ALEC Kitson was a devoted member of the Labour Party. He had no other political interest or affiliations. To work for the Labour Movement was for him a vocation. The poverty he saw and endured as a child made him a socialist. He sought in his teens and early manhood a coherence of thought and action. He knew what he was against, that's the easy part for those who started life in the slums of pre-war Scotland.

But what are we for, not just in high blown terms, but in every day details. Alec was a thoughtful man. He really did believe that it wasn't enough to explain the world, but to change it. To make a better world where there could be no hiding place for poverty. The means of doing this in Britain, he believed, was through the Labour Movement and Labour Party. He never departed from this belief.

I've been a close friend of Alec's for 37 years. I was a Communist in the sixties and part of the seventies and worked with him on many issues. Many outstanding trade union activists in the Scotland of those years were members of the Communist Party. Even the most right wing Labour diehard had to work with Communists. Alec was no right wing diehard but a left wing socialist and trade unionist. He had enormous respect for some Communists and little respect for others. During those years a few trade union leaders, members of the Labour Party, automatically supported anything the Soviet Union did. I know from research in Moscow over recent years that they were kept men.

Alec Kitson was not of that ilk. He was his own man. A dyed in the wool Labour man. McCarthysim didn't die with McCarthy. It was used throughout the Cold War against anyone who fought for the workers, spoke out for peace and disarmament, or supported liberation struggles in the colonial worlds. They were often branded fellow travellers and reds under the beds. Alec fought for all these things, and received the full treatment. This smear has been resurrected since his death last Saturday. It's a lie and slanders the memory of a decent man. One of the great figures in the post-war history of the Scottish and British Labour Movements. This slander should be nailed. Generations to come deserve the truth.

As with most human beings the child maketh the man and his childhood experiences certainly made Alec Kitson. His father was a shale miner. He volunteered in the First World War. Fought in France and German East Africa. Contracted malaria, suffered from ill health for the rest of his life, worked as a grocer in East Calder and had to give it up due to ill health. He died in 1949. At no time did he receive an army pension.

The family stayed in a tiny house in Kirknewton where Alec was born in 1921. His paternal grandfather, who had also been a shale miner from which the first commercial oil was made, sought to make a fortune abroad in the oil industry in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere. He returned penniless and was taken in by Alec's mum. Alec then stayed with his maternal grandfather David Grieg who lived down the stairs. He was an active Liberal who became a socialist and joined the Labour Party. A member of the National Union of Railway Workers and secretary of his local branch. He was also a parish councillor and took young Alec to union meetings, local party meetings, and out on the hustings.

There is no doubt that Granda Grieg had a significant influence on Alec. He left school at 14, though winning a place at West Calder High.

The family was living in dire poverty. He went to work as a van boy at St Cuthbert's Co-op in Edinburgh for 47p a week and was paid off at 16 when his employer was legally bound to pay his insurance stamp. The transport manager must have spotted his potential for he offered him a job as milk boy. He had his own barrow that carried five or six hundred cwts of full milk bottles. He worked seven days a week from 6am till 11am. He couldn't afford the fares, got an old bike and cycled to Edinburgh and back, 23-miles a day, 160-miles a week. He became a driver in 1938 and joined the Scottish Horse and Motormens Association.

He became the union's youngest official in 1945 as collector in Leith and North Edinburgh. He met and married his beloved Ann McLeod in 1942, became the union's General Secretary in 1959. The union had fallen on bad times and Alec with his comrades put that right. They organised schools at the union's convalescent home in Ayr, training activists to look beyond immediate issues and learn to think strategically. It soon became a force in the Scottish Trade Union Movement. Alec was elected to the General Council of the STUC an organisation which he cherished. Through all these years he worked for the Labour Party in Edinburgh.

Then amalgamation with the TGWU in 1971 saw Alec become deputy general secretary of the biggest union in the Western world. His home and heart remained in Scotland. He was a member of the British Labour Party's National Executive from 1968 until 1986 and chairman. He was in charge of the International Committee of the Party and helped, among many others, his comrades in South Africa during the dark and terrible days of Apartheid.

Some events in the sixties are worth recalling. It started over a drink, of an evening, at a Scottish Trade Union Congress. We were bemoaning the fact that the Scottish Labour Movement was all at sea on the National Question in Scotland. The Party had abandoned its Home Rule policy in 1948, leaving a vacuum that could only be partially filled by the SNP. Labour was simply reacting to the issue in terms of political expediency. A flutter of support for the SNP and it would pay some lip service to the question. If the SNP was doing badly the issue was quietly dropped.

This we considered an unprincipled approach. We had further discussions and agreed that we must try and redefine the underlying principles. We posed some questions to ourselves. Was Scotland a nation? And decided it was, one of the oldest in the world. Was the status quo tolerable. We reckoned no. What changes were needed, how could we give effect to them? It has to be dealt with objectively and not in the abstract. We had to deal with the social and economic realities including the problems of the Highlands and Islands.

I was to do some initial drafts but it was very much a collective input including George Middleton who was an expert on the Scottish economy. George Houston a professor at Glasgow who helped on rural and agricultural issues, Mick McGahey, Hugh Wyper and others. Very much to the fore was Alec Kitson. We took our findings to the trade unions and they were widely debated.

The arguments for a Scottish parliament thus became the property of the Scottish Trade Unions. And then the property of the Labour Party. The ultimate goal was to make them the property of the Scottish people. Alec lived for the day when this would happen, but it was not to be. When that day comes it will be due in no small measure to Alec Kitson and his kind. Alec's wife Ann died suddenly, a few weeks ago. Now Alec has gone. My heartfelt sympathy goes to their daughters Irene and Joyce and grand children Nicky, Jonathan, and Lee. In the midst of our grief there is also gratitude for lives well lived in the service of others.

An appreciation by

Jimmy Reid