Greg Tucker: activist, socialist, trade unionist.

Livng outside of London, we are often quite cut off from the "left scene" which is very much centred on life in the capital. I hadn't even realised that Greg Tucker was ill and it came as a massive shock to hear a couple of days ago that he had died.

Now that I've got five minutes to write something by way of a tribute, I find that everything I would have written has already been said by others; people who knew him better or longer than I did.

I didn't know him well. We were in different unions, he'd been expelled from the Labour Party I think before I even joined it, and we were in the same political organisations or campaigns only sporadically. But the few times I met him Greg was always that rare thing on the left: a clearly principled and determined socialist, yet someone who would speak calmly and thoughtfully with an eye on bringing people together rather than concentrating on disputes. He played an important role in both political and industrial struggles, and was both a willing organiser and a principled leader.

The left, and the entire trade union movement, is poorer without him.