Jimmy Hood
Good-natured Labour MP for Clydesdale whose people appreciated his straight-talking style
JIMMY HOOD, who has died aged 69, was a rumbustious NUM official in Nottinghamshire during the strike of 1984-85 who went on to serve for 28 years as Labour MP for Clydesdale (later Lanark and East Hamilton), becoming an effective and surprisingly low-key scrutineer of European legislation.
The burly Hood earned a reputation for toughness by decking a union colleague who had been drinking with his wife. But he was basically goodnatured, and conscientious in representing his members and constituents. A working-class rarity in a party increasingly estranged from its roots, Hood sponsored John Prescott’s 1988 campaign against Roy Hattersley for the deputy leadership.
As a strike leader in a coalfield where most miners stayed at work, Hood was regarded as a Scargillite militant. Yet while he was deeply committed to the industry and his class, he turned out at Westminster to be devoid of envy and open-minded.
When a new chairman was needed in 1992 for the Select Committee on European Legislation, Hood was not an obvious choice. But during 14 years heading one of the most precise and technical of parliamentary panels (later renamed the European Scrutiny Committee) he earned respect.
Ministers called before his committee knew it had done its homework, and that Hood – not a Eurosceptic – would persist if he felt the full implications of a supposedly harmless measure had not been explored.
His constituency combined parts of industrial Strathclyde with stretches of moorland for which he developed a great love. Its people, many of them ex-miners, appreciated his hard work and straight-from-the-shoulder style, but they could surprise even him.
Arriving at Coalburn sports centre while electioneering with the Scottish Secretary Helen Liddell in a car bedecked with balloons, Hood was asked by its manager what was in them. When he replied: “Methane”, the manager told him: “The kids will love it.”
James Hood was born on May 16 1948 at Lesmahagow, Lanarkshire, the son of William Hood, an ex-miner, and his mill worker wife Bridie. He attended Lesmahagow High School and Motherwell Technical College, where he studied mining engineering, and later Nottingham University.
After four years at Ponfeigh and Auchlochan collieries, he moved south to begin 19 years as a coalface engineer, also becoming NUM branch secretary at Ollerton Colliery. He joined the Labour Party in 1970, and in 1977 won a seat on Newark and Sherwood council.
Hood was already at loggerheads with some of his members when the NUM executive called out the Nottinghamshire pitmen in April 1984. The previous autumn, Polish-born miners at Ollerton had objected to Arthur Scargill visiting because of his opposition to Lech Walesa’s Solidarity trade union.
When a coalfield delegate conference voted to defy the union leadership and cross picket lines, Hood pronounced himself “sick”. To him, whatever the NUM’S rules might say, it was one out, all out. He led out supporters of the strike, but the bulk of the workforce carried on, ousting him as branch secretary.
“We may be in a minority at present,” he said, “but history will prove that those who struck and fought were in the right.” Hood stayed out until the leadership caved in the following year; after his election to Parliament, he was elected to the NUM’S executive.
Late in 1985 Hood was selected as Labour candidate for Clydesdale in succession to the Left-wing but unworkerly Dame Judith Hart. Since he had spent years away in England, his SNP opponent scoffed: “Those who know the new Labour candidate don’t want him, and those who want him don’t know him.”
Although Hood’s politics were firmly Westminster-based, at one Scottish Labour conference he led a chorus of “Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner”, when the Aberdeen MP Bob Hughes, who had settled in London, got up to speak.
On his election in 1987, sponsored by the NUM, Hood doubled his predecessor’s majority. In his maiden speech he suggested that if Ravenscraig steelworks were closed “the wrath of the Scottish nation will be such as to make the miners’ strike look like a picnic”. He confirmed his image as a firebrand by threatening not to pay his poll tax, but relented.
Before Hood could move his home north, he was involved in a late-night incident in Ollerton. He learnt that Mick Mcginty, vice president of the Notts NUM and his right-hand man during the strike, had been seen in local pubs with his wife, with whom Mcginty ran the local Miners’ Welfare Club; concluding that they were having an affair, he laid Mcginty out. He was arrested, but not charged.
Hood campaigned hard for George Beattie, the first of several Scots convicted of murder years earlier who were released pending a re-hearing of their case, only to be sent back to jail by the Criminal Court of Appeal. He regarded the decision as an outrage.
He also pressed for a ban on open-air drinking by the young. More controversially among Scots, he pressed the Scottish FA to participate in Team GB for the 2012 London Olympics. Hood was founder-chairman of the Parliamentary group on ME, and chaired at various times the Scottish group of Labour MPS, the party’s backbench Home Affairs Committee and the Miners’ Parliamentary Group.
Hood voted against the Iraq war, but was not a habitual rebel. His career – which had been punctuated by a serious heart attack – came to an abrupt end in 2015, when the SNP captured all but one of Labour’s Scottish seats after the previous year’s close-fought independence referendum. An outspoken supporter of the Union, Hood went into the election with a majority of 13,478, but lost by 10,000 votes to the SNP’S Angela Crawley.
Jimmy Hood married Marion Mccleary in 1967; she survives him with a son and a daughter.