I first met the economist Robin Murray in 1988, when he gave invaluable assistance to an Open Space documentary I was producing for BBC2 about the coercive, exploitative and low-quality nature of the Employment Training scheme being run by Margaret Thatcher’s government. Entitled ET Isn’t Working, the film was made with the Brighton Unemployed Centre, near where he lived, and focused on the inequities of the system from the point of view of unemployed people themselves.
Robin helped strengthen the intellectual underpinnings of the film, not in some desiccated theoretical way, but fully engaging with the lives of the people involved. He was friendly and purposeful with an invitingly warm, kindly smile. I was told by those going to the centre, who he had supported for some time, that he was “a good bloke”. “You’ll like him,” they said, and indeed I did.
