Workers’ Liberty put Alan Thornett’s obituary online on 18 October under two names, Sean Matgamna’s and Tony Richardson’s. Matgamna wrote nearly all of it. Richardson’s part is a tribute lifted from Anticapitalist Resistance and set beneath it, with a credit at the foot, and the two describe different men. Richardson’s Thornett is the transport steward whose department refused to move coal across the Cowley plant during the 1972 miners’ strike, and who wrote three books on the struggles there. Matgamna’s is a tragedy, the leader of a “milder cult” whose followers had to be expelled so that the rest could get on with supporting the miners. Readers who were not there will take the shared byline as a joint verdict. It is nothing of the kind, and in 1984 Matgamna and Richardson sat on opposite sides of the room, under other names.
Those names matter, because the record of the fused Workers Socialist League survives: 222 internal documents, 2,887 pages of bulletins, minutes and faction papers from the fusion of July 1981 to the split of 1984. In them is a web of pen-names: Matgamna is Carolan, Martin Thomas is Kinnell, Thornett is Smith, Richardson is Jones, John Lister is Cunliffe and Rachel Lever is Khan. Matgamna invites a comparison himself. “In the pre-fusion discussions, as the minutes show,” he writes, “Alan and his friends were very reasonable.” So here are the minutes. This is a partial reply. It leaves Matgamna his opinions of Alan’s character, which belong to those who knew him, and takes up the things he says happened.
The first thing to notice is how much of the obituary was written in 1984. “Lister… believed that his main job was to put Alan Thornett into print,” Matgamna writes now. Matgamna wrote in March 1984 (Internal Bulletin 95, p. 4) that “Cunliffe seems to have functioned primarily as the literary arm of the ‘worker leadership’. His job was to convey to print their perceptions, ideas, analyses, etc.” The line that “Alan Thornett wanted freedom of expression by way of never being replied to” is Matgamna’s gloss in IB 114 on a complaint of Lister’s: “What they object to is that we have the right of reply.” The talk of placating them, of Alan claiming “unquestioned leadership status”, of a faction doing “business as usual” in the miners’ strike, all of it is in Matgamna’s bulletins of March to June 1984, sometimes word for word. An obituary that reprints a forty-year-old prosecution brief has a duty to check the brief against the evidence. Matgamna did not, so the rest of this piece does.
Start with the women’s paper, because the obituary is at its most contemptuous there. The old WSL, Matgamna says, had “female syndicalists” whose idea of women’s work was “confined to unions and strikes”, while his own side “had started a women’s paper”. The phrase “female syndicalist” is Matgamna’s, from IB 122 in June 1984, where he called the old WSL’s paper “just a general old-WSL paper with a ‘women’s’ face”. That paper was Woman Worker, and it ran to eleven issues between June 1979 and the spring of 1981, roughly every two months until three months before the fusion. Its statement of aims, printed in June 1980, describes “a revolutionary working class newspaper which takes up the struggles of women against their economic and political exploitation at work and at home”. The front page of issue 5, in January 1980, led on Corrie’s Bill and ran the headline “Defend abortion rights, steel jobs, social services: CALL A GENERAL STRIKE!” Inside the June 1980 issue, beside a review of Nurseries Now and a photograph of the Wandsworth nursery occupation, the paper went after the ‘Ditch the Bitch’ slogans carried by Labour Party members at Leicester’s May Day carnival under the headline “Fighting sexism in Labour Party”. It covered the Armagh women, Chile and the Women’s TUC. That is not syndicalism in any sense a dictionary would recognise.
