Remember when ... Campbell Christie, ‘choirmaster of Scots discontent’

A MEASURE of the state of Scotland’s economy in 1986, when there were 370,000 people on the dole, came in a document launched by Campbell Christie at his first annual conference as STUC general secretary.

Christie, seen here on the right with his predecessor, James Milne, unveiled a blueprint for the regeneration of the economy, and claimed it could create up to 500,000 jobs and eliminate unemployment in Scotland. Among the priorities was an elected Scottish Assembly with tax-raising powers.

Christie remained as general secretary until 1998. Among the many issues he had to deal with were the declines in Scotland’s heavy industry and in trade union membership, and government legislation that eroded the power and influence of trade unions across the UK.

Industrial crises ranged from the closure of Caterpillar’s Uddingston plant to the battle to save the Ravenscraig steelworks.

As a Herald obituary noted in October 2011, after his death at the age of 74, Christie “was one of the leading trade unionists of his generation, a shrewd strategist who maintained the influence of the STUC long after Scotland’s industrial base had disappeared.

“He had parallel influence as a civic leader, not least in the campaign to establish a Scottish Parliament, becoming, as one account put it, the ‘choirmaster of Scottish discontent’.”

Devolution for Scotland was an enduring, and unusual, enthusiasm for a trade unionist, but Christie represented the STUC on the Scottish Constitutional Convention from its creation in 1989.

He would later write that a Scottish parliament was a “radical concept for democratic and representative equality first pioneered by the STUC”.

Christie became not only the public face of the STUC but also that of the devolution movement.

In 2010, Christie became a public supporter of “fiscal autonomy” for the Scottish Parliament he had worked so hard to create.