Extracts from Alan Thornett’s speech
A couple of caveats before we start this afternoon. The first is that this is not a commiseration, it is a celebration.
It is the celebration of the life of a fantastic comrade and his contribution to the movement. When I have finished speaking therefore you don’t need to be silent; you can clap your hands, scream appreciation, have a standing ovation or even a Mexican wave. It’s a celebration. You can even do that for the other speakers as well.
The second is that for Charlie two score years and ten was not life expectancy it was political activity. He became a Trotskyist almost when Trotskyism began, and he was active until the latter part of last year and campaigned for the Socialist Alliance in Cambridge in the election.
His political activity spanned virtually the entire history of the Trotskyist movement. To talk about his political life, therefore, is to talk about the entire history of the movement.
I am not going to do that. Not just because I am not an historian of the movement, or because there are comrades here better qualified than me to do that, but because I have been asked to limit my remarks to an hour and forty five minutes and I want to try to stick to that agreement!
I have changed my mind several times in the past few days as to how to approach this presentation. Some comrades – one in particular – urged me to ensure that I covered as much as possible the whole of Charlie’s political life. "Make sure you say something about each of the seven decades", he said.
I decided I just could not approach it this way. I decided that the contribution of the early pioneers of our movement was simply too great. They were the ones who in tiny numbers faced the Stalinist juggernaut at the beginning of the 1930s.
They had seen the destruction of the Russian revolution and the Stalinisation of the Soviet party. They had seen the betrayal of the Chinese revolution. They had been driven out of the CPs or worse. This, as Trotsky said was the midnight of the century.
Soon those who had led the revolution would face show trials in Moscow. It was under these conditions, as someone said , they dared to begin.
They made themselves the living link between the revolutionary Marxism of the Russian revolution and future generations of revolutionary socialists. They are entitled to our gratitude for that and we should show it for Charlie today.
We could turn it round the other way. Imagine had they not dared to begin. Imagine a situation where the Stalinist nightmare had extinguished the flame of revolutionary Marxism in any living or organised form.
Can you imagine how much poorer we would be today? It is for these reasons that today we salute the early pioneers and Charlie amongst them.