Set it beside the paper Matgamna’s side brought to the fusion, Women’s Fightback, “Paper of the women’s campaign Labour Movement Fightback for Women’s Rights”. It was never simply the I-CL’s paper, and it had more going for it. Its founding conference on 22 March 1980 drew five hundred women. The IMG’s Socialist Challenge (no. 141) carried the report by Valerie Coultas of the IMG’s Political Committee, who described “a new campaign launched by the Socialist Campaign for a Labour Victory, a grouping of activists in the Labour Party”, and who noted that women from Teesside, Yorkshire and Scotland were “perplexed” at the call for a delegate conference “which would exclude women who were not members of trade unions or local Labour Parties”. Before the second conference in June, Socialist Challenge (no. 152) printed Rachel Lever, a leader of the I-CL, recalling that “500 women from different political backgrounds in the women’s movement and the labour movement — including 150 from the Labour Party — came together”. When the second conference elected a steering committee, the committee co-opted Judith Arkwright “after an application by the IMG” (Women’s Fightback, July 1980, p. 2). That September, Tony Benn told Socialist Challenge (no. 165) that “both outside and even inside the party there has been a great splinter activity: the Women’s Fightback, the Socialist Campaign for a Labour Victory, and so on.” That was the campaign the fused WSL agreed to build. The WSL conference that voted for fusion in May 1981 recorded that the joint organisation would “produce a regular Trotskyist women’s magazine while working to build the broad-based Women’s Fightback grouping” (Socialist Press, 14 May 1981, p. 3). Woman Worker had stopped two months earlier, and the Trotskyist women’s magazine never came. Nor did the fused WSL keep up a regular magazine of any kind: Workers Socialist Review managed four issues in three years, in December 1981, September 1982, April–May 1983 and autumn 1984, and the last of them was given over to the documents of Alan’s expulsion. What it had instead was a campaign paper of the Labour left. Woman Worker had introduced itself in 1979 as “the women’s paper of the Workers Socialist League, a Trotskyist organisation”, and its last issue still said “As Trotskyists we are fighting to reconstruct the Fourth International” (no. 10, March–April 1981, p. 3). I cannot find Trotsky, the Fourth International or workers’ control anywhere in Women’s Fightback in the fusion years; in June 1983 its front page said that “A Labour victory would be a huge gain for women”. Two WSL women told the internal bulletin in January 1983 that “the paper was never meant to reflect the WSL line” (IB 23). Matgamna, oddly, agreed about the difference. In June 1984 he dismissed Woman Worker as “just a general old-WSL paper with a ‘women’s’ face”, and complained that the contributions of the WSL’s Todd to the fusion talks had been “mainly lectures to us on the importance of transitional demands” (IB 122). A syndicalist organisation does not advise anyone on transitional demands. Women’s Fightback’s covers from 1980 to 1984 are a lobby of the TUC “for women’s right to work”, the Chix strike, NUPE’s 12 per cent, the Benefits staff in the CPSA, NALGO against the GLC cuts and, in October 1984, the miners’ wives. They are every bit as much about the organised labour movement as Woman Worker’s. The difference is elsewhere. Issue 26, in June 1983, put a red “VOTE LABOUR” across a photograph of women demonstrators and an inside feature called “Why we’re voting Labour”. Woman Worker had told its readers in 1980 to remind their Labour ward of party policy on abortion and then to say no to “another Callaghan-Healey government”. One paper organised women workers independently of Labour and used the Labour Party where it could; the other framed their struggles as something that had to flow into it. If that is syndicalism, then give me syndicalism over Labourism any day.
The obituary saves its worst not for Alan but for a woman. 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, but championed a unilateral industrial focus. She knew next to nothing except self-promotion”, and was, “as with many of them”, “a non-participating WRPer”. Alan is a “very subjective man” at the head of a “milder cult”; she gets no politics at all, only a class label, a diagnosis and a sneer. The papers of the time, Matgamna’s own among them, record a different woman. In May 1978 Socialist Press reported that a court had awarded costs against “Ann-Marie Sweeney a parent and NUPE vice-chairman” after bailiffs broke up the South Oxford Nursery occupation. In October 1981 Socialist Organiser printed her action programme for Women’s Fightback, the campaign Matgamna’s own side had launched. It opened “I WANT to stress that this isn’t some far-fetched ultra left list of demands” and ran from abortion rights and child care to the Nationality Bill, violence against women and rents. In March 1982 she chaired Fightback’s “Women in Trade Unions” conference, 350 women at Kingsway Princeton college, where Rachel Lever spoke for the campaign, and she wrote up its workshops: “We have the TUC Charter on Women — all fine sentiments but sweet FA in practice.” That October, when she was shop steward for Oxfordshire’s home helps and minutes secretary of the Oxford County branch of NUPE, the union suspended her “pending a call for her expulsion” for writing to its executive “querying ballot procedures”, and Socialist Organiser headlined it “NUPE’s witch hunt”. The “egomaniac” of the obituary was, on the record of Matgamna’s own paper, a nursery campaigner, the author of Women’s Fightback’s programme, the chair of its trade union conference and a shop steward victimised for asking questions. A unilateral industrial focus does not write Women’s Fightback’s programme or chair its conference.
