11/09/2025
Remember When the Left Fought, It Was Class War
Today’s political debates can feel shallow and divided, but there was a time when the Left asked profound questions about what freedom really means. Long before soundbites and hashtags, Jimmy Reid, in a rare televised clash with Kenneth Williams circa 1973, challenged the very idea of freedom, upon which so much false ideology today is built.
Let me set the scene:
Jimmy Reid... a respected shop steward, union leader, and voice of working-class Glaswegians, had just led the unforgettable Upper Clyde Shipbuilders “work-in,” forcing the government to reverse redundancies.
That same man later became Rector of the University of Glasgow, delivering a speech that cut through neoliberal propaganda: “The rat race is for rats, and we are not rats.” The speech the New York Times heralded as the greatest speech since Abraham Lincoln's famous Civil War oration, Gettysburg Addresss.
In his debates, Reid rejected the sanitised market definition of freedom while Williams leaned into the liberal myth, neither challenging the systemic lies that leave ordinary people alienated from their own lives.
This video doesn’t just replay that sparring, it asks: What is freedom if not the ability to shape one’s own destiny? How do we reclaim autonomy when capitalism has reduced us to economic units?
An age that tells us "we will own nothing and be happy"...
Can we again have that kind of bold, class-rooted conversation?
