Bill Speirs

Former leader of STUC and Scottish Labour chairman

Born: 8 March, 1952, in Dumbarton.

Died: 23 September, 2009, in Glasgow, aged 57.

BILL Speirs had a unique combination of talents which made him the outstanding trade unionist of his generation. His intellect would have graced any university. His strategic and tactical abilities would have given the very best of communists a run for their money. And his instincts to forge and sustain unity behind a host of industrial and political causes marked him out as a renaissance figure in the trade union movement.

Bill was a very Scottish trade unionist: socialist, a small 'n' nationalist and an internationalist. These threads for Bill were seamless and he had little time for tortured ideology which suggested they were incompatible. He argued from first principles with that trademark sustained eloquence, making him, in the words of Campbell Christie, his predecessor as STUC general secretary, "one of the outstanding personalities of the trade union movement".

His pragmatic left, anti-market politics were forged by the inequalities witnessed when capitalism deindustrialised his native Clydeside. He was to be the tactical mind behind many a struggle to save jobs. Bill understood the primacy of solidarity and the need to build coalitions to achieve cherished goals. Only a person of his resoluteness and faith in the justice of his causes could have so successfully represented working people in the way he did.

But to define him solely in terms of industrial struggle is to misunderstand the scope of his contribution. He is "a huge loss to the thinking and planning and strategy of the labour movement", according to Mr Christie. That thinking led him to embrace the struggle of international workers and he played a key role in heightening the profile of the STUC in international causes such as ending apartheid and promoting the rights of Palestinians as they watched the illegal annexation of their homeland.

William MacLeod Speirs was a bright child who went on to gain a first-class honours degree in politics from the University of Strathclyde. Research work soon followed, first at Cardonald, and then Paisley College of Technology, before he joined the STUC.

He worked his way through the ranks of the STUC and was the natural successor to the avuncular Mr Christie when he stood down as general secretary in 1998. As Mr Christie's assistant, Bill complemented perfectly the work of the more experienced official who forged cross-party links on campaigns to defeat the poll tax and galvanise pro-Home Rule forces to force the Tories to change on the constitution.

If Mr Christie's time as STUC general secretary was marked by epic struggles as Scotland moved away from a manufacturing economy, Bill had to carve out a new role in an age when unions were ostensibly less relevant. It is to his eternal credit that the STUC remained at the heart of the political, cultural and civic life of the nation during his eight-year tenure. Former first minister Jack McConnell was right when he observed that Bill "brought something really special to the political and civic scene".

Those who encountered him will remember the slightly shambolic dress sense and the mischievous glint in the eye as he considered the machinations of a particular issue. He could find humour in the absurdity of whatever situation he found himself in. If you debated with him he listened and took the argument on board. But you could see the brain working overtime as he out-thought whatever was offered by way of argument, in the process demolishing sloppy assumptions and points that did not stand up.

Jim Devine MP said: "He could think wider and broader than anyone else I knew in the movement."

Had Bill chose elected politics he could, perhaps, have achieved much more. None of the post-Dewar Scottish Labour leaders had his reservoir of talent, nor his keen sense on how to carry unpopular causes by the sheer passion of argument. In that sense many will perhaps lament on what might have been.

For all that, Bill Speirs would have been more than satisfied that he made a difference to the people who mattered most to him – to workers, particularly black and women workers marginalised by the prejudice of less enlightened times. And he could hold his head high that he continued the crusading traditions of the Scottish trade union movement in recognising obligations to men and women around the world.

To those who had only their labour to sell or who were oppressed by racism and prejudice at home and abroad, all had a real and genuine friend in Bill Speirs.