Matthew Lygate will have been in jail for 11 1/2 years by the time he walks to freedom from Saughton on Monday. The majority of murderers in Scotland serve between nine and eleven years of their life sentence. But Lygate's crime was political, a series of armed bank robberies netting a modest £14,000, allegedly organised by him to further his Workers' Party of Scotland with its Maoist ideal. Lygate did not impress the court by making a naive and inept political speech from the dock. He was jailed for a shattering 24 years, putting him in the same league as the Great Train Robbers and the worst of the IRA terrorists. Two others sharing the dock were jailed for 24 years and 25 years.

JAMES FREEMAN, Home Affairs Reporter, looks at the forces which were in play.

ONE man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter; thus Matthew Lygate. When he walks on Monday morning through the wicket gate of Saughton into a brief limelight, similar, presumably, to that which briefly illuminated Jimmy Boyle, the Government and the Scottish establishment will have rid themselves of a considerable embarrassment. For a couple of weeks, as long as it takes for London-based television and "heavy" newspaper correspondents who milk "provincial" journalism for their material to catch on, there will be a flurry of activity and possibly a large amount of high-sounding hot air.

The central question will remain — as it is likely to remain for all time — unanswered. Why did Lygate, an unassuming, self-employed tailor, an essentially humane, gentle man with a single-minded dedication to political ideals so far Left as to seem almost bizarre in the context of a near-stagnant Scottish political pond, attract a prison sentence of such savagery as eventually to prick the public conscience? The answer will never be satisfactorily uncovered, because it lies buried somewhere in a mass of uniquely Scottish factors which relate to the failure of our nationalism, to fear of radical change, and to the defensive over-reaction of threatened capital. There is little edifying to Scottish society in the Lygate episode.

We have the words of Lord Dunpark, not a Judge who has ever in the past been particularly associated with reactionary values, before us as he passed sentence on Lygate who had by that time dismissed his counsel and stood before the Bench in the best tradition of working-class revolutionaries everywhere and made what in retrospect appears like an ill-considered, half-cocked, cliche-ridden political speech. Lord Dunpark suggested Lygate had supported bank robberies probably because banks were capitalist institutions. He clearly found nothing sympathetic in Lygate's claim that what had brought him to court was violence against the working class, the same violence which had put 150,000 persons out of work in Scotland and the violence which had caused the withdrawal of free milk which led to children once again suffering rickets.

These matters, the Judge made clear, were irrelevant to the sentence he was going to impose — but he allowed Lygate to plough on. Plough on the Glasgow cloth cutter did. People could not get work so their only alternative was to join the army and fight in Ulster and "murder Irishmen and women," at which point Lord Dunpark again said these matters had nothing to do with the sentence he would pass.

Fellow accused

Lygate, lecturing the court, told the Bench that the day would come when those who judged him and his fellow accused would themselves be judged. His conduct in March 1972 seems now to smack of the actions of a man inviting martyrdom, which, were that the case, proved a tactic of singular success. His defence appears to have been bizarre, a denial of involvement in the bank robberies (three armed raids involving the theft of around £14,000) yet an admission that he knew of large sums of cash, firearms, masks, and clothing in the Paisley Road West, Glasgow, bookshop of the Workers' Party of Scotland of which he was chairman. "I have associates in many parts of the world involved in guerrilla tactics on behalf of the working classes," Lygate said in Glasgow High Court.

He had refused to participate in bank robberies yet he supported them "if it meant liberating money from banks to furnish materials for us to move forward in the struggle." Confronted by that kind of morality, would any other Scottish Judge have acted differently? Given the climate of the time the answer is most probably not. The political climate may have played no part, but on the other hand our Judges surely reflect contemporary society and the values current at the time. Nationalism had been seen to be a powerful threat to the Union, powerful enough to disturb London into some kind of recognition of uniquely Scottish problems demanding different approaches. Lygate, McPherson, Doran, and Lawson were part of something bigger, a groundswell which was causing — and still does to a lesser extent — serious unease in the corridors of power.

This was the period of the various Tartan Armies, of fringe nationalism, of copycat quasi-political movements revelling in connection with the IRA, with Welsh, Breton, and Basque separatist movements. It was also the time of the rapid expansion of the Special Branch in Scotland, the detachment of much greater police resources in the cause of political surveillance. As happened with Lygate, hardened criminals were attracted to the political underground. Both sides — the idealist and the thugs — were satisfied with the arrangement for their different reasons: the theorists, many of whom were more concerned with dressing up in kilts and militaristic regalia, because it meant funds for the cause, the criminals because of simple avarice.

Establishment reaction was swift and merciless. A glance through the court proceedings of the time, some of which were little different from political show trials of Eastern Bloc countries, shows that acts of criminality which were tinged with politics attracted sentences a third or even a half again longer that simple, equivalent, criminal acts. When Lygate and his friends appeared they were the first of the big fish the police had captured. Although not on the Nationalist fringes, they were, in the public conciousness, part and parcel of the same disaffected element. There can be no doubt that their salutary sentences were intended to deter, but successive trials over the following 10 years showed was only partly successful. A curious case was heard the year before Lygate appeared in England, which contrasts starkly with the events in Scotland.

