“Long live the workers of Scotland”
Matt Lygate
1938 – 2012
“An honest man here lies at rest
As e’er God with his image blest.
The friend of man, the friend of truth;
The friend of Age, and guide of Youth:
Few hearts like his with virtue warm’d,
Few heads with knowledge so inform’d:
If there’s another world, he lives in bliss;
If there is none, he made the best of this.”
- Robert Burns
Matt Lygate was born on 26/12/1938 in Govan Glasgow. From early on, he became an accomplished artist, orator, and thinker. He always loved the great outdoors and would often dissapear for hours up hills and down gullies to the distress of his parents. As a teenager, he moved to Sunderland with his family and became one of the best renouned tailor’s cutters of his time. Matt loved his family and family life, however when ordered to join the British Army (forced conscription was still in place at that point, 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 British Communist Party as well as a devout Christian, believing that Christ himself was a revolutionary socialist.
Once in New Zealand, Matt’s fervour and passion for justice as well as adventure blossomed. In his years on the islands of New Zealand, he travelled from village to village without map or tent, taking on local hard labour jobs as he went. He was institutional in the setting up of the first railway worker’s union and fought for the rights of the Maori people across the island. His travels took him from the heights of the Alps, picking deadly weeds in the snow, to the fields of grain where he worked along side many of the industrious indiginous people of the island. On leaving New Zealand to return to his family, the New Zealand secret service met him at the docs to make Matt aware he would not be allowed back any time soon. Such was the impact Matt left everywhere he went. Many took inspiration from his great work and polemics on justice, liberty and equality, others saw him as a grave threat to the established order. Matt excelled at and loved playing both the saint and the sinner in the eyes of different beholders. He was never one for cult status. He always insisted people judge him on what he said and not who he is.
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.
