Norman Godman
Long-serving Labour MP for Greenock who spoke up passionately for Scotland’s industries
NORMAN GODMAN, who has died aged 81, was a former Hull shipwright who campaigned for the survival of the Scott Lithgow shipyard and safer working conditions for Scottish fishermen during 18 years as Labour MP for Greenock. A moderate Left-winger and a Christian Socialist, Godman was respected at Westminster, not least because he put his arguments with great politeness. This did not mean his views were not passionately held.
In 1983, urging Margaret Thatcher’s government to intervene to help Scott Lithgow, he told the Commons: “What we are seeing in Scotland, as a result of the Government’s indifference, is the creation of a Scottish underclass, made up of ex-miners and their children, ex-textile workers and their children, ex-smelter workers and their children and ex-shipyard workers and their children. I say to ministers: ‘For God’s sake, put aside your metropolitan indifference, your lack of concern, and intervene directly’.”
Godman was well suited to his constituency: Greenock & Port Glasgow until 1997, and Greenock & Inverclyde thereafter. He had been brought up among fisherfolk in another struggling port, and become an expert on Scotland’s fisheries while taking a PHD at Heriot-watt University.
He was in Hull when in 1974 the trawler Gaul was lost in the Barents Sea with its crew of 36; it would be 28 years before an inquiry ordered by John Prescott established its fate. Godman’s campaigning on fishery safety brought him the presidency of the Clyde Fishermen’s Association and a seat on the council of the RNLI. When in 1990 the crew of the Antares died in the Firth of Clyde, after its nets were snagged by a nuclear submarine, it was Godman who made sure a previously taciturn Royal Navy admitted the facts.
His campaigning for Scott Lithgow was less successful. The final straw was a disastrous contract for the semisubmersible Ocean Alliance, delivered four years late at a loss of over £200 million. Scott Lithgow carried on, but closed in 1993 despite Godman’s best efforts.
Godman also chaired Labour’s backbench Northern Ireland committee. In the aftermath of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, he urged Tony Blair to follow up his “courageous” decision to hold a fresh inquiry into Bloody Sunday by ensuring “bureaucratic miserliness” did not deny victims’ families legal representation.
Godman’s time at Westminster (1983-2001) overlapped the career at Holyrood of his wife Trish; elected for West Renfrewshire in 1999 when the Scottish Parliament was created, she served until 2011.
Before meeting Godman, she had brought up three sons on her own while training as a social worker. One – Gary Mulgrew – was in 2008 one of the “Natwest Three” bankers jailed in the US for stealing £3.7 million in a complex fraud involving the collapsed energy company Enron. Godman and his wife were in no way involved in her son’s financial dealings, apart from purchasing from him at cost a flat he had bought in Edinburgh.
Norman Anthony Godman was born on April 19 1937 into a Hull fishing family with roots in Aberdeen. He left Westbourne Street school at 15 to become a shipwright’s apprentice, returning to the trade after National Service with the Royal Military Police. As an MP, he would criticise updates to the Armed Forces Acts as favouring senior officers over other ranks. He became a mature student at Hull University, reading Psychology and Sociology, then in 1982 completed his PHD. By then he had joined Heriot Watt’s Department of Business Organisation, lecturing on industrial relations and co-authoring an influential paper, The Scottish Fishing Industry: Technical opportunities and political constraints.
Godman joined the Labour Party in 1962, and in 1979 took on the Conservative Iain Sproat at Aberdeen South. Campaigning for a fairer Common Fisheries Policy, he fell 772 votes short. He was selected for Greenock & Port Glasgow after its Labour MP Dickson Mabon defected to the SDP. The Liberals were so strong in Greenock that they insisted Mabon fight a neighbouring seat at the 1983 election; Godman still beat their nominee by 4,625 votes.
Godman teamed up with Gordon Brown to suggest that Scottish Labour MPS build support for devolution among English MPS; crucially, they won the support of John Smith. He left the Commons at the 2001 election and was succeeded by David Cairns, a former Catholic priest, Blair’s government hurrying through a Bill repealing an ancient statute that would have disqualified him.
Norman Godman married Trish Mulgrew, née Leonard, in 1980. She survives him, with her three sons.