Jim Sillars doesn't care if he upsets 'Stalin’s wee sister' Nicola

After the SNP’s recent disastrous election performance, he called for “repentance” not “reflection”, arguing that common sense had departed via the window at Holyrood, with “marginal issues” promoted at the expense of real priorities.

Sillars plumbed the depths of insult, averring the SNP leadership was “a busted flush”, a process begun by “Stalin’s wee sister” – Nicola Sturgeon. Yikes. Poor Stalin.

Jim and the late, great Margo (Image: free)

Jim was husband to the late, great Margo (no surname necessary, unless you’re under five), of whom he has written: “We were two halves of one whole. I am incomplete without her.” It was a marriage of equals, though Jim says Margo’s intellect was “far, far superior”.

That’s something about which he’ll never change his mind, though he’s reserved the right to do so elsewhere. Devolution: no, yes, no. Independence in the EU: yes, no.

Originally a “hammer of the Nats”, a handle frequently deployed by Unionists in homage to Edward I (“hammer of the Scots”), he became a leading Nat himself, though in his autobiography says: “If I am a nationalist of any kind, it is an Ayrshire one.”

That’s where Jim Sillars was born, in its historic county town of Ayr, on 4 October 1937. His father was a Labour-supporting railwayman, his mother a carpet weaver.

Young Jim grew up in a council house and was educated at Newton Park School and Ayr Academy, but later said, “I did not have a good formal education”, the fault lying partly with himself, he said, and partly with “the system and attitudes” of the time.

He became a proletarian autodidact, though he also studied law for two years at Embra Yoonie, “the best educational experience of my life”.

We’re getting ahead of ourselves. After leaving school at 15, he worked as an apprentice plasterer, which career soon crumbled after his boss priced a job allowing for three labourers: all of them Jim.

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Feeling exploited, he walked out and followed Dad to the railways. Then, to avoid national service in the Army, at 17 he joined the Royal Navy, serving as a radio operator from 1956 to 1960, and acting as unofficial shop steward, in between reading everything he could lay his hands on. Which tends to lead people towards socialism, a path made clearer by witnessing imperialism first-hand while stationed in Hong Kong.

In 1960, after the Navy, he joined the Labour Party and continued his apprenticeship in the real world by becoming a firefighter and union activist. When injury saw him invalided out of the fire service, he became a full-time party hack for Ayr Labour and was elected to the toon cooncil, serving from 1962 to 1970.

From 1968 to 1970, he worked for the Scottish Trades Union Congress and, in 1970, won the mining constituency of South Ayrshire in a by-election.

By this time, he was already regarded as an articulate critic of independence, having co-authored a meaty pamphlet called Don't Butcher Scotland’s Future.

However, marginalisation of Scottish issues at Westminster led to disenchantment, and he started thinking about a devolved Scottish assembly with economic powers. Harold Wilson’s Labour claimed to want one too but, in government, proposed only a weak, nominal version.

Miffed, Sillars left Labour (British) in 1976 to found the Scottish Labour Party (SLP), a move he later described as “a typical Scottish rush down hill, with blood flooding to the head”. Former comrades berated him, with Scottish Secretary Willie Ross averring “there is a special place in Hell for the likes of you”.

Jim Sillars celebrates his Govan byelection win (Image: free)

It made Sillars ill, developing an ulcer and vomiting blood. Meanwhile, the International Marxist Group infiltrated his new party, making it dysfunctional from the start.

In 1979, as one of only three SLP candidates, Sillars lost his South Ayrshire seat to Labour’s hyper-Unionist George Foulkes. So he went to work in South East Asia.

In the early 1980s, attracted by the party’s socialist 79 Group, including Alex Salmond, Sillars joined the SNP, developing policies such as poll tax non-payment and independence within the European Union. He also anticipated direct action and “cell doors crashing behind us” in pursuit of independence.

Having failed to win Linlithgow from Labour’s devolution-detesting Tam Dalyell at the 1987 general election, Sillars was selected as SNP candidate for the Glasgow Govan by-election of November 1988. Govan was where Margo had her famous by-election victory in 1973. It was where Jim and Margo first met.

Like Margo, Sillars won a dramatic victory, but the seat reverted to Labour in 1992, prompting our hero to contend that Scotland had “too many 90-minute patriots”.

That set the cat among the pigeons, while Jim swanned off to work at the Arab-British Chamber of Commerce in London, promoting business links between Britain and the Middle East. Later, he supported Margo after her election to the Scottish Parliament, revealing in his autobiography: “As a former Royal Navy rating I could take on all the housework no problem.”

Jim Sillars remains outspoken at 86 (Image: free)

Unlike Margo, Sillars had called for abstention in the 1997 Scottish devolution referendum, and remained unconvinced by devolution, arguing that it had “marginalised Scotland at Westminster”.

In the Brexit referendum of 2016, contrary to SNP Europhilia, he backed British withdrawal from a “profoundly undemocratic” EU. He detected a similar Project Fear to that deployed by Unionists in 2014’s independence referendum. For a man whose X handle is “NaeFear” that was never going to play well.

In recent times, often in open letters published in The Herald, Sillars has called talk of another independence referendum “foolish” while Russia was attacking Ukraine and independence support lacked “an overwhelming majority”.

He’s sympathetic to Alex Salmond’s Alba but places his hopes on a change in SNP leadership.

In his autobiography, A Difference of Opinion: My Political Journey, he described himself as “one of the last few survivors of a working-class political culture that produced its own leaders”. Earlier this year, in an interview, The Herald’s Kevin McKenna noted Jim’s remarkable “powers of recall, analysis and lucidity” at the age of 86.

Even political opponents respectful of debate must agree: long may he continue to speak his mind.