obituary_ george blazyca _ world news _ the guardian

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George Blazyca, who has died of cancer aged 52, was one of Britain's foremost voices on

post-communist societies and European Union expansion. As director of Paisley

University's Centre of Contemporary European Studies, his expertise on Poland was

tapped both by Westminster and the Scottish executive.

A lifelong socialist, Blazyca did not abandon his core beliefs, as many of his generation

did. Nor did he succumb to neo-liberalism, as communism collapsed in Poland in 1989.

One of his earliest books about Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms (Planning Is

Good For You: The Case For Popular Control, 1983), is consistent with his prolific later

work.

Poland provided Blazyca with a case study of the potential for, and the constraints

implied by, socialist politics. He tempered his view of privatisation and the creation of a

free market in Poland with his forensic knowledge of the realities of the Polish

economy, or, as he often said himself, economies - such were the yawning gaps of

income and wealth within one country. But he never wavered in his belief that Poland's

re-engagement with Europe was the ultimate guarantor of its political freedom.

Born in Hawick, George was the eldest of the three children of Jerzy Blazyca, who

served as a signaller with the Polish forces in Italy, and Maria Grilli, an Italian who

settled in Scotland. Both parents were prevented from completing their education by

the second world war, but poured their efforts into George's education at Hawick high

school, where he excelled in maths, physics and English. There, he was taken under the

wing of careers master and history teacher, Jock Houston, who took him on debating

competitions run by the English Speaking Union and the Scottish Daily Express. The

quietly confident schoolboy became markedly more vocal under the influence of his

mentor.

Blazyca's horizons widened. He had the unlikely distinction, for a Scottish working-class

Obituary

David Hearst

The Guardian, Wednesday 30 March 2005 18.03 EST

uary: George Blazyca | World news | The Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/news/2005/mar/31/guardiano

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child, of gaining a place at Sussex University. He went on to take a PhD there, with a

thesis on the Polish economy, which he completed in Warsaw.

Back from Poland in 1976, Blazyca lectured at the University of East Anglia, Coventry

Polytechnic and Greenwich University - where he was head of department - before

being appointed to his Paisley professorship in 1992.

Blazyca never lost his belief in the transforming power of education. He saw his owneducation as a great advancement, and his role as an educator was to repay that to the

thousands of students whom he taught. To his colleagues, his students and his friends,

Blazyca was a generous man, with a chuckle, a twinkle in his eye and an explosive

ability to prolong the argument into the small hours of the morning. Even on his

deathbed, in the Victoria Infirmary in Glasgow, Blazyca could not resist firing a salvo at

New Labour's plans for the NHS. He wrote in the Scottish Left Review: "Hospital

'choice' surely takes the Rich Tea biscuit. Are our friends in England to interrogate a

Baedeker guide on falling ill, with grades for consultants and their teams, for ward

comforts, decoration, staff attitudes, visitor parking and the coffee shop? ... When the

first English hospitals-in-competition go bust I hope that those Scots Labour MPs who

voted down even their own Westminster colleagues to extend the market ever deeper

into the English public realm will have something honest to say about the chaos that

comes with choice."

With his death, European studies in Britain has lost one of its finest analysts. To his

friends and his family, George's death leaves, in the words of a colleague on the Scottish

newspaper the Herald, "a bloody great space".

He is survived by his parents, his wife Wendy, his children Rachel, Anna and Sam, and

by his siblings Richard and Rita.

George Blazyca, economist, born September 5 1952; died March 2 2005

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obituary_ george blazyca _ world news _ the guardian

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