly (as he became), a future chairman of Celtic Football Club, but then a Strathclyde economics lecturer. A similar electoral tsunami had occurred in Edinburgh, bringing in, among others, Robin Cook.

  The new intake immediately came into conflict with the old guard. There had long been a strong whiff of Tammany Hall about Labour in Glasgow, with abuses of the considerable powers of patronage that shaded into outright graft. Councils were considerably more powerful then than they are today, with largely unfettered control over revenue from domestic and commercial rates, control over appointments – not just senior officials but individual schoolteachers, for example – and, in Glasgow, the opportunity to allocate a vast stock of around 150,000 council houses, increasing at four to five thousand a year. And until 1974 Glasgow was a unitary authority. In many respects, the early 1970s were the last big fling of municipal government, for good and ill. And the people who controlled the levers of power were substantial figures, much more important than MPs.

  The issue of who should control the Glasgow Labour machine came to the fore immediately after the 1971 election when it became clear that the newcomers would not willingly defer to the established order. There were two overlapping groups in the old guard. One, led by the leader, John Mains, and the two Dans, Donnelly and Doherty, were of Irish Catholic stock and had seen the Labour Party as a route to respectability, influence and power. Another group, led by Sir William Gray, the formidable chairman of the Scottish Housing Association, and Tom Fulton, were not in any way sectarian but were interested in modernizing and rebuilding the city in a largely non-political, technocratic way. Bill Gray once told me that his greatest achievement was to have used slum clearance and council rehousing to break up the old Catholic and Protestant ghettos.

  In addition to these, and strongly represented in the new intake, were two other, also partially overlapping, groups. One comprised the trade unionists, a large contingent that included Michael Martin; David Marshall, then a TGWU organizer and until recently a Glasgow MP; Jimmy Gunn, with whom I had campaigned in Woodside; and Albert Long, whose daughter I taught economics to and who much later, was Anne McGuire, was a minister in the New Labour government. The trade unionists had their base in the shipyards and engineering factories around the city and broadly reflected the left-wing perspective of the powerful national leaders of the time, like Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon, and the communist-dominated Glasgow Trades Council (in which John Reid was active). The other group – mine – was made up of middle-class professionals, sometimes dubbed (by those who felt threatened by them) the ‘ pseudo-intellectuals’: teachers, lecturers, lawyers and a Church of Scotland minister, Geoff Shaw, who would in due course rise to the top. The dominant personality in this group was Janey Buchan, a future MEP and the feisty wife of Norman Buchan, one of the leading Tribunite MPs. Her forthrightness and courage were allied to a sharp tongue and a remarkable capacity for making enemies. There was in Glasgow a socialist tradition dating back to the Independent Labour Party with such revered figures as Keir Hardie, Jimmy Maxton and John Wheatley, and many of our group identified with their uncompromising values.

  Relations between the radical elements in the new intake and the old guard were already strained by an ugly argument that had broken out in the Labour Party shortly before it returned to power, centred on religion. There were two aspects to it. One was the Scottish dimension of hostility towards direct grant schools, which were seen to be a threat, as in England, to comprehensive education. There were several equivalent schools in Glasgow, but they happened to include a leading Catholic school, St Aloysius, to which leading members of the Labour group, in particular the prospective chairman of the education committee, sent their children and which they strongly supported. The other, broader issue was a challenge to faith-based education which split the city almost fifty–fifty between Catholic and non-denominational (in practice, Protestant) schools. The Irish ‘troubles’ were growing in seriousness in the wake of Bloody Sunday (in 1972), and there were genuine fears that the sectarian strife might spread from Londonderry and Belfast to Glasgow. For those worried about the febrile state of Glasgow society there were warning signs, including an invigorated Orange movement led by the local Ian Paisley figure, the Reverend Jack Glass. For a newcomer like me the marching bands of the August Orange parades merely provided entertainment for young children, but many Glaswegians
– whether Catholic, Protestant or non-religious – regarded them with real fear. A group of Labour activists, including those in my own circle, started to agitate for school integration, and this led to a public rebuke from the cardinal and from our more conservative Catholic colleagues. I have since changed my views on the issue and now defend faith schools as an aspect of parental choice. But in that rather more polarized environment (and armed with anecdotes from Olympia at St Pius’s) I became one of the ‘troublemakers’ seeking to upset the established order at a delicate time.

  Once elected, I luxuriated for a while in my new status and delighted in the magnificent Victorian surroundings of the City Hall which were, alas, of rather greater dignity than most of the happenings within. Since I was simultaneously trying to be a councillor, an academic and a New Man, I often brought my three-year-old son, Paul, to council meetings, which was heartily disapproved of by some socially conservative colleagues but won me some firm friends among the women councillors. I tried from the outset to avoid the tribal breast-beating that passed for debate in the council and adopted a non-confrontational and constructive style, which I have tried to maintain to this day. It paid off immediately since my maiden speech, suggesting ways in which the council could facilitate economic regeneration in the city, received good reviews, including a big write-up in the Scottish Daily Record by a young journalist called James Cox who resurfaced many years later as the presenter of The World at One and as a neighbour in Twickenham.