Matt Lygate

Matthew (Matt) Lygate (26 December 1938 - 10 January 2012) was a Scottish Marxist revolutionary, political activist, tailor, poet, artist and founder of the Workers Party of Scotland. Convicted of bank robbery in 1972, he served the longest ever sentence in Scottish legal history for robbery despite not committing bodily harm, serving 11 years of a 24-year sentence in HM Prison Edinburgh. He is noted for his strong anti-revisionist stance and adoption of Maoism in the 1960s.

Lygate was born in Govan, Glasgow and he was educated at St Gerard's Senior Secondary School in Glasgow, leaving aged fifteen. His family moved to Sunderland as a teenager. At a young age he joined the CPGB. When called for National Service, Lygate refused to join the British Army because he considered it "imperialist" and fled to New Zealand.

Upon return to the UK, Lygate became active in the Scottish and Irish republican movements. He was also a leading socialist, and in 1967 founded the Workers Party of Scotland, and was a founding member of the John Maclean Society. The WPS claimed to be, "based fundamentally upon the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels and the subsequent development of Marxism by Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tsetung, Enver Hoxha and John Maclean". Lygate supported Scottish home-rule and advocated to socialism in Scotland in tradition with John Maclean and the Red Clydeside. The WPS grew slowly and mimicked similar far-left groups that were sprouting across Europe in the 1960s. The WPS supported the revival of Gaelic and published works of Mao Tsetung in Gaelic. Lygate contested numerous by-elections, however, firmly believed that socialism could only be established through revolution. He and the WPS defended the actions of the Army of the Provisional Government, often referred to as the "Tartan Terrorists".

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