Poignantly, just hours after his beloved Arsenal won the league title, our friend and comrade Patrick ‘Pat’ Atkinson passed away on 18 May, aged 73.
Tributes highlight Pat’s generosity, humour and warmth – “a lovely man” is the phrase that comes up again and again. He also possessed qualities of a working-class Bolshevik, striving to overcome obstacles in a lifelong commitment to socialist change. Despite a stammer, he never hesitated to speak at public meetings or express his views.
Raised in Dublin as the youngest of eight, Pat worked for the Irish bus service, CIE, for several years before emigrating to Britain in 1977. He followed his electrician brother, Jim, into the Militant in south London. Pat was active in the Labour Party Young Socialists, remaining committed to Militant and the Socialist Party for the rest of his life.
Pat eventually settled in Hackney, generously allowing his council flat to host many comrades visiting London from around Britain and abroad. He worked at Hackney bus depot, becoming a determined rank-and-file militant in the T&G union and later Unite, and was active in the party’s Industrial Bureau. Pat’s conscientious union activism saw him at one time travelling from London to Blackpool to help out with comrades’ participation in a Unite conference in 2005, even though he was not a delegate.
A working-class autodidact, Pat relished the arts, culture and sport that London offered, with a particular love for Irish literature and music. But he had no time for middle-class pretension or snobbery, a point he often made loudly and without apology.
Ireland
Irish class politics and the work of the Irish section of the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI), which the Socialist Party (England & Wales) is also affiliated to, remained central to the interests of ‘The Dub’, as Pat styled himself. He volunteered to help comrades in election campaigns and mass struggles in southern Ireland and helped organise solidarity in London as part of Militant’s Irish Bureau. During the long years of the ‘Troubles’, Pat argued for workers’ unity and socialism in the trade union and labour movement and among the Irish diaspora in London. Carrying out this work, speaking with an Irish accent, required courage at a time when the Irish community faced intense state repression and widespread anti-Irish prejudice in Britain.
Pat became a mature student, worked for a support housing association, and was active in Unite’s LE1111 housing branch. No party task was beneath Pat. He supplemented his student finances by cleaning the party offices, ensured local shops were stocked with socialist papers, single-handedly conducted postering tours across Hackney, and helped with any tasks required at party summer camps.
The split in the CWI in 2019 was difficult for Pat, given his longstanding bonds with comrades in Ireland. But he stayed committed to the CWI’s class-based politics, distributing the Militant Left newspaper of the Irish comrades in London.
In recent months, cancer stopped Pat’s activity, but he inquired about party news and sought political discussion from his hospital bed.
Pat will be remembered as jovial, warm-hearted and modest, and as a dedicated, independent-minded Marxist who worked tirelessly for socialist change.
We extend our condolences to Pat’s sister Maureen, his nieces Siobhàn, and Catherine, and to his wider family, friends and comrades.