Jimmy Allison

Labour Party Scottish Organiser

In a by-election in a marginal seat the effectiveness of the agent or campaign organiser is as important as the talent of the candidate. In 1955, the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party enjoyed a majority of parliamentary seats in Scotland and won over 50 per cent of the popular vote. Over the next four decades, the party was to lose every single seat. A significant player in this political meltdown was Jimmy Allison, who was active in every Scottish by-election from the time he joined the Labour Party in 1959.

Allison, who was Labour's chief Scottish organiser in the crucial years 1977-91, had the knack of galvanising members of the local Labour Party, of getting them to work on the doorstep - in the belief that it was their campaign and their responsibility.

He had the nous (and good manners) to recognise that, if local members felt themselves to be involved in the choosing of a candidate, albeit their favoured man or woman did not win at the selection conference, they would go out and help. Allison gained the reputation, justifiably, of being as straight as a die when he supervised often difficult and contentious selection conferences, for parliament or council, which are often prone to skulduggery.

The west of Scotland needed such an influence. Contrast this approach to the top-down imposition of a candidate, and the shouldering aside of the local party, which resulted in Labour's humiliating defeat earlier this year in Dunfermline at the by-election caused by the death of Rachel Squire. If Allison's political modus operandi had still been in vogue, the Liberal win in what had been until 1950 a Communist-held seat would never have happened. Allison's combination of streetwise bluntness and twinkling, funny, good-humour would have secured victory at the polls.

Jimmy Allison was born in 1928 into a mill family in Paisley, where his father worked at the Seedhill Finishing Company making Viyella. After leaving Mossvale School, where he was dux boy, on his 14th birthday, Allison became a junior employee in the same mill as his father. Had he been born 10 years later, he would unquestionably have stayed on at school and gone to university. Part of his socialism came from his determination that others should not be forced to discontinue their education, when palpably they would make good use of it.

In his autobiography, Guilty By Suspicion: a life and Labour (1995), written with the journalist Harry Conroy, Allison recalls how he refused his father's request that he join the Boys' Brigade because of their uniforms. National Service in the Scottish Infantry reinforced his natural dislike of anything that pertained to uniform and regimentation - which carried on in a healthy way throughout his time as an officer of the Labour Party.

In 1964, still a mill-worker, he was elected to the Paisley town council, a legendarily turbulent authority. However, the rules of the Labour Party were such that when he became a full-time organiser he was required to surrender his council seat. Paisley Central was then taken over and held for the next 28 years by his wife Nancy, who in 1995 was to be given the accolade of Provost of Paisley. The Allisons were a formidable husband-and-wife team in west of Scotland politics. The Paisley MP Douglas Alexander says:

Jimmy Allison played a key role in many of the organisational challenges faced by Labour in Scotland. He was there in bad times as well as the good . . . A lifelong runner, even with a recent hip replacement he still delivered Labour leaflets around his home during the 2005 election campaign.

I owe Jimmy Allison 22 years, 1983-2005, in the House of Commons. Along with Brian Wilson, later MP for Cunninghame North in Ayrshire, and Energy Minister, I had not only led the Labour Vote No campaign in the 1979 referendum, but, even more sinfully, in the eyes of the pro-devolutionists (and indeed in the eyes of James Callaghan, who was himself cynical about the issue of devolution per se), had gone to the High Court in Edinburgh to win an injunction against the Independent Television Authority, who proposed to show what we thought was an unbalanced television programme in favour of devolution. This was the case of Wilson, Dalyell and Birt v the Independent Television Authority in which Lord Ross granted an injunction which resulted in the programme's being withdrawn before it was shown.

Powerful forces in the Labour Party wanted retribution after the loss of the 1979 general election, in the form of my being deselected from the West Lothian seat and Wilson's being barred from ever standing as an official Labour candidate. Their first port of call to initiate this draconian discipline was the Labour Party organiser in Scotland - Jimmy Allison. He stopped them in their tracks, "You'll ken," he said,

it is a wee bit difficult for me to discipline Brian Wilson and Tam Dalyell, since I could not persuade my own mother, a well-informed lady, and my own wife Nancy, a prominent Labour figure, to vote for a Scottish Assembly. They voted No.

Allison put the kibosh on those who wished to wreak vengeance on the anti-devolutionists.

Last year, Allison confided in me his unhappiness about the Scottish Parliament (where he had always loyally supported official party policy in public) and dismay in particular at the way in which the parliament had intruded into areas which should properly be the responsibility of local government.

Allison was a familiar figure, too, throughout the English Labour Party. Not a by-election went by other than that he was drafted in to organise part of the English or Welsh constituency. Evidence of the friendships that he formed was abundant at every annual conference of the Labour Party, when he was greeted by people whom he had met on the campaign trail - and not only because he had the important responsibility of organising the stewarding at the Labour Party conference.

It is just inconceivable that, if, in 2005, Allison had still been in the position which he occupied for so many years at the conference entrance and on the conference floor, the octogenarian Walter Wolfgang would have been so insensitively evicted.

Tam Dalyell