John Reid, Baron Reid of Cardowan - Political Ideology

Political Ideology

Reid grew up in a very working-class environment. He is intensely proud of his industrial working class upbringing and one of his favorite mottoes is "better a broken nose than a bended knee".

At university Reid, for a time, became a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain of which he has said: "I used to be a Communist. I used to believe in Santa Claus". However, the secretary of the Young Communist League, Jim White, who went to university with Reid, recalls: "He told us he was a Leninist and Stalinist. Although I was suspicious about his transition, we couldn't tell if he was acting. We let him join." On securing the support of the Communists and Labour students, Reid was able to run for president of the student's union and win the election. His political career was launched.

He moved on from Leninism after leaving university with his doctorate, and became a researcher for Scottish Labour party. Reid believes that any socialist, or indeed any rational person, should be a revisionist on principle.

His intellectual familiarity with Marxism helped him in the early 1980s when he compared the split within Labour between the left-wing Tony Benn and Neil Kinnock as one between Bennite "quasi-Leninists", and "Luxemburgers", (named after the German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg), who favoured the more soft-left Neil Kinnock. He lent his support to Kinnock.

As an advisor to Kinnock, Reid was one of the earliest to embark on the crusade to reform and modernise the Labour Party. In 1983, after the Labour Party's worst ever election defeat, he had, at Kinnock's request, put on a single sheet of paper what had been making Labour so unelectable for the past few years. "Leaderless, unpatriotic, dominated by demagogues, policies 15 years out of date", Reid had written. He was contemptuous of the party campaign machine which Harold Wilson had, in 1955, called a "penny-farthing". "The only difference now is that it's a rusty penny-farthing. Fix all these things and you will fix the party" Reid is quoted as saying. He regards New Labour as a natural development of Bevanism.

Elected to Parliament in 1987 as Member of Parliament for Motherwell North, within two years Reid was appointed to the shadow Front Bench as spokesperson for Children. In 1990 Reid was appointed a Defence spokesperson.

Controversially, when the former Yugoslavia was breaking up in the 1990s Reid considered it important to start a dialogue with the Bosnian Serbs. However during the Bosnian War, Reid struck up a friendship with the Serb rebel leader, Radovan Karadžić, later to be indicted as a war-criminal. Reid admitted he spent three days at a luxury Geneva lakeside hotel as a guest of Karadžić in 1993. This was during the period (April 1992-July 1995) in which the crimes for which Karadžić was indicted in 1995 were committed.