Ron Brown

Ronald Brown, politician and electrical engineering worker: born Edinburgh 29 June 1940; MP (Labour) for Edinburgh Leith 1979-92; married 1963 May Smart (died 1995; two sons); died Edinburgh 3 August 2007.

Alas, Ron Brown will be remembered as a figure of ribaldry, arising out of colourful escapades - one involving the Mace of the House of Commons, another involving showers and women's knickers - which led the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party to decline to endorse his candidacy in the 1992 general election, after 13 spectacular years in the House of Commons, as MP for Leith. The party found his behaviour, in the end, de trop.

For two, among many reasons, I am sad that this should be the case. First, Brown had suffered an industrial accident, which hospitalised him for many months at the height of his working career, involving a huge voltage passing through his body, leaving his face severely scarred. I was told by two separate and senior Edinburgh surgeons that they were astonished that he had survived at all, and were awestruck by his guts and determination to resume a normal life. The horrendous experience did, in later years, have something of a psychological affect.

Secondly, Brown allowed himself to become the butt of parliamentary mirth on account of his travel itinerary, seeing that he was a frequent visitor to such countries as Afghanistan, Libya, North Korea and Yemen. His detractors, a large and distinguished company, would dismiss him as "Afghan Ron".

However, those few of us who were prepared to take him seriously, and offer him friendship, became aware of the appalling dangers posed by the turbulent position in Afghanistan long before most of our parliamentary colleagues. Brown's view was that the Russians were on balance a force for good, imposing law and order in that wild land, and he believed that it was totally irresponsible of the Americans and Margaret Thatcher to support the non-secular, often religiously fanatical mujahedin against the secular, Russian-supported authorities in Kabul.

In particular he pointed out in Parliament, to the annoyance of Thatcher and her ministers, that they were very unwise to supply religious fanatics with weapons. With the benefit of hindsight, who can now say that Brown wasn't perceptive when many more orthodox politicians were blind?

In 1981, when I was a House of Commons delegate to the United Nations in New York, Sir Anthony Parsons, then the UK ambassador (later Margaret Thatcher's foreign affairs adviser), knowing that I was critical of her policy on Afghanistan arranged for me to go to the Russian headquarters in New York, to see his UN colleagues Oleg Troyanovsky, the Russian UN representative, and Anatoly Dobrunin, the Soviet ambassador in Washington, about the situation on their southern border. It was made clear to me at that time that these heavyweight Russians regarded Brown as a more substantial figure than one of Lenin's "useful idiots".

Brown was far too irreverent to be besotted by the Soviet Union, and too much of a libertarian to accept Communist dogma. He had a healthy scepticism, but loads of human sympathy with people who had gone through the war against Nazism. He had, also, a droll sense of humour. "I met a Russian general in Kandahar," he would often relate:

He said he wished he had never heard of god-forsaken Afghanistan and wished nothing better than to go home to his kids in Dnieperpetrovsk. He then confided in me, "As a military commander, give me one Afghan on a donkey, rather than four Russians in a tank."

Ron Brown was born in 1940 into a working-class family with a tradition of work in the Leith Docks. After attending Pennywell Primary School he went to Ainslie Park High School. In those days it was a pioneering educational establishment, whose visionary headmaster George Murchison had a passionate belief in getting the best out of pupils.

Brown got a place at Bristo Technical Institute in Edinburgh, where again he developed practical skills. When he went to National Service in the Royal Signals, although later on he could be labelled as anti-military, he showed great skill in handling quite complex equipment. On the basis of a good army report he was taken on by the north Edinburgh firm of Bruce Peebles, then making generating equipment for many of the power stations being built.

Partly on account of his natural charm he was elected as a shop steward at the Bruce Peebles plant at East Pilton, becoming president of the local branch of the Amalgamated Engineering Union and their main negotiator on wages and conditions. The late Sir Duncan McDonald, chief transformer designer of Bruce Peebles, later boss of the whole Reyrolle Parsons group, told me:

In the 1960s and 1970s I had a great many dealings with Ron Brown. I have a great deal of time for him. He never whinged about his dreadful accident and was never sorry for himself. He was absolutely sincere in putting a case for fellow workers. And, above all, though he could be very difficult, and thrawn, full of anti-management rhetoric, once he had given his word to us he would keep it.

Elected first of all to the old Edinburgh Town Council for Central Leith, Brown became a regional councillor for the Royston/Granton district of Leith. In 1979 the then MP for Leith, Ronald King Murray, an effective Lord Advocate in the Labour government, decided that he wanted to accept the opportunity of becoming a judge of the Court of Session. The popular councillor Ron Brown was elected to take on his mantle.

On several occasions I was invited by Leith Constituency Labour Party to be their speaker after their monthly meeting. I was struck how forgiving they were of Brown's excesses, often headlined over the national newspapers, which included damaging the House of Commons Mace when he threw it to the floor during a poll tax debate in 1987 (he was firmly against the tax), and being convicted of criminal damage to a former mistress's flat (although he was acquitted of stealing jewellery and underwear from her). They felt that "He's our Ron and if anyone is going to discipline him it'll be us, not Transport House." Secondly, there was the dynamic figure of his wife, May Brown - an extremely energetic and intelligent left-winger with a heart of gold who was immensely popular and made it her personal business to help the down, the out and the weak of Edinburgh's port. If ever a Member of Parliament depended on his wife to protect his back in his constituency it was Ron Brown. I was very sad for him when May died, after which he became something of a lost soul.

The people of Leith will remember Ron Brown in his best days, and so will those of us who take a dissenting view on foreign affairs from the orthodoxies of successive British governments.

Tam Dalyell