By Duncan Chapel
ALAN THORNETT, who died aged 89, was the best-known militant in the British car industry during the decade when the industry settled the fate of British trade unionism. He spent the next forty years explaining, with names and dates, why that fight was lost and why it need not have been. He never stopped writing. His last article appeared in September 2026, on a Labour government’s energy policy. He died in Oxford on 9 October 2026.
Alan was born on 15 June 1937, near Oxford. He worked four years as a farm labourer and served three in the army. In the summer of 1959, he started at the Morris Motors plant in Cowley, driving a forklift truck in the South Works to feed the track for the new Mini. The same year he joined the Communist Party. He left it in 1964. By then he had a shop steward’s card, held from 1963, representing the lorry drivers who moved cars and components around the site. In 1967 he became the TGWU’s deputy convenor in the plant, and he chaired both the Joint Shop Stewards Committee and the union’s 5/55 branch.
Eddie Coles, a friend of the same age, came the same road from the farms, through the air force rather than the army, and started on the Cowley tracks that same summer. When Eddie died in 2002, Alan wrote his obituary. Eddie never held a union post above shop steward, and Alan’s verdict was that he and others like him “were the bedrock of the trade union movement in the plant”. That bedrock was a key aspect of what Alan spent his life defending; our movement talks a great deal about working-class leadership and produces it rarely. Most of the left’s writers and theorists, then and now, came through universities. Alan came to politics from a farm and an army barracks, and he went to work on the farm at about fifteen. Everything he knew about Marxism and the economics of the car industry he taught himself, and decades later he did the same with Earth sciences. He ended up writing four books and several hundred articles. The habit that made him a good steward, having the facts and the figures before the meeting started, is the same habit that made him a good writer.
Cowley was one of the most militant plants in Britain. Unionisation came late and hard. By the end of the 1960s the plant averaged more than three hundred stoppages a year, and it struck against both Harold Wilson’s In Place of Strife and Edward Heath’s Industrial Relations Act. In Militant Years (2010) Alan is clear that the workers on the line built that movement themselves. He is just as clear about who set out to take it apart. The company, of course, but also the full-time officials of his own union. Stewards elected on the track answered to the people working beside them. The officials answered to the union machine, and for most of the decade they worked with management to break the stewards’ organisation. Around 1974 an unnamed Sunday Times reporter decided, “for no apparent reason”, as Socialist Press put it, to call Alan “The Mole”. The name went round Fleet Street.
What the stewards built at Cowley was, in Alan’s description, a form of workers’ control inside the plant. The clearest example came in the winter of 1971. Management wanted to bring in work study under the new Measured Day Work system, with industrial engineers timing every job on the track. Whenever the engineers appeared, the line stopped. Within days, the new plant manager, John Symonds, conceded what Alan calls in Militant Years a breakthrough unique in the car industry. No job could be timed or changed without the stewards’ agreement, and until a final deal was reached, they held a veto. It was called mutuality. In plain terms, the pace of work on the track was negotiated with the people doing it, not imposed on them. A few weeks later, in January 1972, the same stewards’ committee voted to block the movement of coal inside the plant in support of the miners, knowing that it would stop the North Works.
I was once told that Cowley stewards on a picket line in a long hot summer put in a claim for the cost of their sun cream. It may be an urban myth. But the point it makes is not a myth: before Thatcher, workers’ self-organisation was sometimes strong enough that a claim like that sounded winnable.
For ten years Alan was a member of Gerry Healy’s Socialist Labour League and then its successor, the Workers Revolutionary Party. In 1974 he wrote an opposition document inside the WRP. It argued for a return to the method of the Transitional Programme. Concretely, it said the party should put demands on the left Labour MPs, so that their refusal to fight the Wilson government would be exposed in front of the people who had voted for them. On 24 November 1974, at a Western Area aggregate meeting, Healy challenged Alan to answer a series of questions on the degeneration of the WRP. Alan asked permission to answer them in a second document. First thing the next morning, Healy convened the Control Commission. It overturned a decision the Central Committee had taken only two days earlier and expelled him forthwith. At the beginning of December, about two hundred members who supported the document, or were suspected of doing so, followed him out, and the WRP’s organisation in Oxford, Reading and Swindon was wound up. In the same year the TGWU’s Midlands region split the 5/55 branch that was Alan’s base and removed him as deputy convenor. The expelled comrades founded the Workers Socialist League on 19 October 1975, with Socialist Press as its paper. By December 1977 the left had won back the leadership of the reconstituted Cowley branch.
