My first clear memory of Alan Thornett was when my wife Sue and I as young newcomers joined a minibus full of Cowley car workers setting off from Oxford at the crack of dawn in March 1971 to join a lobby of a special TUC Congress in Croydon’s Fairfield Hall. The forecast had been for rain, and Alan was wearing rather eccentric rainwear: one of the workers jokingly asked if this was to be the “new uniform for members of the Socialist Labour League” – and Alan laughed along.

But when we got to the large All Trades Union Alliance meeting that had been called to follow the 9am lobby for members and supporters from all over the country, Alan was one of two speakers, along with SLL National Secretary Gerry Healy. We realised he was a Central Committee member of the political organisation we had begun working with – and as a self-educated worker, he had a developed analysis not only of what was happening within the Cowley car plants, but a much wider grasp of the contradictory movements within the British working class.

For me as a 20-year old Oxford University student and about as middle class as can be, but hostile to the antics of student politics, it was the SLL’s focus on recruiting from the working class, and fighting to raise members’ level of political awareness and their ability to think for themselves and play leading roles that first drew Sue and I into working with it, selling its daily newspaper Workers Press, and eventually joining the SLL in the late summer of 1971.

I continued to work with Alan in one way or another for almost 50 years.

I became a branch secretary, and worked with Alan and Tony Richardson to build branches outside the car factory, in Oxford and beyond. As my University grant came to an end, they persuaded me to accept a full-time job as an SLL organiser covering the Western Region. Because this did not pay enough for Sue and I to afford a private rental, we moved for a while into a spare room in Alan’s house – and we got to know him much better. We would see flashes of his humour as we helped duplicate, collate and staple the pages of the 5/55 T&GWU Branch magazine that he produced for 4,500 members in the Assembly Plant.

Witch-hunts

Alan was repeatedly witch-hunted in the national press for his leading role in a series of Cowley strikes, and branded (although only by the press) as “The Mole.” But we laughed with him at one article’s use of the word “charismatic” to describe him: he kept asking us to read the passage again and explain the word. Responding to another witch-hunting article he pretended to be outraged, not by the fact that it defamed him horribly, but by it making him a year older than he was.

It was Alan’s serious commitment to principles that first brought him into conflict with Healy and what had become the central bureaucracy as the SLL morphed into the Workers Revolutionary Party in 1973-74.

The launch of the WRP as a self-styled “mass party” – with the “recruitment” of hundreds of members on an increasingly flimsy basis (with boasts of people signed up in queues for fish and chips, or even going up in  a lift) – had ironically been accompanied by a lurch to more sectarian politics, and a focus on maximal demands (general strike, “Bring down the Labour government,” nationalisation without compensation) which were less and less useful in the day-to-day battles in the Cowley car plants and elsewhere.

Alan recognised that in the fight to defend jobs and conditions in the ailing British Leyland, and other industries, the demands that were needed to mobilise working class resistance were the type of demands spelled out in 1939 by Trotsky in the Transitional Programme, which addressed real issues, but could also build a “bridge” from the existing limited consciousness of the working class to recognising the need for revolution to achieve them.

One of the most effective of these was the call to “open the books” at BL and in other industries which were threatening jobs and forcing up exploitation: it challenges business secrecy and the profit-centred essence of capitalism.

Alan’s great strength was both in realising the gap that was opening up between the method embodied in the WRP’s policies and the method Trotsky had urged on the newly-formed Fourth International, and his dogged determination to fight (initially as an individual, and then a small minority) to correct the line of a party that made no allowance for any difference of opinion.

Alan began the fight with a document ‘Correct the Wrong Positions of the Party – return to the Transitional Programme’: it stood in Alan’s name alone, although a number of us helped formulate it, spoke up in favour of it, and assisted with the two subsequent documents. It brought a furious reaction from Healy and his acolytes.

Where we could get a hearing for this document we began to gain support, initially in Oxford, where we had five branches, but also in parts of London, Yorkshire and the wider WRP Western Region which was led from Oxford. When eventually the “Thornett clique” was expelled at the end of 1974 the purge exceeded 200 people, the bulk of them leading active members, and all but a couple of the Cowley workers.

Expulsions

Just a couple of weeks later, in January 1975, the majority of a meeting of expelled members in Cowley decided to form a new organisation (the Workers Socialist League) to continue to fight for the principles Alan had spelled out: as an English graduate I was told I had to be the editor of a newspaper, Socialist Press, which was to appear within a month. None of us had done anything like this before – but we were sure we were doing the right thing, and we worked all the hours we could to get the newspaper under way – gluing it together on a member’s kitchen table – and to build an organisation that could live up to the principles we had argued for.

Eventually Alan moved in to a larger house, closer to Cowley, in which he converted the top floor into an office where we could produce the newspaper and organise the WSL. Alan (while still working on the transport section in BL) would often drop by during the production of the paper to check on progress, look over and comment on a front page lead, or to hand over his draft of an article.

Alan’s reputation also helped attract intellectuals (Bob Sutcliffe, Adam Westoby, Terry Eagleton) to the WSL, who wrote for the paper.

Meanwhile the mass expulsions from the WRP had also torn a hole in the circulation and finances of the Workers Press, which ceased publication soon after the split. There was a brief hiatus, and then the Newsline appeared, now printed in a new works in Runcorn, and clearly focused on very different politics, with servile articles praising Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi, Iraq’s Saddam Hussain, the bourgeois leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, and even right wing steel union leader Bill Sirs.

