If You Don’t Run They Can’t Chase You by Neil Findlay, Luath Press, Edinburgh 2021

Reviewed by Vince Mills

November 2021

“The scars of the past are slow to disappear
The cries of the dead are always in our ears
And only the very safe can talk about wrong and right
Of those who are forced to choose, some will choose to fight”

Paul Doran

This book is a collection of first-hand accounts of campaigns by those, in the words of Paul Doran’s Natives, chose to fight – campaigners, all at the core and many at the inception of major campaigns on social justice.

Despite the author’s background as an MSP and Councillor, they go well beyond the political to cover industrial, social and community struggles. Some of these are older, industrial defeats that still hurt like the miners’ strike (1984-85) and the Ineos dispute, while others are much more recent, like the Spycops and the Mesh scandals, where there has been some level of redress, even if the campaigns are still very much alive. Others still, like the anti-apartheid movement which operated on an international level and the more local campaign against the Football Act enacted by the Scottish Parliament can be described as, pretty well, unqualified successes.

TAKING ON THE STATE 

The book is a collection of interviews transcribed by the author and he succeeds in communicating  the raw anger in many of the campaigners, especially I think in the women.

Here is Margaret Aspinall who lost her son, James at the Hillsborough disaster, describing what happened when Mrs Thatcher, then Tory Prime Minister, came to offer condolences:

“She came to me and I said, ‘I’m sorry Mrs Thatcher, I do not want to shake your hand just now.’

‘Why ever not dear? she said in that voice.

I said, ‘Until you can tell me the truth about my son dead having attended his first ever away game, then I won’t shake your hand.’”

Despite revelations about incompetence and cover-ups, the Justice for the 96 campaign is still pursuing redress for those who died that day. 

The strength of this kind of collection is that the reader can reach their own conclusions about the kind of state we live in without the author preaching. Those who come into conflict with it, as many who tell their tales here, reveal a system where surveillance is a common tool - an intrusion that nearly destroyed the life of Andrea who married an undercover cop. His job was to get information on her friends, one of whom was involved in the anti-blacklisting campaign. And though perhaps we should not be surprised that Brian Filling, a key anti-apartheid activist, was subject to ongoing surveillance, it is worth noting that striking miners and MPs supporting them and even it would appear community activists trying to get the Football Act abolished were not beyond the interest of the forces of law and order. This is Paul Quigley who was at the centre of Fans Against Criminalisation, the campaign founded in 2011 to contest a piece of emergency legislation which curtailed the rights of football fans. The Offensive Behaviour at Football Act was eventually repealed in 2018:

“The surveillance was really in your face. From the moment we stepped off a supporters’ bus or a flight we were followed and filmed till the moment we got back on.”

This is not just information gathering - it is, as Brian notes, intimidation. But it is far from the only form of intimidation that campaigners face. The description of the pain and injuries the mesh campaigners had to suffer is some of the most harrowing that the book has to offer, among much, it has to be said. What are we to make of a system, where women who have suffered all this, one of them in her wheel chair because of medical incompetence and corporate greed, are then subjected to the kind of treatment faced by Elaine Holmes of the Scottish Mesh Survivors 'Hear Our Voice' campaign, which brought together hundreds of other women suffering the effects of polypropylene mesh implant surgery:

“At one meeting I was being cross examined by three senior surgeons and officials who wouldn’t let up and were pressing me aggressively on a number of issues…they broke me under intense pressure, so Olive stood up and wheeled me out.” The ‘Olive’ referred to is Olive McIlroy, a co-founder of the Mesh campaign.

Indeed, being looked down on and dismissed, not least by those whose profession inflicted this catastrophe on them in the first place, is a common feature many of the campaigners experienced.

Dave Smith, who was blacklisted, worked on building sites as a civil engineer: “You couldn’t get a start on the big projects and any jobs you did get were on the smaller projects, where the money was less. And even then it wasn’t long before they got rid of you…I went to the politicians and raised the issue, but they dismissed it as a conspiracy theory or said I was making it up.”

COURAGE, PERSISTENCE, CREATIVITY AND HUMOUR 

Despite this, despite the legal system, the police, the put downs, the surveillance, despite all of this, working-class campaigners have refused to back down. They have shown courage, persistence, creativity and, of course, humour.

Terry Renshaw faced jail time and several of his mates served it after being ‘fitted up’ as part of the Shrewsbury 24 picketing case: “In December ’73 the first trial ended and saw Des Warren, Ricky Tomlinson and John McKinsie Jones go to jail…The second trial was January 1974 - three went to jail, found guilty on all charges…My barrister told me ‘they have you down as Des Warren’s right-hand man and if you don’t plead guilty you are going down for three years.’ I refused to plead guilty…”

In the end Terry received a suspended sentence but the courage he and his victimised comrades showed was immense.

Maria Fyfe who died in 2020 was the very embodiment of persistence. Despite the prevalent sexism in both the Glasgow Council chambers and the Westminster chamber where Maria was the only woman MP elected in a group of 50 Scottish Labour MPs in 1987, she continued to fight for increased representation of women and women’s issues throughout her career:

“On the day my bill came before parliament, the clerk was about to read out the name of my bill. Tory Nicholas Soames was sitting beside me and asked me what my bill was all about…Then the clerk shouted out, ‘THE TAMPON SAFETY BILL!’ and Soames slumped in his seat and said audibly, ‘What is this place coming to.’”

Alistair Mackie was the Trade Unionist who was at the core of the Workers’ Action Committee that won the Scottish Daily News as a workers’ cooperative in 1975, after the workforce had been made redundant by Beaverbrook Newspapers. It took a highly creative strategy to hold together groups of workers historically divided on the basis of craft and to win the support of large sections of the population who, for a while at least, supported the paper. Eventually it was taken over by Robert Maxwell and collapsed. Here is Mackie:

“…I got a phone call from senior Glasgow Labour MP Hugh Brown who said to me, ‘Have you thought about setting up a cooperative to take over the paper?’…I put the idea to the Action Committee and pointed out that we could either go for the cooperative idea or the paper would shut within a month. That was the stark choice before us.”

Some final words from scouser Tony Nelson who was at the centre of the Dockers Dispute 1995-97. The Mersey Docks and Harbour Company tried to crush resistance to casualisation but dockers refused to cross the picket line of sacked colleagues. The ensuing dispute generated extraordinary solidarity and collaboration of dockers globally and despite all of hardships of that campaign, Tony is still able to make you laugh.

One of the outcomes of the dispute was surprising. Using money raised by a film that Jimmy McGovern had made in support of the locked-out workers, the dockers opened Casa Bar to provide premises for meetings and social gatherings for any progressive organisation. Despite their best endeavours to keep it exclusive to acceptable left wing causes and hence avoid trouble, one night a group of lecturers booked a fancy-dress party, and unfortunately it was themed on the second world war:

“My partner Jackie …came through needing a hand from me: Tony you’ll need to come through, one of the lads has just knocked out Adolf Hitler.”

 

Vince Mills is Chair of Unite West of Scotland Education Branch