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Jimmy Reid – Inaugural Speech as
Rector of
Jimmy Reid was elected as Rector of This page is supplementary to another page on this
website posted to honour the memory of this great
man which can be found by clicking here. At the memorial service for Jimmy Reid held in Govan on 19th August 2010, the First Minister of the
Scottish Parliament Alex Salmond announced that an
information resource including the text of the speech would be made available
to all school children in Scotland so that they could learn about the
contribution that Jimmy and his colleagues have made to modern day
Scotland. In the three decades since the speech, the scourge
of poverty, the underprivileged, the slums and the insecurity can still be
found in Alienation is the precise and correctly
applied word for describing the major social problem in Many may not have rationalised
it. May not even understand, may not be able to articulate it. But they feel
it. It therefore conditions and colours their social attitudes. Alienation
expresses itself in different ways by different people. It is to be found in
what our courts often describe as the criminal anti-social behaviour of a section of the community. It is expressed
by those young people who want to opt out of society, by drop outs, the
so-called maladjusted, those-who seek to escape permanently from the reality
of society through intoxicants and narcotics. Of course it would be wrong to
say it was the sole reason for these things. But it is a much greater factor
in all of them than is generally recognised. Society and its prevailing sense of
values leads to another form of alienation. It
alienates some from humanity. It partially dehumanises
some people, makes them insensitive, ruthless in their handling of fellow
human beings, self-centred and grasping. The irony
is, they are often considered normal and well
adjusted. It is my sincere contention that anyone who can be totally adjusted
to our society is in greater need of psychiatric analysis and treatment than
anyone else. They remind me of the character in the
novel, Catch 22, the father of Major Major. He was
a farmer in the American Mid West. He hated suggestions for things like
Medicare, social services, unemployment benefits or civil rights. He was,
however, an enthusiast for the agricultural policies that paid farmers for
not bringing their fields under cultivation. From the money he got for not
growing alfalfa he bought more land in order not to grow alfalfa. He became
rich. Pilgrims came from all over the state to sit at his feet and learn how
to be a successful non-grower of alfalfa. His philosophy was simple. The poor
didn't work hard enough and so they were poor. He believed that the good Lord
gave him two strong hands to grab as much as he could for himself. He is a
comic figure. But think, have you not met his like
here in It is easy and tempting to hate such
people. However it is wrong. They are as much products of society and a
consequence of that society, human alienation, as the poor drop out. They are
losers. They have lost essential elements of our common humanity. Man is a
social being. Real fulfilment for any person lies
in service to his fellow men and women. The big challenge to our civilisation is not OZ, a magazine I haven't even seen
let alone read. Nor is it permissiveness, although I agree our society is too
permissive. Any society which, for example, permits over one million people
to be unemployed is far too permissive for my liking. Nor is it moral laxity
in the narrow sense that this word is generally employed - although in a
sense here we come nearer to the problem. It does involve morality, ethics,
and our concept of human values. The challenge we face is that of rooting out
anything and everything that distorts and devalues human relations. Let me
give two examples from contemporary experience to illustrate the point. Recently on television I saw an advert.
The scene is a banquet. A gentleman is on his feet proposing a toast. His
speech is full of phrases like "this full-bodied specimen". Sitting
beside him is a young, buxom woman. The image she projects is not pompous but
foolish. She is visibly preening herself, believing that she is the object of
this bloke's eulogy. Then he concludes - "and now I give ... " then a brand name of what used to be described
as Empire sherry. The woman is shattered, hurt and embarrassed. Then the
laughter. Derisive and cruel laughter. The real point, of course, is this. In
this charade, the viewers were obviously expected to identify not with the
victim but with her tormentors. The other illustration is the
widespread, implicit acceptance of the concept and term, the rat race. The
picture it conjures up is one where we are scurrying around scrambling for
position, trampling on others, back-stabbing, all in pursuit of personal
success. Even genuinely intended friendly advice can sometimes take the form
of someone saying to you, "Listen, you look after number one". Or
as they say in To the students I address this appeal.
Reject these attitudes. Reject the values and false morality that underlie
these attitudes. A rat race is for rats. We're not rats. We're human beings.
Reject the insidious pressures in society that would blunt your critical
faculties to all that is happening around you, that would caution silence in
the face of injustice lest you jeopardise your
chances of promotion and self-advancement. This is how it starts and before
you know where you are, you're a fully paid-up member of the rat-pack. The
price is too high. It entails the loss of your dignity and human spirit. Or
as Christ put it, "What doth it profit a man if he gain
the whole world and suffer the loss of his soul?" Profit is the sole criterion used by The
Establishment to evaluate economic activity. From the rat race to lame ducks.
