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New Red Book reveals how distant Labour have become
Its cover is a photograph of the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS) 'work-in' of 1971-1972, led by Jimmy Reid. Five thousand copies of the book were printed by its publisher, Edinburgh University Students' Publications Board.
Contributions were wide and varied from the likes of Jim Sillars, Robin Cook and Tom Nairn and 25 others – including no women. To say that Brown edited The Red Paper is a misnomer because he pretty much accepted all the contributions in their states of first draft.
But when all is said and done, The Red Paper was the public political highpoint of post-war 'Scottish socialism', defined as social democracy through a form of labourism, meaning unions would deliver what they called 'socialism' through the parliamentary road – and not revolutionary road – and via the Labour Party. It was a time when, to mix metaphors, Brown was Red.
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Such was the emphasis on socialism as social democracy in Scotland, it almost seemed to offer a version of 'socialism in one country'.
And, though seldom read because of the tiny type, it was a book that 'lit up the murky Scottish political scene like a lightning-flash' according to Neal Ascherson in The Observer in 2000. This indicates the book had a profound psychological and political but not intellectual or practical impact.
Brown introduced the chapters by saying: 'Scottish socialists cannot support a strategy for independence which postpones the meeting of urgent social and economic needs until the day after independence. But neither can they give unconditional support to maintaining the integrity of the United Kingdom – and all that that entails – without any guarantee of radical social change.'
So, the argument was constitutional change via devolution could lead to social justice. For Labour in 1975, this was heretical because the Unionist Labour left was mesmerised by the party's pledge in its 1974 General Election manifestos to 'bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families'.
And Brown's perspective was not the 'devolution will kill nationalism stone dead' argument of right-wing Labour MP and Scottish Secretary George Robertson, 20 years later in 1995.
At the time, Brown was more reflective and reasoned. With the SNP Westminster breakthrough in the October 1974 General Election with 11 seats, he did not regard nationalism as a cancer that needed to be cut out as many of his fellow Labour members did.
He wrote: 'What this Red Paper seeks to do is to transcend that false and sterile antithesis which has been manufactured between the nationalism of the SNP and the anti-nationalism of the Unionist parties.'
But, nonetheless, the attainment of social justice of the Blair-Brown 1997-2010 Labour governments and the Labour-LibDem coalition Scottish governments of 1999-2007 was not much in evidence. It certainly was not advanced by the Brown-initiated cross-party pledge of 'The Vow' promising further devolution on September 16 ,2014.
Indeed, Brown not only junked his beliefs of using the state to ameliorate the outcomes of the market but then advocated using the state to make the market more efficient. Long gone were any ideas of workers' self-management and public ownership, including the oil industry.
One of the organisers of a University of Aberdeen conference to assess The Red Paper in 2000 commented: 'It is surprising how many people have forgotten about it, including, perhaps, Gordon Brown himself. Unlike many of the other contributors to the Red Paper, he seems reluctant to recall the time when he advocated public ownership and community democracy.'
Not everybody gave up on the ideas of this type of Scottish socialism, though. Within Scottish Labour, the Campaign for Socialism group was established in 1994 to fight against the removal of Clause IV on public ownership by Blair and Brown from Labour's constitution. The group has counted a handful of MPs in Scotland and MSPs among its members.
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More significantly, those around the group worked with others on the left to produce a new version of The Red Paper on Scotland in 2005 for the 30th anniversary. This same formula was used by The Red Paper Collective to produce a further edition the year before the referendum in 2014 called Class, Nation And Socialism: The Red Paper On Scotland 2014.
The Red Paper Collective was established in 2012. Now in 2025, we have a fourth iteration produced by it called Keep Left: Red Paper On Scotland 2025.
Every Red Paper after the first has been more readable than the last. But the tide has gone out for its ideas: not in terms of their credibility or coherence but in terms of their traction inside Scottish Labour.
This is the story of Thatcherism creating the creature that is 'New' Labour, in which Brown was a leading light. When asked in 2002 what her greatest achievement was, Thatcher replied: 'Tony Blair and New Labour. We forced our opponents to change their minds.' North and south of the Border, we are still living with that legacy.
Professor Gregor Gall is a research associate at the University of Glasgow and editor of A New Scotland: Building An Equal, Fair And Sustainable Society (Pluto Press, 2022)
