Matt Lygate 1938 – 2012.
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Wednesday January 25, 2012 02:12
by pat c
Matt Lygate the Scottish Socialist Republican has died. Here is an obituary.Matt was a believer, not just in Socialism but also in Christianity. If there is an afterlife then he has gone to join John Maclean and James Connolly. Full text at link.
Born on 26/12/1938 in Govan Glasgow. From early on,Matt became an accomplished artist, orator, and thinker. He always loved the great outdoors and would often dissapear for hours up hills and down gullies. As a teenager, he moved to Sunderland with his family and became one of the best renouned tailor’s cutters of his time. When ordered to join the British Army (conscription was still in place even after the war), Matt, like his father during WWI, refused stating he would never join an imperialist British Army. That same week, he was on a boat to New Zealand before the powers that be could abscond him. Matt had been an avid member of the CPGB as well as a devout Christian, believing that Christ himself was a revolutionary socialist.
Matt Lygate 1938 – 2012. Funeral Mass Wednesday 25th Jan 10am,St Aloysius Church 25 Rose St, Glasgow, G3 6RE.
On return from New Zealand, Matt’s political and social work continued. He became heavily involved and a leading figure in the Scottish and Irish republican and socialist movements. He was a leading founder of the Workers Party of Scotland which was a Marxist-Leninist Republican party advocating the establishment of a Scottish socialist republic in the same tradition of John Maclean’s vision. He was also instrumental in the establishment of the John Maclean Society which did much work to reserect the memory and life’s work of Maclean. He believed in the emancipation of mankind worldwide. He was a true internationalist, involved in the struggle for Irish and Palestinian independence, meeting many world figures over his time. In fact when nominated years later for Glasgow University Rector, he stood down to allow votes for Yassar Arafat. Over his time he has been nominated and rejected two honourary degrees from both Glasgow and Edinburgh University. He rejected them on the political grounds that they might corrupt him and remove him from his working class route, but in truth it was also because Matt was a brutally modest man and shunned any idolisation or cult status.
In 1972, Matt and 4 others were convicted of bank robbery and handed out the longest sentences in Scottish legal history for non murder crimes. During the case, Matt dismissed his defence team and represented himself. Knowing the fact he was to be tryed, not on bank robbery, but his politics, he used the court rather than to defend himself, but to attack the very system he knew aimed to destroy him. In his closing statment, he told the judge it was not his violence that had brought him to court, but that of the state against the working class. The same violence that had put 150,000 people out of work at the time in Scotland and stolen children’s milk leading to the return of Rickets in Scotland. He announced that the day would come when those who judged him would themselves be judged, an announcement that Lord Dunpark did not take too kindly too. On announcement of his 24 year sentence, Matt looked to the public gallery and with clenched fist shouted “Long live the workers of Scotland” and with that began the longest bank robbery sentence in Scottish history. Although the judge himself admitted the crimes to be political and although it was proven in court, none of the alleged stolen funds went to Matt, he was not allowed political prisoner status. He was also denied appeal, a basic right in Scots law based on the statement by the presiding Judge that Matt openly supported bank robbery and so did not require appeal. A political belief in the redistribution of money in s capitalist society did not account to acceptance of guilt of specific robberies, yet the judge refused to accept this and Matt was denied appeal against his unequivically long sentence.