| Alan Thornett |
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| CATEGORIES ABOUT ALAN THORNETT | |
| 1937 births | |
| thornett, alan | |
| living people | |
| uk workers revolutionary party members | |
| british trotskyists | |
| respect – the unity coalition politicians | |
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When a car worker in Oxford , Alan Thornett was recruited to Gerry Healy 's Socialist Labour League in the early 1960s . He helped to build a formidable support for Trotskyist ideas in the Cowley Oxford plant during the 1960s and early 1970s . However, in 1973 he and most of the Cowley group were expelled from the SLL along with up to 500 other members of the SLL. Some of them went on to form the Workers Socialist League (WSL) of which Thornett was a senior leader. It participated in an international tendency of groups expelled from Healy's ICFI known as the Trotskyist International Liaison Committee . However the WSL foundered after losing members to the Spartacist League and gradually losing its basis of support as industrial struggle tailed off in the late 1970s . The WSL entered the Labour Party and fused with Sean Matgamna 's group the I-CL in 1981 , only to be expelled again in 1983 somewhat smaller. Thornett and his comrades regrouped as the Socialist Group and then fused with the International Group to form the International Socialist Group (ISG). Thornett is now a leader of the ISG, the British Section of the United Secretariat Of The Fourth International of which he is also a central leader. Thornett successfully argued for the ISG to exit the Labour Party and join the Socialist Alliance . Later, bucking the trend among small far-left groups, he supported the Alliance's dissolving into the Respect Coalition . Thornett sits on Respect's National Council. He is the author of two volumes of autobiography: 'From Militancy to Marxism' and 'Inside Cowley'. EXTERNAL LINKS
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