Academic and central figure in the SNP

Born February 20, 1940;

Died April 25, 2019

GAVIN Kennedy, who has died aged 79, was a long-standing academic, negotiator and independence campaigner.

He was particularly active during the 1970s, both in the formal councils of the Scottish National Party and in the “79 Group”, which agitated for a “Scottish socialist republic”. “He was a bit of a gadfly,” recalled his contemporary Chris Cunningham, “but he pushed and probed people; he challenged people’s understanding of politics.”

Although not a particularly strong republican (like Alex Salmond, another 79 Group alumni), Kennedy was happy to describe himself as a “socialist” in an influential book he edited in 1976, The Radical Approach: Papers on an Independent Scotland, a sort of nationalist response to Gordon Brown’s earlier Red Paper on Scotland.

Described in the Scottish press as “nothing less than a call for national revolution”, Kennedy more modestly offered it as a contribution to the debate. “The political situation in Scotland,” he declared in an introduction, “is on the boil”, while his chapter on “Scotland’s Economy” concluded that if states could co-exist within the European Economic Community (EEC), then “why should Scotland and England have so much difficulty surviving as good but independent neighbours?”

Gavin Kennedy was born in Wethorby, Yorkshire, to Robert Neil and Anne Kennedy. Aged 19, he married Rita Watson, with whom he lived in Edgware. In February 1961 they and other demonstrators clashed with the police outside the Belgian Embassy in Belgravia, during a large protest following the assassination of the country’s first post-independence leader, Patrice Lumumba.

Police had barred access to Eaton Square with a cordon, which was charged by the crowd. Both Kennedys were arrested for obstructing a police officer. Gavin claimed he had turned around after being instructed to move outside the cordon, but “accidentally bumped into a police officer”, after which he was “put down, dragged out, manhandled and thrown into a police van”. He pleaded not guilty but was fined £5 at Marlborough Street Magistrates’ Court.

Following that incident, Kennedy’s life took a markedly different course. He and Rita divorced in July 1961, and a few years later Kennedy matriculated at the University of Strathclyde to study economics. Graduating with a BA in 1969, he then studied for an MSc, also at Strathclyde. His political views had also shifted; ten years after serving on the editorial board of the Young Socialist publication Keep Left, he had become what The Times described as a representative of the “moderate left” at Strathclyde University. Later, he would leave the Labour Party for the SNP.

In 1969, while teaching young managers at the North East London Polytechnic, Kennedy was invited to visit the Shell-Haven Refinery on the Thames Estuary for a briefing on the oil company’s attempt to secure a productivity deal with several trade unions representing its skilled maintenance workforce. Intensive discussions with both sides taught Kennedy a lot about how economic decisions were made in practice rather than theory, from which he also developed an interest in workplace negotiations.

Shortly before the Shell-Haven negotiations reached their successful conclusion in 1972, Kennedy married Patricia and began teaching economics at Brunel University in West London, from which he gained his PhD the following year. With a colleague, Kennedy volunteered to present a seminar on “Workplace Negotiations”, which ran in May 1972 and was attended by 18 managers from a variety of business backgrounds.

While presenting another series of workshops to managers at Scottish & Newcastle Breweries in Edinburgh in 1973-74, Kennedy developed the idea that all negotiations shared a common process. He called it the “8-step approach”, but when asked to compress this into a half-hour training video, it became – and thereafter remained – the “Four Phases of Negotiation”: Prepare, Debate, Propose, Bargain.

In 1973, he joined Strathclyde University as a senior lecturer in economics, also devoting his considerable energy to the SNP, which was then entering the political mainstream. For the remainder of that decade, Kennedy was deeply involved with the party not only as a parliamentary candidate but as a member of its national assembly, national council and national executive committee.

Kennedy was particularly interested in the Economics of Defence (Faber & Faber published a book of the same name in 1975) and served on the SNP’s defence policy committee from 1974-79. A pamphlet for the Andrew Fletcher Society, The Defence Budget of an Independent Scotland, marked the first serious engagement with that aspect of the constitutional debate.

Kennedy concluded that an independent Scotland would have three options, “home defence” (like the Republic of Ireland), “armed neutrality” (like the Kingdom of Sweden), or membership of NATO (like most other West European countries). He suggested a defence budget of £450 million a year, roughly six times that of Ireland.

In 1980, meanwhile, Kennedy’s 8-step negotiation model entered the public domain in a co-authored book, Managing Negotiations, which was followed in 1983 with an exposition of the “Four Phases” version in a Longman Training video called “The Art of Negotiation” (an interactive version appeared in 1988). Dr Kennedy also left Strathclyde to join Heriot-Watt University as Professor of Defence Finance in 1983.

Three years later he founded “Negotiate” (later based at the University of Nevada), becoming its managing director and, later, chairman. Drawing on his considerable consultancy experience, over the next three decades he and the company trained thousands of managers via specialist negotiation seminars all over the world. Ultimately, Kennedy would write or co-author 14 books on negotiation, many of which were translated into several languages.

Kennedy also designed the negotiation modules for Heriot-Watt’s Edinburgh Business School, of which he became a director as well as Professor Emeritus. In 2005, he published Adam Smith’s Lost Legacy, an examination of how the economist’s ideas had been misrepresented since 1776; keeping with the Enlightenment, he was a trustee of the David Hume Institute from 2005-11 and active in the Edinburgh-based Tuesday Club.

Kennedy continued to support Scottish independence but demonstrated his own independence in criticising Alex Salmond’s controversial Kosovo intervention in 1999. Before the 2014 referendum, he chided the “narrow perspective” of debates concerning the defence of an independent Scotland, but said he believed it would not require nuclear capability, having previously supported Trident, very much a minority view within the SNP.

Gavin Kennedy died at his Edinburgh home on 25 April and is survived by his wife Patricia and five children, Kim, Karen, Florence, Beatrice and Gavin.

LINDSAY BRYDON