Alan Thornett died this month at 89. The tributes that followed, from comrades, from the trade union press, even from The Times, which called him the “union leader nicknamed ‘the Mole’” whose “militancy at Cowley made him a working-class hero”, remembered a shop steward who spent his life on the side of the workers he represented, and a ecosocialist who kept arguing, organising and writing to the end.

One obituary stands apart. Workers’ Liberty’s, written by Sean Matgamna and published on 18 October with a tribute by Tony Richardson attached to it, is the most hostile notice Alan received from anyone, left or right. It describes the group he led as “a much reduced and milder cult around the former star worker of the WRP”. It calls him “a very subjective man”. It is not an assessment of a life. It is an attempt to settle  scores from a faction fight that ended forty-two years ago.

There were real political differences in the 1980s between Alan’s comrades and Matgamna’s, inside the short-lived fusion of their two organisations in the Workers Socialist League: over Afghanistan, over the Falklands war, over Ireland, over how socialists should work among women. Those differences deserved, and got, argument at the time. Whoever was right, nothing in them explains the tone of what Matgamna has now written about a man who has just died.

Different standard for some opponents

Matgamna can be generous when he chooses. When Ted Knight, the former Healyite leader of Lambeth council, died in 2020, Matgamna began his reminiscence: “I am saddened by the death of Ted Knight”. When Tony Benn died in 2014, Workers’ Liberty’s obituary was sharply critical of his politics, and still found room to say that “Benn stood with the workers in all the clashes after 1979”.

Alan Thornett stood with the workers in all the clashes too, and in most of them he was at the front. He led the transport drivers at Cowley through strikes in 1972 and 1974, was sacked by British Leyland in 1982, and went on organising for the rest of his life. A Healyite council leader is mourned and a parliamentary reformist is credited; a Trotskyist car worker, who was in the same organisation as Matgamna for three years, is a cult leader.

Gratuitous abuse

The obituary is at its ugliest about women, and it is harder on one of them than on Alan himself. Alan’s comrades in the old WSL, it says, had “female syndicalists” led by “a very determined egomaniac, Anne-Marie Sweeney”. “She was middle-class, from an art college”, and “knew next to nothing except self-promotion”. Alan at least gets a political label; she gets a class jibe and a diagnosis.

The papers of the time, including Matgamna’s own, tell a different story. In 1978, when bailiffs broke up the occupation of the South Oxford Nursery, Anne-Marie Sweeney was in court as “a parent and NUPE vice-chairman”. In 1981 she wrote the action programme of Women’s Fightback, the campaign Matgamna’s side brought into the fusion, covering abortion rights, child care, violence against women and rents. In 1982 she chaired Fightback’s conference on women in the trade unions, attended by 350 women, at which Rachel Lever of Matgamna’s  side spoke for the campaign. That October, as shop steward for Oxfordshire’s home helps, Sweeney was suspended by her union for writing to its executive about ballot procedures. Matgamna’s paper, Socialist Organiser, called it a witch-hunt and defended her.

So when the obituary sneers at “female syndicalists”, it sneers at women who ran nursery occupations, fought hospital closures, chaired conferences and were victimised in their unions, and whom his own paper defended at the time. That is not political criticism. It is contempt.

How differences were handled

The obituary’s other theme is that Alan’s faction had to be expelled so that the rest of the organisation could get on with supporting the miners. In April 1984, a month into the miners’ strike, the leadership of the fused WSL expelled 36 members, most of them from the old WSL, Alan among them. Their solidarity work, in Oxford and in Yorkshire, is on record, and Matgamna acknowledged it at the time: “Smith is president of Oxford TC,” he wrote of Alan in June 1984, “and involved in its solidarity work.” A conference endorsed the expulsions three months later without the expelled having a vote. A second group, including long-standing members of Matgamna’s own tradition, walked out in protest; in Matgamna’s camp they were filed as “the second wave of Thornettites”.

There is a lesson in this for the far left, and it is not about who was right on the Falklands. Fusions between revolutionary groups are hard. They need room for minorities to argue their case, a shared paper that both sides can write in, and the patience to let disputes be settled by experience rather than by organisational measures. When that patience runs out, a split is announced as a political clarification, and the people on the other side become cranks, careerists or cultists. Forty years later the same language comes back in an obituary.

Matgamna had used it before. In 1976, when his earlier fusion with Workers Power broke apart, the Workers Power comrades complained that Matgamna had accused them of wanting to turn the organisation into a “semi-syndicalist sect”. In 1984 it was Alan’s comrades’ turn. The charge travels well.

The record since

The obituary has nothing to say about the forty years after 1984, and they are the best answer to it. In the 1990s Alan and his comrades built International Workers Aid, taking aid convoys to Tuzla and campaigning to lift the arms embargo on a Bosnia facing ethnic cleansing. They argued for the left to unite rather than splinter, from the Socialist Alliance through Respect to Left Unity. When the Fourth International declared itself ecosocialist in 2010, Alan wrote the report of the meeting for Socialist Resistance, and in 2019 he published Facing the Apocalypse: Arguments for Ecosocialism (launch talk). In 2022, at 84, he was writing in support of the Ukrainian resistance. Internationalist, non-sectarian and ecosocialist: on the questions that have mattered since the split, Alan and the current he helped build were on the right side. Matgamna’s record over the same years runs the other way. In 2008 he wrote that “there is good reason for Israel to make a precipitate strike at Iranian nuclear capacity”, while adding “We do not advocate an Israeli attack” (Solidarity, July 2008). In 2004 his organisation’s conference rejected “troops out” of Iraq as a slogan (AWL conference document). In 2019, when Alan, writing as Alan Davies, published “Defend Corbyn against the AWL”, Workers’ Liberty printed it and replied. Readers can judge which record has worn better.

What the arguments were about

The differences were not trivial, and they still matter. The Falklands war of 1982 restored the prestige of British militarism, helped Western governments past the “Vietnam syndrome”, and carried Thatcher to a landslide the following year. How socialists in Britain responded to that war was a serious question, and the WSL argued about it seriously. But those arguments are not settled by insulting the dead, and an obituary is no place to try.

Alan Thornett deserved better. So did the women and workers who stood with him. A full, documented answer to Matgamna’s account, drawing on the WSL’s own internal bulletins and minutes, is published on Red Mole. This is the shorter point: the far left will not win anyone if this is how it speaks of its own.