The next five years were a war of attrition. In the plant’s union elections of January 1976, seven national dailies and three television networks campaigned against him, and the company let it be known that it would refuse to recognise him if he won. The right-wing slate took the election, and Alan came tenth of thirty-four, with 526 votes. British Leyland went on refusing, year after year, to recognise him as deputy convenor, and the union held inquiries and threatened to put him out. The Communist Party, in partnership with the TGWU officials, left the witch hunt unreported. Derek Robinson, the Communist convenor at Longbridge, was sacked by Michael Edwardes in 1979 after four years of selling worker participation to the Leyland stewards. Alan had opposed that policy throughout. He wrote Robinson’s obituary in 2017, and he did not pretend the argument between them had never happened. Alan himself was sacked on 17 November 1982, nominally for failing to renew a heavy goods licence. In fact, as he argued in print within days, it was a strategic decision to clear the plant before a new model went into production.
Much of what he wrote in those years did not carry his name. A paper short of hands needs one writer to carry several items in an issue, so Alan wrote as Bill Peters in Socialist Press and then in Socialist Organiser, the paper of the WSL’s fusion with the International-Communist League from 1981 to 1984. (Decades later, writing on Brexit, he did the same as Alan Davies.) Some of the best ‘Peters’ pieces report his own victimisation in the third person, because he was the person in the plant who had the information. In 1983 he wrote a five-part series on the Japanese car industry, which began with a visit to Toyota’s Takaoka plant and set it beside Cowley. Lifetime employment and the company union, he showed, rested on the smashing of Japan’s independent unions after the war. The Japanese model was not a stage of technology. It was a defeat that had been exported. This was internationalism of a practical kind: go and look, then tell Cowley what you saw.
He spent the miners’ strike without a workplace and without a vote, writing in Socialist Viewpoint, launched in the autumn of 1984. His argument then, held for the rest of his life, was that the government had no capacity to take on another major union at the same time as the NUM. Every route to a second front was open at some point in the year. The unions’ leaderships declined each of them. In December 1985, he identified the story the movement was already telling itself: that the strike had been wrong to fight, and that compromise had been right all along. He spent the next decade arguing against it. Inside Cowley (1998), with a foreword by Ken Loach, set out the 1970s in detail. The Social Contract was the deal under which the unions held down wage claims in return for promises from the Labour government of 1974–79. The industrial relations historian John McIlroy, reviewing the book, found that it showed how enforcing that deal had softened up workplace trade unionism for the offensive of the 1980s.
In May 1987 Socialist Viewpoint merged with International, the journal of the International Socialist Group, to form Socialist Outlook. From then on Alan was a leader of the British section of the Fourth International. He was elected to the International’s leading body, the International Committee. His reports from its meetings and congresses, among them the 2010 world congress at which the International declared itself ecosocialist, were often the only account British readers got. He had been inside Healy’s version of an international and knew what it did to its sections. When Healy died in 1990, Alan wrote the obituary, and he made the case historically rather than personally, which was a harder thing to do. He allowed himself one line of irony: by the 1980s Healy had done “more to discredit the Trotskyist movement, and the left in general than anyone else claiming to be a part of it”, and he added, “despite other strong contenders for that distinction”.
I worked with Alan day to day in the 1990s on the staff of Socialist Outlook, when he already had decades of experience as one of the country’s most respected revolutionary leaders. Our organisation was vibrant but fractious, grappling with the closure of historical cycles; the dissolution of the USSR; the Clause 4 defeat of the Labour left; and the definitive victory of neoliberalism. That time marked the transition from a Europe in which different economic futures were still openly contested to one in which market discipline, fiscal restraint and global integration increasingly appeared as the only realistic future once the labour bureaucracy had effectively condemned the working class in many countries to a long defensive struggle. Despite his frustrations with how well the national and international interventions of Marxist groups responded to this shift, Alan rose to the struggle both as a political and organisational leader.
When the war came to Bosnia, he threw himself into solidarity. After a bruising attempt at working with the remnants of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party in Workers’ Aid for Bosnia, International Workers Aid (IWA), constituted at Manchester in the autumn of 1993 to take the labour movement’s solidarity to the multi-ethnic resistance. He spent the next years reporting on convoys trying to get lorries through to Tuzla: Alan actually drove trucks to Tuzla several times, and his role was highlighted in Solidarity is More than a Slogan, the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation book about IWA.
