Obituary: Alex Falconer, dockyard worker, trade unionist and politician

ALEX Falconer was a widely respected Labour Member of the European Parliament for 15 years, from 1984-99, where his campaigning and his uncompromising stands won him the nickname “the Falcon”. At home in his constituency of Mid Scotland and Fife, he was better known, to his Labour supporters and even beyond, as “the People’s Champion”.

Falconer, who started work as a foundry apprentice in Dundee at 15, later became a close friend of the man who would become Prime Minister, Gordon Brown.

The two men shared an office in Inverkeithing, Fife, where Brown was MP for Kircaldy and Cowdenbeath and Falconer an MEP, having won his seat easily from the Conservatives.

Although he sat in the European Parliament in both Brussels and Strasbourg, Falconer quickly upset most of his fellow MEPs, not to mention his own Labour leadership back in the UK, with his robustly anti-European Union stance.

He was quick to attack the weaknesses, anomalies and often downright ridiculousness of EU decisions. And he managed to maintain a personal image of hard work and integrity among MEPs, many of whom became known more for their wining, dining and partying – at the taxpayer’s expense – than for their legislation.

A stalwart of the traditional Left, Falconer became a founding member and leading light of the Campaign for Socialism (CfS) within the Scottish Labour Party, which sought to keep the old objectives alive as Labour drifted towards the Centre and beyond.

He was an outspoken supporter of Scottish devolution, was a leading campaigner on the environment and noisily opposed many of Margaret Thatcher’s policies, including the privatisation of household water supplies and the poll tax.

The title “People’s Champion” had a lot to do with his stand on behalf of his constituency’s coal miners, including the day he and a colleague held up a National Union of Mineworkers’ banner while Mrs Thatcher was making a speech (or giving a lecture) to the European Parliament.

Falconer was also a passionate supporter of his constituents and others who suffered from the industrial disease known as pleural plaques, caused by high exposure to asbestos. He was a driving force in gaining compensation for them and his campaign led to unique legislation on their behalf in Scotland.

Alexander C Falconer was born in Dundee in 1940, left school aged 15 with no qualifications and started work as a “lodge boy” at the Blackness Foundry in his home town.

Made redundant at the age of 18 as the famous foundry moved towards closure, he saw the Royal Navy as his best option and served as a seaman for nine years.

Returning to Scotland, he worked for a while as a labourer, an NHS worker, a hospital stoker in Dunfermline and finally, from 1969, as a lagger (insulator) at the naval dockyard in Rosyth, Fife.

Unswerving in his socialist ideals, he became a shop steward in 1970, joined the Labour Party in 1973 and served on behalf of the Transport and General Workers’ Union as a Scottish Labour Party Conference delegate from 1975 until he was elected MEP for Mid Scotland and Fife in 1984.

He won 42.6 per cent of the vote, to Conservative candidate John Purvis’s 28.2 per cent. (Purvis would later be re-elected, in 1999, after Falconer retired, and would serve for a further ten years).

During his tenure in Strasbourg and Brussels, Falconer served on several European parliamentary committees, including economic, monetary and industrial policy; environmental and public health and safety; legal affairs and citizens’ rights; regional policy; and external trade and relations.

Pamphlets he published included The Democratic Deficit, Usage and Abusage of the Wealth of Nations, Global Village Economics, Beyond the Wealth of Nations and The Ill-Divided World.

During his time as an MEP, one of Falconer’s research assistants during the latter half of the 1980s was Richard Leonard, later to become a member of Labour’s Scottish Executive Committee.

Falconer’s favourite song, one that originated in his hometown of Dundee, was the Jute Mill Song written by trade union and feminist activist Mary Brooksbank around 1920 and still relevant to this day:

Aw, dear me, the warld’s ill-divided

Them that work the hardest are aye wi’ least provided

But I maun bide contented, dark days or fine

There’s nae much pleasure living affen ten and nine

As for Falconer’s favourite saying, that came from the English-born American revolutionary and political activist Thomas Paine: “Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must undergo the fatigue of supporting it.”

Falconer’s friend and Labour colleague Michael Connarty, MP for Linlithgow and East Falkirk, praised him thus: “If ever there was a living advert for the benefits of one-member, constituency-based representation in the European Parliament, it was embodied in Alex Falconer.

“Big Alex, as he was known, had a healthy scepticism about the uncontrolled market policies of the EU and was scathing about the obscenity of the Common Agricultural Policy which at that time created wine lakes and saw mountains of good food sprayed with toxic chemicals to force up food producer prices.

“Always wearing his political heart on his sleeve, Alex raised funds for the miners during the 1980s strike, at one time taking up a bucket collection in the EU parliamentary sessions.”

Alex Falconer died in hospital on Sunday after suffering from cancer.

He is survived by his wife Margaret and family.

PHIL DAVISON