AWL history

Fran Broady, 1938-2014

Fran Broady, who was a leading member of our organisation in the 1970s, died on 18 May at the age of 75. Fran met us in 1970, when we were an opposition tendency in IS (forerunner of, but very much more open than, today's SWP). The IS/SWP expelled our tendency in December 1971, because of our campaign against the switch of line to "No to the Common Market" from advocating European workers' unity. Fran chose our small expelled group without hesitation. I remember a conversation with a student member of another left group in 1972, when we were labouring to get a circulation for our new, small...

Left candidates in May elections

Rhodri Evans ( Solidarity 323) is wrong to simply say: “That socialists will have to vote Labour and step up the fight in the unions”. That might have been sufficient in 1991 but it hardly deals with the complexities of the situation we now face. Workers’ Liberty has analysed the Blairite restructuring of the Labour Party and increasingly recognised the diminished scope for party members and union members to affect policy. Indeed from 1999-2010 we stood candidates against Labour, sometimes in alliance with other socialists, sometimes alone. In 2010 it was argued that we could reckon upon some...

"Why we joined IS" (November 1968)

Why we joined IS (November 1968) The statement below was produced by the Workers' Fight group (forerunners of the Alliance for Workers' Liberty) on taking up a unity appeal made in 1968 by the International Socialism group (IS: now called the SWP). The group merged with IS on the basis of an explicit agreement that its members would have the right to organise within IS as a "tendency" it was called the "Trotskyist Tendency") to argue for their basic views where those differed from IS doctrine. The Trotskyist Tendency remained within IS until it was expelled in December 1971. That expulsion was...

For a Trotskyist regroupment (1967)

This appeal for revolutionary socialist regroupment, based on unity in action and debate on differences, was one of the first public political statements of our tendency, in 1967.The RSL referred to would come to be better known as Militant, now the Socialist Party and Socialist Appeal. The SLL would become the Workers Revolutionary Party. IS would become the Socialist Workers Party. The need for a healthy revolutionary socialist Trotskyist movement in Britain has rarely been more obvious. Not for a decade and a half has there been such an opportunity as now to advance revolutionary politics...

From precariat to proletariat

These excerpts from autobiographical notes by Alice, who joined our movement in 1978 at the age of 23, tell something general about how people become committed to socialist activism, and also something about left politics in the 1970s. Alice came from an unprosperous and conflict-ridden working-class family, and had attended school only patchily since the age of 14. In March 1973, aged 18, she took advantage of an offer of a lift to leave her home country and to come to London, unfluent in English, with no job or home to go to, and in her pocket the equivalent of £160 in today’s money. She...

Dave Broady, 1937-2014

Dave Broady died on 4 April. In 1972 he contributed regularly to Workers’ Fight, a forerunner of Solidarity . An excerpt [below] signals the tone and type of his writing. After joining the Navy, and being jailed and dismissed, Dave became a construction worker, a steel erector. He told me he couldn’t tolerate the more controlled environment of a factory. Dave’s then wife Fran Broady joined our organisation in 1970-1, and was a prominent member for a long while. Their older daughter Karen also became an active revolutionary socialist, and now works with AWL in Manchester. Dave himself, however...

Irish Emigré Trotskyism in the mid-1960s: Notes by a Participant

[Workers' Fight and the Trotskyist Tendency of the International Socialists – now the SWP – were forerunners of the Alliance for Workers' Liberty. This is only an outline account, part of a longer article “AWL’s record on Ireland” .] INTRODUCTION The politics of the Trotskyist Tendency on Ireland in 1969 were rooted in the work of the small group of socialists who produced the journal An Solas/Workers’ Republic in 1966-7, under the umbrella of the Irish Workers’ Group, a mainly émigré and mainly London-based organisation. The group producing Workers’ Republic was the original nucleus of the...

Lament for Comrade Leonid Brezhnev (1982)

The achievements of an 18 year reign: • Re-Stalinisation of the USSR • Invasion of Czechoslovakia on the 20th August 1968 to snuff out “socialism with a human face”. • Savage anti-working class repression in the USSR and Eastern Europe. • Invaded Afghanistan in December 1979. • Thereby gave a tremendous boost to the imperialist arms drive. • Threatened to invade Poland unless Solidarnosc is destroyed. Martial law declared in Poland in December 1981, Solidsrnosc formally banned in October 1982 • November 1982: he dies – unfortunately in bed. His successor,Yuri Andropov, presided as USSR...

A portrait of Gerry Healy's Workers Revolutionary Party, patron of the Livingstone Labour Left, in 1980

For describing the WRP as a cross between the Moonies, the Scientologists, and the Jones Cult, which exploited young people, etc.,John Bloxam and Sean Matgamna were in 1981 sued for libel by the actress Vanessa Redgrave. This portrait of the WRP was part of an appeal for labour movement support in fighting the libel action. The WRP was then subsidising and producing Labour Herald, the paper of the Livingstone Labour left. Some readers have asked us for more information about the WRP, the organisation which is threatening to bankrupt Socialist Organiser [predecessor of the Alliance for Workers...

The merger meeting of the Workers' Fight and Workers' Power National Committees, December 1975

The meeting of the Workers' Fight and Workers' Power National Committees to form a National Committee of a new organisation, the International-Communist League, a forerunner of AWL, in December 1975. The meeting was at the Keskidee Centre, Gifford St, London N1. Front row, from left: Susan Carlyle (WF), Fran Broady (WF), Rachel Lever (WF), Dave Stocking (WP), Andrew Hornung (WF), Sue Thomas (WP), Phil Semp (WF), Bill Ford (WP) Second row, from left: Sean Matgamna (WF), Paddy Prendiville (WP), Rinaldo Frezzato (WP), Steve McSweeney (WP), Dave Hughes (WP), Michele Ryan (WP), John Bryant (WF)...

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