He was building broad parties long before the phrase was fashionable, and he never pretended it was easy. He worked in the Socialist Alliance, helped found Respect in 2004 and fought its split in 2007, and argued for Left Unity after that. He was a founder of Socialist Resistance and then of Anticapitalist Resistance. His reasoning was always rooted in class. The defeats of the 1980s, he wrote in 2000, were what made British politics unlike anywhere else in Europe. In 2008 he put the case that a party to the left of Labour was part of regenerating the unions, not a substitute for it. Uniting the left was a means to that end.
Alan wrote as he talked, plainly. The facts came in date order with the ballot figures attached, and where another writer would reach for a flourish he put an aside in brackets. He was an organiser, not a theorist, and every piece ended on what had to be done next. Above all he was fair to the facts, even when the left’s reflex ran the other way. In 2009, he opposed the ‘British jobs for British workers’ approach of unions (and some of the left) at the Lindsey Oil refinery, opposing skilled workers from Italy. After the defeat at Grangemouth in 2013, much of the far left was denouncing Len McCluskey. Alan set out the evidence that the stewards had recommended acceptance and the workforce had voted for it. He granted that the union leaders were responsible for the state of the unions. Then he wrote: “Denouncing McCluskey, however, irrespective of the circumstances or the facts, does not advance the struggle to regenerate the unions very much.”
Alan had an immediate reaction to David Cameron’s plan for a Brexit referendum which he saw, presciently, as likely to lead to a carnival of reaction. He successfully convinced many on the British left that, despite traditional opposition to the EU’s neoliberalism, that was not the occasion or way to leave it. He assembled the arguments in a powerful book, The European Union and the Referendum: For a critical ‘in’ vote to oppose xenophobia.
Ecology became the main subject of his last twenty years, and he got there earlier than most of the British far left. In February 2020 he wrote a preface for the Chinese translation of Militant Years, and in it he did something few veterans do. He named the one part of the Cowley record he would not defend. The stewards had the strength and the influence to make people take the ecological crisis seriously, and like the rest of the union movement, they never used it. He had changed his mind over the previous twenty years, he wrote, because there is no improving workers’ conditions on a planet that is dying, and no building a socialist future on one.
He reported on the Fourth International’s 2010 congress when it declared itself ecosocialist, noting the role of comrades from Latin America and in particular from the Philippines in understanding the centrality of environmental questions. In 2013, as Left Unity was taking shape, he argued that a new left party must be both democratic and ecological from the start. He read the Earth-system scientists and explained them for socialists: in 2016 he wrote about the Anthropocene Working Group’s case for a new geological epoch, and why the left should care. Facing the Apocalypse: Arguments for Ecosocialism (Resistance Books, 2019) started from the left’s “bleak” record on the environment. It set out planetary boundaries, water, pollution and the sixth extinction, and it traced the ecological thread in Marx, Engels, William Morris and Edward Carpenter. It was launched at meetings from Edinburgh to Waltham Forest. As Covid-19 spread in 2020, he argued that pandemics were part of the ecological crisis and not something running alongside it. Ian Parker called him the David Attenborough of the revolutionary left. The line stuck because it caught something real: he made the science plain for people who had never read it.
He wrote for Anticapitalist Resistance on the climate until weeks before his death, and he treated it as a class question. Who would pay for the transition, and who would have to be made to concede it? He defended the electric car against comrades who called it a technical fix, and he argued that the left should contest the COP process rather than boycott it. His most repeated line was that “nothing can be built on a dead planet”. He pressed a simple point hardest: A movement that cannot force change under capitalism cannot overthrow it.
Speaking in London in February 1987, a week after the death of the Argentinian Trotskyist Nahuel Moreno, Alan addressed a room full of currents that had spent decades expelling one another. He said of the man being honoured: “He did not have the whole answer and none of us have the whole answer.” He would not want more claimed for himself than that. What he had was the habit of writing it down in the week it happened, with the names in. The record is there, and it is worth reading: some 371 of his pieces, from 1976 to 2026, are already collected at thornett.redmole.org, with translations and a link to his own blog.
His papers for 1951 to 1997 are held at the Modern Records Centre at the University of Warwick (MSS.391).
Alan Thornett, trade unionist and socialist, born 15 June 1937; died 9 October 2026.
A good piece Duncan. Thank you.