The obituary’s account of Rachel Lever is worse than unkind. She “came under repeated attack”, Matgamna writes, and “Thornett said not a word.” When Lever resigned in July 1982, it was Matgamna who moved a resolution “to formally expel” her. It was defeated, 7 for, 14 against and four abstentions, and “Collins/Smith proposed an amendment to the expulsion resolution, to delete reference to expulsion and insert ‘condemn resignation’”, which was carried with one vote against (minutes of the National Committee of 10–11 July 1982, IB 12, p. 8). The man who said not a word is the man who stopped her being expelled, and the expulsion was Matgamna’s own proposal. Five months earlier, Thornett had voted for her resolution reaffirming “the fusion agreement” that the organisation’s women’s work was “primarily centred on the WF campaign” (Executive Committee, 7 February 1982). Matgamna’s own account in 1984 blamed “heavy-handed assaults by the old WSL men on the EC – of whom the most insensitive and destructive was, probably, Levy” (IB 122, p. 28). Even then, in the middle of the expulsions and with every reason to name Thornett, the critic he singled out was someone else.
Afghanistan, the obituary says, was one of three differences “narrowed down” before the fusion, and in “a fit of stupid goodwill” Matgamna proposed that the Thornett position be the organisation’s line “pro tem”. Nothing in the documents records such a proposal. What the fusion platform of 26 July 1981 says is this: “The WSL openly acknowledges the existence of different views within its ranks on historical questions of the Trotskyist movement, on the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, on the EEC and on the General Strike. A timetable has been fixed for a discussion and decision on Afghanistan, the EEC and the General Strike. In the meantime the different views will be expressed publicly in the press of the movement.” Both sides opposed the invasion. The old WSL’s own text, by Tony Richardson and John Lister, says in as many words “We opposed the invasion”; what it would not do was “simply call for the immediate withdrawal of troops”. The conference that voted for the fusion in May 1981 recorded that the WSL had “consistently condemned the invasion as a reactionary move by the Kremlin leaders” (Socialist Press, 14 May 1981, p. 3). That was the whole of the difference, and the fusion went ahead on the agreement to debate it. When Thornett wrote in August 1983 that the debate had been held off “by the overwhelming majority on both sides”, and that Matgamna “opposed it going on the conference agenda earlier this year on the basis that it would ‘split the movement’”, Matgamna and Thomas’s reply did not deny it (IB 63, p. 5; IB 70). In October 1980, in a debate reported by the League for Socialist Action’s paper, which took the other side, “Speaking for Workers Action, Sean Matgamna ridiculed the idea that the CIA was involved in promoting guerrilla resistence to the PDPA regime”. Carter had signed the order authorising covert aid to them on 3 July 1979. By 1984 he had caught up with it himself. His draft resolution for the WSL conference that summer, “Afghanistan: For the withdrawal of USSR troops! Draft resolution by Carolan for the EC” (IB 116, June 1984, p. 21), says: “Probably the CIA was involved – though not to the degree that Russia said.” It went to a conference held after the 36 had been expelled in April, and Workers Socialist Review 4 printed it that autumn as “Afghanistan: USSR Troops Out!”, in the same issue that summed up the political differences with the expelled group and put Afghanistan among them. The debate the 1981 platform promised was settled once the other side was no longer in the room. A writer that sure of his reading of the evidence might have been more careful forty years on.
