lit a candle 2h agoMy dad called to tell me, said he'd read Facing the Apocalypse twice. I hadn't heard of the guy before that, the car plant stuff, the Cowley years. Strange to learn about someone's whole life in one phone call.
Their story
Alan Thornett was a British car worker, shop steward and Trotskyist leader who became, in the words of his comrade Duncan Chapel, the best-known militant in the British car industry during the decade when that industry settled the fate of British trade unionism. He spent the following forty years explaining,…
Alan Thornett was a British car worker, shop steward and Trotskyist leader who became, in the words of his comrade Duncan Chapel, the best-known militant in the British car industry during the decade when that industry settled the fate of British trade unionism. He spent the following forty years explaining, with names and dates, why that fight was lost, and his last two decades turning the revolutionary left toward ecosocialism.
Thornett was born on 15 June 1937 near Oxford, into a rural community. He left school to work on the land from about the age of fifteen, spending around four years as a farm labourer, and then did three years of national service in the army, in a unit trained to halt a Soviet advance into Germany. In the summer of 1959 he started at the Morris Motors plant in Cowley, Oxford, driving a forklift truck in the South Works to feed the track for the new Mini. The same year he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain, which he left in 1964.
He held a shop steward's card from 1963, representing the lorry drivers who moved cars and components around the site, and in 1967 he became the Transport and General Workers' Union deputy convenor in the plant, chairing both the Joint Shop Stewards Committee and the union's 5/55 branch. Recruited with other Cowley stewards to Gerry Healy's Socialist Labour League in 1966, he led its industrial wing, the All Trades Union Alliance. Cowley was among the most militant plants in Britain, averaging more than three hundred stoppages a year by the end of the 1960s and striking against both Harold Wilson's In Place of Strife and Edward Heath's Industrial Relations Act. In the winter of 1971 the stewards stopped the line whenever work-study engineers appeared, and management conceded "mutuality": no job could be timed or changed without the stewards' agreement. In January 1972 the same committee blocked the movement of coal inside the plant in support of the striking miners. Around 1974 the press began calling him "The Mole", a nickname that stuck.
Inside Healy's organisation, by then the Workers Revolutionary Party, Thornett wrote an opposition document in 1974 rejecting the party's prediction of an imminent military coup and arguing for the method of the Transitional Programme. On 25 November 1974, the morning after Healy challenged him at an aggregate meeting, a Control Commission expelled him, and about two hundred members followed him out. The expelled comrades founded the Workers Socialist League in October 1975, with Socialist Press as its paper. In the plant's union elections of January 1976, seven national dailies and three television networks campaigned against him, and British Leyland refused year after year to recognise him as deputy convenor. He was finally sacked on 17 November 1982, nominally for failing to renew a heavy goods licence, which he argued was a strategic move to clear the plant before a new model went into production.
He often wrote under pen names, including Bill Peters in Socialist Press and Socialist Organiser (the paper of the Workers Socialist League's 1981 to 1984 fusion with the International-Communist League), and later Alan Davies. In 1983 he visited Toyota's Takaoka plant and wrote a five-part series contrasting it with Cowley. During the 1984 to 1985 miners' strike, without a workplace, he wrote in Socialist Viewpoint, arguing that union leaders had declined every chance of a second front. In 1987 Socialist Viewpoint merged with International to form Socialist Outlook, and the International Socialist Group was formed; from then on Thornett was a leader of the British section of the Fourth International and an elected member of its International Committee. In the 1990s he threw himself into International Workers Aid for Bosnia and drove lorries on convoys to Tuzla more than once.
Thornett built broad left parties long before the phrase was fashionable. He argued for the International Socialist Group to leave the Labour Party and join the Socialist Alliance, then backed the move into Respect, which he helped found in 2004, and sat on its National Council until Socialist Resistance left in 2010. He argued for Left Unity and was a founder of Socialist Resistance and later Anticapitalist Resistance. He campaigned for a critical "in" vote in the 2016 Brexit referendum, which he expected to become a carnival of reaction.
Ecology became the main subject of his last twenty years. He read Earth-system science and explained it for socialists, and his book Facing the Apocalypse: Arguments for Ecosocialism (Resistance Books, 2019) set out planetary boundaries and the ecological thread in Marx, Engels and William Morris. Ian Parker called him "the David Attenborough of the revolutionary left". His most repeated line was that "nothing can be built on a dead planet". His other books were the autobiographical From Militancy to Marxism, Inside Cowley (1998, with a foreword by Ken Loach) and Militant Years (2010).
He kept writing until the end; his last articles were finished at the beginning of September 2026. Thornett died in Oxford on 9 October 2026, aged 89. The cause of death has not been made public. Some 371 of his pieces from 1976 to 2026 are collected at thornett.redmole.org, and his papers for 1951 to 1997 are held at the Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick.
Biography adapted from Anticapitalist Resistance and Red Mole obituaries by Duncan Chapel (10 Oct 2026); Liam Mac Uaid, Liam redux (10 Oct 2026); Ecosocialist Discussion (10 Oct 2026); Wikipedia; Solidarity review of Inside. Wikipedia ↗
In their own words
“I think this prediction was wrong.”
From his 1974 opposition document inside the Workers Revolutionary Party, on Gerry Healy's forecast of an imminent military coup.
“Nothing can be built on a dead planet.”
His most repeated line in his ecosocialist writing, per Anticapitalist Resistance.
“He did not have the whole answer and none of us have the whole answer.”
Speaking in London in February 1987 about the Argentinian Trotskyist Nahuel Moreno.
“Denouncing McCluskey, however, irrespective of the circumstances or the facts, does not advance the struggle to regenerate the unions very much.”
Writing after the Grangemouth dispute in 2013.
“Were the bedrock of the trade union movement in the plant.”
On rank-and-file stewards such as his friend Eddie Coles, in his 2002 obituary of Coles.
“More to discredit the Trotskyist movement, and the left in general than anyone else claiming to be a part of it, despite other strong contenders for that distinction.”
From his 1990 obituary of Gerry Healy.
Photos
1Alan Thornett speaking
by People Forever
same, my uncle was at Cowley in the seventies and swore by him