The vocabulary in vogue is a giveaway. It's more reminiscent of a human
menagerie than human society. The power structures that have inevitably
emerged from this approach threaten and undermine our hard-won democratic
rights. The whole process is towards the centralisation
and concentration of power in fewer and fewer hands. The facts are there for
all who want to see. Giant monopoly companies and consortia dominate almost
every branch of our economy. The men who wield effective control within these
giants exercise a power over their fellow men which is
frightening and is a negation of democracy. Government by the people for the people
becomes meaningless unless it includes major economic decision making by the
people for the people. This is not simply an economic matter. In essence it
is an ethical and moral question for whoever takes the important economic
decisions in society ipso facto determines the social priorities of that
society. From the Olympian heights of an executive suite, in an atmosphere
where your success is judged by the extent to which you can maximise profits, the overwhelming tendency must be to
see people as units of production, as indices in your accountants' books. To appreciate fully the inhumanity of
this situation, you have to see the hurt and despair in the eyes of a man
suddenly told he is redundant without provision made for suitable alternative
employment, with the prospect in the west of Scotland, if he is in his late
forties or fifties, of spending the rest of his life in the Labour Exchange. Someone, somewhere has decided he is
unwanted, unneeded, and is to be thrown on the industrial scrap heap. From
the very depth of my being, I challenge the right of any man or any group of
men, in business or in government, to tell a fellow human being that he or
she is expendable. The concentration of power in the
economic field is matched by the centralisation of
decision making in the political institutions of society. The power of
Parliament has undoubtedly been eroded over past decades with more and more
authority being invested in the Executive. The power of local authorities has
been and is being systematically undermined. The only justification I can see
for local government is as a counterbalance to the centralised
character of national government. Local government is to be restructured.
What an opportunity, one would think, for decentralising
as much power as possible back to local communities. Instead the proposals
are for centralising local government. It's once
again a blueprint for bureaucracy, not democracy. If these proposals are implemented,
in a few years when asked "Where do you come from?",
I can reply: "The Western Region". It even sounds like a hospital
board. It stretches from Oban
to Girvan and eastwards to include most of Everything that is proposed from the
establishment seems almost calculated to minimise
the role of the people, to miniaturise man. I can
understand how attractive this prospect must be to those at the top. Those of
us who refuse to be pawns in their power game can be picked up by their
bureaucratic tweezers and dropped in a filing cabinet under "M" for
malcontent or maladjusted. When you think of some of the high flats around us,
it can hardly be an accident that they are as near as one could get to an
architectural representation of a filing cabinet. If modern technology requires greater
and larger productive units, let's make our wealth producing resources and
potential subject to public control and to social accountability. Let's gear
our society to social ~-need, not personal greed. Given such creative
re-orientation of society, there is no doubt in my mind that in " few years we could eradicate in our country the
scourge of poverty, the underprivileged, slums, and insecurity. Even this is not enough. To measure
social progress purely by material advance is not enough. Our aim must be the
enrichment of the whole quality of life. It requires a social and cultural,
or if you wish, a spiritual transformation of our country. A necessary part
of this must be the restructuring of the institutions of government and where
necessary, the evolution of additional structures so as to involve the people
in the decision making processes of our society. The so called experts will
tell you that this would be cumbersome or marginally inefficient. I am
prepared to sacrifice a margin of efficiency for the value of the people's
participation anyway, in the longer term, I reject this argument. To unleash the latent potential of our
people requires that we give them responsibility. The untapped resources of
the North Sea are as nothing compared to the untapped resources of our
people, I am convinced that the great mass of our people go through life
without even a glimmer of what they could have contributed to their fellow
human beings. This is a personal tragedy. It's a social crime. The flowering
of each individual’s personality and talents is the pre-condition for
everyone's development. In this context education has a vital
role to play. If automation and technology is accompanied as it must be with
full employment, then the leisure time available to man will be enormously
increased. If that is so, then our whole concept of education must change.
The whole object must be to equip and educate people for life, not solely for
work or a profession. The creative use of leisure, in communion with, and in
service to our fellow human beings can and must become an important element
in self-fulfilment. Universities must be in the forefront of
development, must meet social needs and not lag behind them. It is my earnest
desire that this great My conclusion is to reaffirm what I hope
and certainly intend to be the spirit permeating this address. It's an
affirmation of faith in humanity. All that is good in man's heritage involves
recognition of our common humanity, an unashamed acknowledgement that man is
good by nature. Burns expressed it in a poem that technically was not his best, yet captured the spirit. In "Why should we idly waste our
prime," he writes: "The golden age, we'll then revive,
each man shall be a brother, In harmony we all shall live and till
the earth together, In virtue trained, enlightened youth shall
move each fellow creature, And time shall surely prove the truth
that man is good by nature". It's my belief that all the factors to
make a practical reality of such a world are maturing now. I would like to
think that our generation took mankind some way along the road towards this
goal. It's a goal worth fighting for. Date of posting : 21st August 2010 |
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