Workers International League (1937)
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Workers' International League
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| Leader | Jock Haston |
| Founded | 1937 |
| Split from | Militant Group |
| Merged into | Revolutionary Communist Party |
| Headquarters | London |
| Ideology | Trotskyist |
The Workers' International League (WIL) was a Trotskyist group in Britain which existed from 1937 to 1944.
The WIL was formed in 1937 by around members of the Militant Group, who had split due to false allegations from the leadership of that group that Ralph Lee (born Raphael Levy), then a newly arrived South African member, had misled a strike and used the strike funds to move to England.
The split took around a third of the membership of the Militant Group and four of its branches, including Jock Haston and Ted Grant. The group remained in the Labour Party, where they published Searchlight edited by Gerry Healy, which in September 1938 was replaced by the magazine Youth for Socialism, which in its own turn was renamed Socialist Appeal in June 1941 as a result of the WIL's turn of focus away from the Labour Party. The group also produced a theoretical journal Workers International News. The WIL grew with recruits from the Labour Party, the Communist Party of Great Britain, the Independent Labour Party and the Militant Group.
The Fourth International was formed in 1938, and the WIL refused to merge into the newly formed official British affiliate, the Revolutionary Socialist League itself a regroupment of the Militant Group and others. They requested either affiliate or sympathiser status to the International but were rejected.
Unlike the Revolutionary Socialist League, the WIL readily adopted the Proletarian Military Policy developed by Trotsky in his last writings and expanded upon and advocated by James P Cannon and the Socialist Workers Party. They campaigned for the creation of workers' militias instead of the Home Guard, deep air raid shelters for workers, and after 1941 against the pro-war, anti-strike position of the CPGB.
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