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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
Obi tuary
David Hearst
The Guardian, Wednesday 30 March 2005 18.03 EST
Obituary: George Blazyca | World news | The Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/news/2005/mar/31/guardianobituar...
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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 own
education 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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