It was increasingly clear that in leading what became a split in the WRP, Alan had rescued many of us from the subsequent complete political degeneration of that party, and subsequent splits revealed even more about Healy’s appalling regime, the suitcases of cash delivered by Libyan diplomats, and the abuse of women members. Sadly none of those involved in these later splits followed through as Alan had to break from Healy’s sectarian politics.

From the outset Alan was committed to translating the key lessons we had learned about the sectarian and bureaucratic errors of the WRP into the building of not just a party in Britain, but an international current. Healy had used his small circle of co-thinker groups internationally to slander and vilify our current, and although there were no real signs of similar opposition emerging from these groups, we made an effort to follow up on any possible show of interest, and to develop a coherent theoretical approach to some of the political problems that had dogged the various currents claiming the label of Trotskyism.

We attempted to develop an internationalist update on the Transitional Programme, and to bring together co-thinkers in the Trotskyist International Liaison Committee in 1979. We took up the invitation to submit a discussion document to the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, (from which Healy had split in 1963). But we encountered problems on the way: the smaller groups drawn towards us tended to be sectarian, more focused on propaganda than action, while the larger organisations did not want to address past problems.

Alan’s attitude was always to seek ways of widening and growing the organisation: he was never content to run a little group in which a handful of us would remain in charge.

Miscalculation

That’s why in 1981 Alan was the most determined in pressing for a fusion between the WSL and the International Communist League, led by Sean Matgamna, which ran a newspaper Socialist Organiser focused on work in the Labour Party. A number of us were unconvinced of the sincerity of the commitments made to develop a fusion of equals, but we recognised to vote against would risk a damaging split. In fact the new organisation began to unravel almost as soon as the fusion conference was over. However the underlying disagreements that had been shelved for later debate resurfaced rapidly in the divided response to the 1982 war for the Malvinas (Falkland Islands), followed by other factional divisions.

As one of the two WSL full-timers, I ran into these problems on a weekly basis, travelling to work in the ICL’s London centre 3 days a week to work on the newspaper, of which I was supposed to be a joint editor – up against Martin Thomas and Matgamna from the ICL.

The merger was a rare miscalculation by Alan, who lacked any real cynical side to himself, and clearly failed to recognise the cynicism and factionalism we would face from the other side of the ‘fusion’.

It was also a damaging mistake. When the inevitable split/expulsions took place, with additional losses through demoralisation we came out much weaker than we had gone in. But the fight had to go on. The Socialist Group that we formed in 1984 had to settle for a monthly magazine (Socialist Viewpoint) in place of the weekly newspaper we had managed before the fusion.

I had resigned as joint editor of Socialist Organiser before the split, and eventually found a full-time job in London working for the GLC-funded London Health Emergency campaign. Daily commuting from Oxford meant I had less time for political work, and less contact with Alan: but I continued to work on the magazine.

The work of the SG inside the Labour Party brought us into alignment with another small organisation, the International Group that had emerged from an opposition tendency within the International Marxist Group, and Alan’s reputation again helped open up direct discussions.

Reaching out

In 1987 a much more satisfactory fusion took place, to form the International Socialist Group, with Alan as a full-timer. The ISG (which developed from a monthly magazine to a fortnightly newspaper Socialist Outlook) became the British section of the Fourth International (FI) until 2009 when – once more in an effort to reach out to attract a broader periphery and bigger influence, it dissolved into Socialist Resistance, with a fortnightly paper of the same name.

There were further attempts to reach out and be part of wider left wing regroupments. For a period we supported the Socialist Alliance, which did appear to unite several of the left organisations and mounted a general election campaign in 2001, but failed to break through on a broader level.

From 2004 we attempted to work alongside the Socialist Workers Party and George Galloway in the Respect coalition, which for a period seemed to be a genuine effort to reach out and build a broader movement, with a particular focus on fighting Islamophobia. When Respect split from the SWP, Galloway sought discussions with Alan, and we worked for two years as a continuity of Respect Renewal until Galloway dropped all pretence of willingness to work within a disciplined and democratic party, and the initiative fell apart in 2009.

From there on Socialist Resistance opted to proceed with only occasional printed publicity, relying instead on a website, which was controlled by others – my role as journal editor no longer existed, and my paid work increasingly took up my time.

I met Alan only at committee meetings and conferences. And while I failed time and again to get the organisation to devote serious resources into campaigning for the NHS and building support in the health unions, Alan became more focused on the development of a theoretical base for ecosocialism, on which he researched and published many articles and two books.

We had less and less in common. Our political paths diverged. In January 2021 a new regroupment brought together Socialist Resistance with activists from the Mutiny website, and independent left-wing organisers to form Anti Capitalist Resistance – which once again reflected Alan’s drive to unite the forces of the revolutionary left as broadly as possible around a principled platform.

For me this was a step too far away from the type of organisation I set out to build, and I have ceased to be a member. But I can see that throughout all these changes Alan remained a constant, always pressing for more developed analysis of the situation, new ways to advance more dynamic demands, and for work to attract younger members to what was sadly becoming an organisation dominated by older people.

Legacy

His legacy will remain a unique combination of decades of principled struggle as a trade union activist and rank and file leader, fighting to educate as well as mobilise workers (some of which is documented in his books); a hater of grasping employers and self-serving bureaucrats; a determined opponent of sectarianism; a defender of the programme and method of Trotsky’s Fourth International; and a man who inspired and motivated others.

He was not always right, in my opinion, but his motivations were always honest. He threw his whole self into political activity, into tackling the challenges of developing a coherent analysis and building the most powerful possible movement to show the working class the way forward. He was a fighter, a leader, a comrade, an example, and to me a friend in need, who was always willing to have a laugh even in the tensest moments. The world is poorer without him.