Alan and I joined the Militant, the forerunner of the Socialist Party at the same time in late 1974. Alan already had a good understanding of Marxism, the term we used then was an ‘unconscious Trotskyist’. He was simply looking for an organisation which would be the best route to a socialist society.
Unfortunately Alan was plagued with back trouble all his life and this had curtailed his rugby league playing career. He played for Bradford Northern, now Bradford Bulls, but he once said to me that he was “never big enough for a forward or fast enough for a back”.
During the fall of the Apartheid regime in South Africa he was one of our leading speakers. He toured Yorkshire branches explaining the latest developments, always explaining the importance of the South African labour movement taking an independent class position, raising the question of a socialist transformation of South Africa to replace Apartheid.
He was branch secretary twice in Leeds. Alan was meticulous in making sure we always had a speaker and meetings were well planned and organised.
After stepping down because of health issues he attended meetings online, and displayed his encyclopaedic knowledge of facts and figures, especially in relation to world debt.
For example, in 2007-08 he told me about the coming crisis in the US housing market and explained what a sub-prime mortgage was, months before the term was used on the TV or in the capitalist press.
Alan was always interested in international events, particularly the work of the Committee for Workers’ International (CWI), and after each congress he would demand a full report on how each section was developing.
In his final days in the hospice he was determined to finish the centre page article in issue 1377 on world debt, but kept being interrupted by nurses. With his typical dry stoical sense of humour, he said “I’ll finish this article before I die” – and he did, passing away on 4 August, a fighter and a Marxist to the end.
Kevin Pattison, Leeds Socialist Party