Bank robbery

It was the firstArmy of the Provisional Government trial, after which William Murray, John Gillan, and John Stewart werejailed for five years, four years, and three years respectively robbing a Blackpool bank. Shotguns, pistols, and masks were found at their address, yet passing sentence, Judge O'Connor told the men it was not for him to wonder what the reasons behind the robbery were. He was, rather remarkably, "prepared to accept it was not for personal gain".

"It was said in mitigation that you have political beliefs which you think can be successfully brought to a conclusion by means of violence, but I am prepared to accept that you may have been misled by that," he added. Murray was released in August 1974 and brought home by a figure who occurs later in the history of the "terrorist" period, Major Frank Boothby, who was later to be sentenced for terrorist activities. In late August 1971, it is worth noting, another event coloured the argument and may have had a serious effect on the thinking of Scottish establishment figures by the time Lygate was arraigned. There was the serious explosion at Edinburgh Castle during the military tattoo for which no arrest was ever made.

The bombing was spectacular, large parts of Edinburgh were cordoned off — and top of the suspect list was the Workers' Party of Scotland. The Special Branch in Scotland, it has to be said, have never faced really insurmountable difficulties over tracking down the Scottish terrorists, whether nationalist or worker revolutionaries. From the outset the Left has been rotten, fragmented with factionalism, and riddled with police informers. It remains so today.

The people involved in today's Scottish Republican Socialist Party, logically the successors, and self-professed custodians of, the spirit and teachings of John McLean, bear remarkable similarities to those who flocked to the Scottish Watch in the '30s and those who peopled the Scottish Neutrality League during the war. Today's SRSP, which campaigned on the basis of release for Lygate during the Queen's Park by-election of 1982 and which would probably be Lygate's natural political home should he ever decide to make a comeback, is just as riven by squabbles over idealogical niceties.

Curiously, the Scottish political police have so far failed to bring to book the latest revolutionary group to emerge, the Scottish National Liberation Army, who have claimed responsibility for a number of letter bombs sent to prominent figures. Their capture would appear to be just a matter of time, however, when the extremely thorough "targeting" techniques take their effect. Throughout the period of the terrorist trials there have been major political shifts in Scottish society. When three men, Owen Gillan, Malcolm McAllister, and Raymond Forbes, were each jailed for a year in 1953 for revolutionary activity — conspiring to further by criminal means the purpose of the association known as the Scottish Republican Army with the intention of coercing the Government into setting up a separate government in Scotland included — crowds gathered outside Parliament House in Edinburgh.

A witness whom the defence had accused of being an agent provocateur, alleged to have acted for the police by supplying the accused men with explosives, was booed outside the High Court and branded "traitor" by a following mob who were fended off by a police cordon. Despite the air of desperation in the nationalist movement now, which many authorities fear may lead soon to more bombings and more trials, that kind of curious scene is beyond imagination.

Matter of opinion

Whether or not Lygate was hard done by in the first instance and whether or not it was cruel and unworthy to hold him in prison for considerably longer than all but a handful of Scottish murderers have served in recent times is purely a matter of opinion. Whether or not the Parole Board acted in poor faith in postponing release or whether or not they found something in Lygate's character and demeanour which continued to spell a danger to society is also an imponderable. The man who defended Lygate, and was sacked by him at the final hour, Mr Nicholas Fairbairn, QC, is in no doubt where he stands. "This case involved three armed bank robberies and armed insurrection against the State, I think the sentence was perfectlyin keeping with Lygate's activities if he was guilty. "I am not suggesting he was not guilty".

"I am against the concept of parole. There may be a case for it in minor sentences. But the one sentence which insured a man never committed another crime was preventative detention, which meant you served the whole sentence. In my view the concept of preventative detention should be applied in Lygate's and other cases. Their acts were just banditary dressed up as idealism."

Others are not so sure. A number of Scottish Labour MPs will freely state they believe that Lygate was a victim of "class justice," and that positive political leadership is now utterly paramount in Scotland from the Labour Party in order to head off further expressions of the extreme disillusionment which exists in some quarters. But one man of the '70s, Sir Robert Mark, stated after his retirement as Metropolitan Police commissioner in 1977: "I do not think that what we call 'crimes of violence' are anything like as severe a threat to the maintenance of tranquillity in the country as the tendency to use violence to achieve political or industrial ends. As far as I am concerned that is the worst crime in the book. I think it is worse than murder." In that public utterance of one of the major figures of power in the early part of last decade lies the key to the harsh treatment of Matthew Lygate and his fellow travellers.

(This article originally appeared in the Glasgow Herald on Saturday 17 September 1983)

Images

1 - Glasgow Herald article from 1983

2 - Matt Lygate (right) with friend, very rare picture from the 1960s at the start of the Workers' Party of Scotland

formation.

3 - Front cover of the very first edition of Scottish Vanguard, 1967 which was the official organ of the Workers'

Party of Scotland. Scottish Vanguard along with other WPS publications can be read on our site in the

Other Archives section.

4 - Front cover of Firinn Albannach from 1983, which was the publication for Siol Nan Gaidheal mk. Firinn Albannach can be found in our Other Archives section. The drawing of Matt Lygate was done by himself whilst in prison.