TODAY is the 25th anniversary of the death of Mick McGahey. The occasion will be marked by a debate in the Scottish Parliament on his legacy.

This is fitting. In his very first year as the leader of the Scottish miners, he went to the Scottish TUC Congress and called for the establishment of a Scottish Parliament in a federal United Kingdom.

In so doing he invoked the spirit of Bob Smillie and Keir Hardie, argued that the essence of socialism was the decentralisation of power, but decisively rejected “any theory of a classless Scotland,” citing the common bonds between the Scottish miners, the London dockers, the Durham miners and the Sheffield engineers.

It was a seminal moment in the history of devolution, a turning point which unashamedly transformed the horizons of the movement, without which today’s Scottish Parliament may not even exist.

McGahey was a political visionary, who left school at the age of 14 but was, in his own words, a product of his class and his movement. He was also the product of a loving family.

If his arrival is captured in the closing pages of R Page Arnott’s authoritative A History of the Scottish Miners published in 1955, his national ascendency is charted 25 years later by Vic Allen’s magnificent The Militancy of the British Miners.

A lifelong communist, McGahey never hid his political beliefs. He was an inspiring orator and an outstanding trade union leader.

As national vice president of the NUM during the 1974 strike, he was vilified by the tabloid press, spied on by the secret services, denounced by the Labour right, and witch-hunted by the Tories.

It was McGahey’s image — the Scottish communist — that was used by Heath in drawing up the constitutional battle lines upon which he fought, and lost, the February 1974 general election.

McGahey was principled and determined. So, when nine miners were killed, poisoned underground in the Michael colliery disaster, his unflinching resolve to stop such needless deaths ever happening again led to every miner in every coalfield being fitted with self-rescuing breathing equipment.

That same vision and class politics saw him lead the Scottish miners out in support of the migrant, predominantly women, Grunwick workers in north-west London. It was a watershed.

He spent his life challenging anti-union laws.

At the age of 18, he had taken the Gateside miners out on strike in defiance of the Emergency Powers Act in solidarity with miners imprisoned. The action broke the wartime ban on strikes and lockouts. He was sacked. He was a fierce opponent of the infamous “In Place of Strife” proposals.

When Thatcher sought to repress free trade unions, he told the TUC: “If the Tolpuddle Martyrs had abided by the law we would not be here. The movement has to learn that if we stop running, they will not chase us. Stand firm and fight.”

That was the same spirit in which McGahey, Peter Heathfield and Arthur Scargill led the miners in the defining strike of 1984-85.

McGahey certainly knew that this was a battle for jobs, the people’s coal, pits, communities, and even a very way of life. He knew that it was a time to stand firm and fight.

And in the wake of the strike, literally “bruised, battered and unbowed” after being set upon, he was devoted to the reinstatement of the sacked miners, whose only crime, he said, was to fight for their jobs and the right to work.

Mick was a great internationalist who led debates in the movement on Chile and South Africa and who led delegations to build links with workers in Eastern Europe. Throughout his life, he promoted the cause of peace and disarmament.

A working-class intellectual who could call on Karl Marx, William Morris, Robert Burns and Lewis Grassic Gibbon, he was the natural heir to Willie Gallacher and John Maclean.

When he stood down in 1987, he was interviewed by the Scottish Trade Union Review. It was a moving farewell in which he recorded his appreciation to all his comrades, and reflected on the basic weakness in the British labour movement as being a “failure to convince people about socialism, to have what Harry Pollitt used to call ‘the gleam’ … the gleam to see a socialist future.”

And he made a clear declaration of why he was a communist: “I know the importance of electoral victories… But within the question of the defeat of Thatcherism is the key question for what?

“To have another Labour government that will be defeated in another five years or something like that. No, it is to change British society — win the case for socialism.”

And with characteristic modesty, self-effacement even, but incisive analysis, and emotional resonance, he concluded: “I have class anger and I have class hatred and class love, because you cannot love the working class without hating that which oppresses it…

“I have had some rough times, some very difficult times. I was always a second-prize man when it came to a battle, that is why I have so many scars, but nevertheless despite all those adverse things I have enjoyed my life in the labour and trade union movement. As the saying goes, I would do it again.”

McGahey remains an inspiration today — a first-prize man to legions of us.

In a sign of how widely he was respected, Donald Dewar arranged for the McGahey family to scatter his ashes in the foundations of the Scottish Parliament building.

His place in the history of the working class is assured, but his values and principles echo down the ages. They remain as relevant today, as they did during his lifetime, so sadly ended a quarter of a century ago.

We must never let that flame of socialist courage which Mick McGahey lit, ever go out.

Richard Leonard is the MSP for the Central Scotland region and served as leader of the Scottish Labour Party from 2017 to 2021.