On Ireland, Matgamna recalls that after the IRA’s nail bomb at Chelsea on 10 October 1981 his article’s strapline, “the politics of the last atrocity”, appeared “obviously garbled”, and he now suspects Lister did it deliberately. The strapline in Socialist Organiser 57 is not garbled. It reads: “JOHN O’MAHONY argues that our attitude to the conflict in Ireland cannot and should not be determined by the ‘politics of the last atrocity’”. The garble is a dropped line in the body, the commonest accident in hot-metal and paste-up alike, and there is no evidence in anything held about who set the page. He says the “Thornettites raised it as a point of honour not to call the bombing an atrocity” and that “Alan Thornett was silent.” At the National Committee of 17–18 October 1981 the objections came from comrades called Spilling, Connolly and Piggot; Richardson said “The article on the bombings is from the EC” and defended it. At the NC of 19–20 December, on an amendment to delete “we condemn attacks on civilians”, the minutes list Thornett among those who “spoke for the EC position”, with Matgamna’s side, and the amendment fell by 10 votes to 21 (IB 3, pp. 6–8, 15).
The Falklands is where the obituary needs the documents most and uses them least. Matgamna says the leading committees first voted “not to back Argentina or Britain”, and that Thornett then “became a pro-Argentinian” because the IMG and the WRP were for Argentina. The position adopted in April 1982 was the resolution the WSL proposed at the TILC meeting of 10–12 April. Its seventh point said that “in the event of a full-scale war between Britain and Argentina we would be unequivocally for the defence of Argentina”, and both sides agree that Lister wrote it. Matgamna himself wrote in July that “the initial bias of Smith, Jones and Cunliffe” was to come out “for Argentina against imperialism” (IB 9, p. 13). So when the exclusion zone was pushed to twelve miles off the Argentine coast and the Belgrano was sunk, the minority argued that the contingency had arrived. They carried the Executive by five votes to three on 9 May and lost the National Committee by 20 to 16 a week later. The internal documents never mention Bob Sutcliffe, to whom Matgamna now credits the April line.
Matgamna says Alan “at first resisted the calling of a special conference” and switched when he smelt a majority, and that “we agreed”. No minute of 1982 records anyone calling for a conference before 10–11 July, when Thornett moved Liverpool’s resolution as a call for one. Matgamna answered that “it would be better to shift to an educational discussion – given the war is over”. Thomas called it “unprecedented in the Marxist movement” and “dangerous”. Thornett told that meeting that “After the conference, the tendency will accept whatever is the majority view, and dissolve.” On 29 July Thomas moved that the tendency be urged “to withdraw the call for a special conference” (IB 12, pp. 8–9; minutes of 29 July 1982). The story of a resistance followed by a cynical switch appears for the first time in “The Sectarian Offensive”, by Matgamna, Hill and Thomas, in February 1983. As for the “ghost votes” at the conference of 5 September, Thomas said at the Executive on 16 September: “We accept the third count but we can’t be sure it was right.” The votes he disputed belonged to members who had paid up their arrears, under the rule for “paid-up” members that Thomas himself had moved at the Executive on 2 September, where “it was agreed that these conditions should apply equally to all.” Socialist Organiser did not report the conference, and the Internationalist Faction later complained of “Carolan’s refusal to publish the change of line” in it.
