Goodbye to a friend and colleague

The shock of Robin Cook's sudden death came at a time when the WEA in Scotland was making arrangements to celebrate the centenary of the formation of the first Scottish WEA Branch in Springburn in the north of Glasgow in 1905. Robin Cook was top of the list of speakers for that meeting. Robin was WEA Tutor Organiser for South East Scotland from 1970 until 1974, when he was elected to Parliament. Even today, stalwarts of the Trade Union movement in Scotland, talk about the weekend schools he organised and the discussions about transforming society, which would go on into the small hours. In his short interview for 'A Ministry of Enthusiasm', the WEA collection of Centenary Essays, Robin recalls shocking a journalist by naming Ian Jordan, his predecessor as Tutor Organiser, as the person who had most influenced him. "The WEA taught me more about the reality of injustice and the case for social rights than I would ever have got out of books."

If the WEA was an influence on Robin, he certainly had an influence on the future direction of the WEA. As Gordon Brown, Chancellor of the Exchequer, said in the funeral oration, Robin set about transforming the WEA. With the then District Secretary, Jack Kane, he thought hard about how to draw working people back into our massive liberal class programme. He sought to widen participation back then, a cause, which was taken up by his successors in Scotland who gave the WEA a new direction in the mid to late 1970s. That transformation still defines WEA Scotland's work today: education with a social purpose, for those who have benefited least from the system, but who, if empowered by learning, could change the system.

As a politician he was marked out as a great orator, with a formidable intellectual capacity, but most of all, as a man of principle, who would make a stand for what he believed in. Robin Cook was elected to Edinburgh Corporation in 1971-74, while a WEA Tutor Organiser, became MP for Edinburgh Central 1974-83 and for Livingston in West Lothian 1983-2005, Secretary of State for the Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs 1997-2001, and Leader of the House of Commons and President of Council 2001-2003, when he made a powerful, but clearly painful resignation speech, unable to support the government policy on Iraq.

Robin Cook
Born 1946 in Bellshill Lanarkshire, died 6th August 2005.