In his celebrated 1972 address to Glasgow University students, Jimmy Reid, the Scottish trade union activist, condemned the alienation and competitiveness that he saw seeping into postwar British culture. “Reject these attitudes,” he pleaded. “Reject the values and false morality that underlie these attitudes. A rat race is for rats. We’re not rats. We’re human beings.”
Back then, Thatcherism was not much more than a twinkle in the eye of Ted Heath’s education secretary, but Reid – who had just helped to save the shipyards of the Upper Clyde from state abandonment – saw it developing in the common sense of the people.
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