Then there is the ending. The obituary has a faction declared in May 1983, agitating from August “on the internal situation”, deaf to appeals for restraint in the miners’ strike, and finally offered the choice of minority rights before a conference voted to expel it. Thornett’s statement, “A Serious Problem of Democracy in the Group”, is signed “Smith 30-7-83 For the Faction” and appeared in the bulletin before the August conference, not after it. On 5 February 1984 five leaders of the majority, Matgamna, Joplin, Parkinson, Hill and Thomas, told the Executive that “the choice facing the minority is either to resume full organisational autonomy or to accept that they are a minority”, which is the language of separation, not of conciliation (IB 83, p. 13). On 10 March the NC passed Matgamna’s preconditions by 11 votes to 8. On 26 March Thornett recorded that he had “proposed that I work full-time for the duration of the strike, going to Yorkshire, working with the miners, and writing for the paper”, had done “some work around the pits in North Yorkshire”, and had been refused an article on the strike because it would be his “individual opinion” (IB 85, p. 16). The faction disbanded on 28 March. On 31 March the NC suspended its members, and on 14 April it expelled 36 of them. The conference of 30 June and 1 July did not expel anyone. It heard one spokesman and one witness for the expelled, for half an hour, sent them out, and upheld the expulsions by 72 votes to 27 with four abstentions, the 35 having no vote (Thomas’s letter of 13 May 1984, IB 121, p. 13; statement of the Democratic Centralist Faction, 8 July 1984). The expelled members’ own account, published that autumn in the first issue of Socialist Viewpoint, adds that the Control Commission, “two supporters of the majority and one of the Faction”, had “upheld all our complaints except one”, including “the right of open access to the paper”, and that “The National Committee rejected all those parts of the report which upheld our complaints. Then they avoided circulating the report” (p. 23). The obituary also leaves out the people who walked out after them. The Democratic Centralist Faction had not been in Thornett’s faction; it fought the expulsions at the conference and resigned from the WSL on 8 July 1984. Its statement says it had grouped together old WSL members and “long-standing and experienced comrades whose history was in the old ICL and Workers Fight”, and that of the pre-fusion members present at the conference “nearly HALF, some 25 comrades, voted with the DCF against the expulsions”. Matgamna’s side had a name for them. Its organisation report the next year counted “the departure of the DCF (the second wave of Thornettites) in July 1984” (IB 133, 1985, p. 9).
The miners’ strike paragraph closes with the claim that Alan’s faction did nothing for the miners “other than in work via Oxford Trades Council”. Matgamna was more generous in June 1984. “Smith is president of Oxford TC,” he wrote in IB 115, “and involved in its solidarity work.” Richardson, who was there, calls Oxford’s miners’ support committee one of the best in the country, and in 1984 its trades council was not a sideline. Nor was Oxford the only place. In Yorkshire, Garth Frankland, a WSL member then and now in Anticapitalist Resistance, recalls that the group fought for twinning Hull, where it had the leadership of the trades council and the miners’ support committee and members on the AEU district committee, with the pits around Castleford, and held weekly organising and education meetings. Ian Dolphin, secretary of Hull Trades Council and a WSL member, addressed a mass meeting of miners at Fryston, a pit whose branch secretary was banned from the county on bail and later cleared, and Frankland spoke to a thousand miners in an attempt to stop the first scabs. “I do not remember a single intervention from the Matgamna group.” Ian Dolphin shares that memory. Keith Sinclair, who was in the IMG in Hull and later the ISG, adds that WSL members were active in support of the neighbouring pits at Wheldale and Glasshoughton as well. That is not memory alone. In 2000 Frankland and Alan Wassell wrote in Socialist Outlook that Terry Harrison, the NUM branch president at Kellingley, “worked with a small number of supporters of Labour Briefing and the Workers Socialist League to build support for the strike” and “helped form the link between Hull and Castleford” (no. 39, November 2000, p. 18). Harrison spoke, they added, at the first miners’ support group meeting called by Hull Trades Council. Ian Dolphin remembers Bob Hague (Fryston) was the principal speaker there. Geoff Collier, who was also in Hull, remembers whose initiative that was: many of the Hull branch, everyone except its one supporter of Matgamna, were in the trades council’s leadership, and they started the support committee, in May, as soon as the council’s monthly cycle of meetings allowed. Hull was on the faction’s own membership list. The list Thornett gave the Executive on 12 February 1984 has 23 names in Oxford and 13 more in London, Coventry, Leeds and Hull (IB 105, p. 3). Matgamna’s side said afterwards that “From the start of the miners’ strike, we made it central”, and named Notts, South Yorkshire and North Staffordshire as its main areas (IB 133, 1985, p. 10). Its youth paper was another matter: a York member complained in December 1984 that Class Fighter “has had no input/presence into the miners’ strike” (IB 129, p. 24). The same 1985 report counted the organisation’s gains as a “breakthrough in the last couple of years – among students” (p. 9). I met Socialist Organiser supporters myself during the strike, selling the paper outside my sixth-form college. In Manchester, Manchester Area NUS, which Matgamna’s student supporters controlled, did give the miners’ support work office space. But the people I saw doing that work were mostly IMG members, Chris Jones among them, rather than Socialist Organiser’s activists. Pete Firmin, then in the Democratic Centralist Faction, remembers a meeting on solidarity work in the first months of the strike at which all the talk was of work with students; it convinced him that the organisation was a lost cause, and the faction resigned soon afterwards. The student turn brought something else with it. In 1985 the youth report for its conference recorded that “the NUS work has rocketed”, and noted in passing “our split with Sunderland over the Union of Jewish Students business” (IB 133, p. 2). Firmin dates from this time the cooperation with the Union of Jewish Students that, in his account, eventually shifted a line on Israel and Palestine that had until then been clearly in support of the Palestinians.
