Tribute to Greg Tucker
Talks2000sAlan Thornett's tribute to Greg Tucker at his funeral, 16 April 2008. Joan Twelves and Bob Crow spoke at the same funeral. The video was not posted to YouTube until 2012.
A corrected transcript of the recording. The recording is the authority.
00:00 Alan Thornett: Thirty-six years ago, in 1972, during his brief period in Oxford — which I think was only a year — that Joan has referred to earlier, I was a Cowley shop steward in the Cowley car factories. Greg was an eighteen-year-old student defending an occupation down in Jericho, and he came to the Cowley shop stewards' movement for support for his occupation. And he got support for his occupation.
00:33 When we compared notes on this many years later, he was generous enough to say that this support was important in the final victory of that occupation. Whether that was true I don't entirely know, but it is very typical that even in those very early days his first response was to turn to the organised working class — something that obviously stayed with him for the rest of his life.
01:06 In more recent years, of course, Greg was a strongly committed member of the ISG. As Joan said, he attended our conference only a week before he died. It was an act of sheer willpower, actually. He even managed to raise a point of order on procedure. He had virtually no voice, but when the chair got the voting procedure wrong, he came from the back of the room, and it was Greg [who pointed out] that something would be a mistake.
01:36 Greg's first political reference point, however, was not so much the ISG as the Fourth International. He was a member of the ISG first and foremost because it was a section of the Fourth International. He was committed to the politics of the FI and in particular to its conception of what it represented [?] — in fact, he was a member of its International Committee — and he followed the fortunes of the sections of the Fourth International in great detail.
02:09 And in recent years he worked closely with the rail fraction of the LCR in France, which he campaigned with during the social forums in recent years, and built a very strong relationship with them, as can be seen here today.
02:40 At the ISG conference I made the point that, from our point of view as from the point of view of the wider movement, Greg was not only a huge loss but an irreplaceable comrade. And this is because he represented something which is very hard to replace. He combined a world view informed by Marxism with tireless campaigning on a range of activity, both political and trade union.
03:14 And in recent times, with the looming ecological crisis, along with the ISG and with Socialist Resistance, he became increasingly involved in the battle against climate change, and came to regard himself not just as a socialist but as an ecosocialist.
03:14 So Greg was a Trotskyist train driver with a view on everything. If you went to him — and I did — you would find, I have to say, an invaluable opinion on everything: from the history of the workers' movement, the application of Marxist principles, and a whole range of issues; international politics; the situation in the union; and the tactics in the most recent election campaign. And in particular the tactics in most of these elections — he had the most detailed view on absolutely every aspect of it.
03:47 His trade-union contribution [?] has already been the subject of moving tributes from his RMT colleagues, both here and also in written tributes. But the contribution that Greg made to militant, principled and political trade unionism I think has yet to be fully evaluated. He always saw the problems of the trade unions today, and the crisis of working-class political representation that we now face, as having a political as well as an industrial solution.
04:48 That's why he was active in the Socialist Alliance, and a candidate of the Socialist Alliance. That's why he joined Respect, and why he was in Respect Renewal. And I think it's in this particular area, in the interface between the political struggle and the trade-union struggle, that Greg will be most sorely missed, and where he made his greatest contribution.
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