Some smaller errors are worth correcting because they recur. Alan joined Healy’s organisation in 1966, not “about 1967”; he wrote “From 1966 until 1974” as Bill Peters in Socialist Organiser 73. The transport drivers who “had not had a strike for many years” struck in May 1972, when 120 of them laid off 6,000 workers, and 150 of them struck in May 1974 “in support of shop-steward Alan Thornett” (Workers Press 776; Red Weekly 51). When BL sacked him in November 1982, Socialist Organiser 109 reported that the drivers “voted to strike from Monday November 22”; the strike was lost only after the TGWU district secretary refused them backing and a mass meeting narrowly voted against striking alone. The figure of 200 expelled from the WRP, which Matgamna calls “greatly exaggerated”, was the figure his own paper printed in July 1981 when it announced the fusion: “about 200 members of the Workers Revolutionary Party… were expelled” (Socialist Organiser 46). Ken Loach’s film was A Question of Leadership, about the 1980 steel strike and the union leaders, not about the Labour Party, and the review of it in Socialist Organiser 49 was written by Tony Richardson and Donna Pickles. After the expulsions, the expelled members and the Democratic Centralist Faction came together as the Socialist Group, newly formed when Socialist Viewpoint first appeared in the autumn of 1984; in 1987 the Socialist Group fused with the International Group to form the International Socialist Group, of which I was later a member. Socialist Resistance did not exist until 2002.
None of this was hidden. Socialist Press announced the fusion in May 1981 as “A new Trotskyist organisation some 300-strong”, made of “two equal-sized Trotskyist organisations”. It was not the first fusion of Matgamna’s to end like this. On 30 September 1976 Red Weekly printed both sides of the break-up of the I-CL, the fusion of his Workers Fight with Workers Power. The Workers Power comrades wrote that “less than three weeks before the conference, S. Matgamna and A. Hornung produced a slanderous document aimed at postponing the conference on the grounds of the ‘a-political factionalism, cliquism etc,’ of Hughes and Stocking and characterising them as wishing to turn the I-CL into a ‘semi-syndicalist sect’”, and that their three members of the Political Committee were then “suspended at a PC meeting to which they were not invited”. In 1984 it was “irresponsible and disruptive agitation”, and the women’s paper was “female syndicalist”. The charge travels well. Matgamna has had forty years to read the minutes he cites, and on 18 October he printed the brief instead, with Richardson’s tribute pinned underneath Matgamna’s verdict.
Sources. WSL internal documents, 1981–84, held in the Red Mole archive: internal bulletins (IB) 3, 9, 12, 63, 70, 83, 85, 95, 105, 114, 115, 116, 121, 122, 129 and 133; Executive Committee and National Committee minutes for 1982; “Against neutrality on the Falklands War” (May 1982); the fusion platform (26 July 1981); the Richardson–Lister pre-conference discussion bulletin no. 2 (1981); the DCF statement (July 1984). Woman Worker nos 1–10 (1979–81) and Women’s Fightback (1980–84), both in the archive. Socialist Press, 14 May 1981; Socialist Challenge 141, 152 and 165. Socialist Press 98; Socialist Organiser 46, 49, 57, 73, 79, 105, 109; Workers Press 776; Workers Socialist Review 1–4 (ETOL index); Red Weekly 51 and 168; Socialist Action (LSA) vol. 3 no. 10; Socialist Viewpoint no. 1. Every quotation from these papers has been checked against the page image. The obituary: workersliberty.org, 18 October 2026.