Comrade Broder had been invited to address a Hands Off the People of Iran fringe meeting at next week’s National Union of Students conference in Blackpool. He was to have been speaking as a Hopi supporter; that and as the most prominent critic of an AWL majority that refuses to raise the demand for the immediate withdrawal of US-UK troops from Iraq or highlight the danger that Israeli expansionism poses for the entire Middle East.

AWL leaders offer barely concealed support for US-UK occupation forces by claiming that almost in spite of themselves they play a progressive role in guarding Iraq against the various muslim militias. In fact the US-UK invasion brought chaos and handed whole swathes of the country over to those very militias. As for Israel, the AWL’s patriarch, Sean Matgamna, actually calls himself a Zionist! And in the name of those politics he opposes granting Palestinians any right to return to the land of their birth; ie, he supports immigration controls and the continuation of Israel as a Zionist state.

Comrade Broder has been put up by the AWL to front a new campaign organisation - we hope that it was not established simply due to internal sect manoeuvrings - called Middle East Workers’ Solidarity (Mews). Whatever the future holds for Mews, comrade Broder has been bluntly informed by AWL tops that the Hopi NUS fringe meeting is for him off limits.

Readers will recall that the AWL also banned the same comrade from speaking on the opening day of our Communist University last year. Indeed, this crass decision certainly appeared to have been part of a desperate campaign to cohere the sect. Not only was comrade Broder no-platformed: other critical voices were closed down at the same time. Eg, the AWL suspended overly critical mailings to its website.

Laughably the AWL leadership sought to paint itself as the victim. On August 11 - the opening day of CU 2007 - it dispatched a special team to picket the first session, supposedly to expose our cowardly refusal to debate the issue of Iraq ... then somewhat spoiled the effect when the hapless AWLers lamely refused all offers from leading CPGBers for them to move their stall inside and contribute to the debate from the floor.

As we commented at the time, “Here is an organisation in a considerable amount of trouble” (Weekly Worker August 30 2007). This is surely confirmed by the latest  move to gag comrade Broder. The fact that the AWL leadership acts in this undemocratic way exacerbates the contradictions that are visibly pulling apart the organisation. After all, what is the AWL actually fighting for, exactly?

At the 2007 annual conference of the Labour Representation Committee, the AWL put forward a stupid motion that would have seen the LRC embark on a suicidal policy of confrontation with the New Labour bureaucracy and which would have certainly led to its expulsion. But for what? For the sake of a Labour Party mark two?

Justifying this approach, on-message AWLers are at pains to insist that the democratic space in Labour has been effectively closed down by the decisions of the 2007 Bournemouth conference. As the AWL’s number two, Martin Thomas, put it at the LRC conference, “The unions no longer have a voice in the Labour Party. They cannot even put a motion to conference to oppose anti-trade union laws. There is a split process there” (Weekly Worker November 22 2007). Or, as he wrote elsewhere, “[Bournemouth] has forced every socialist who has taken the life of the Labour Party seriously … to reassess” (www.workersliberty.org/node/9545). Such altogether legimiate musings have though now hardened into AWL dogma.

Of course, there is a minority in the AWL - comrades such as Maria Exall of the Communication Workers Union - that regard the majority’s assessment on the Labour Party as completely mistaken. There is a debate scheduled at the AWL’s annual conference in April, apparently. All very well and good - but it does make the case of Oxford AWLer Mike Rowley all the more odd then.

Apparently, this comrade took an individual initative to accept nomination from his local Labour Party to run as a council candidate in Oxford’s Iffley Fields. While it is certainly true that comrade Rowley should have liaised with his organisation, the fact that he has been selected - despite being a well-known local leftwinger and a member of the AWL - is living proof that room does indeed exist in Labour for the left.

How has the AWL reacted? It has tried to pre-empt debate at its April conference through crude, bureaucratic manipulation. Instead comrade Rowley’s case should have been used to test both sides of the Labour Party argument.

In email correspondence with me comrade Rowley spelt out the situation as he sees it: “As you know, the AWL holds that the Bournemouth conference marked at least the beginning of the end of Labour as a bourgeois workers’ party. This being the case, the group certainly wouldn’t endorse my candidacy. As I respect AWL democracy, I have, very reluctantly, submitted my resignation” (March 16).

Subsequently, I was informed by a leading AWLer that comrade Rowley had not left, that he had been given an ultimatum to step down as a candidate and that unless that was done he would be suspended.

The platform comrade Rowley is standing on is awful - that cannot be denied. But then the AWL eschews anything like a full socialist programme whenever it gets the chance anyway. In 1999, its Socialist Alliance council candidate in the south London borough of Lewisham, Jill Mountford, stood on an exclusively AWL-drafted manifesto that we characterised at the time as “dismal sub-reformism” (Weekly Worker July 8 1999). Could comrade Rowley not be supported with independently produced critical socialist material if he was constrained by the Labour apparatus in terms of his official platform? Obviously, yes. If the will was there. But that would undermine AWL dogma - and that cannot be allowed to happen.

The bureaucratic moves against comrades Broder and Rowley underline the AWL’s loss of perspective - a product of the crisis of Labourism itself. This is a group that for many years buried itself deep in the Labour Party and talked up the ‘socialist’ and working class credentials of its host body. It advocated a Labour vote on May 1 1997, fully cognisant of the fact that Tony Blair and New Labour had not the slightest intention of implementing any measures in favour of working people. But, according to the AWL’s Workers’ Liberty of the time, “Breaking the icy Tory grip is the only way to begin to open British politics up again ... It is the only way for the labour movement to begin to move forward again” (my emphasis, April 1997). The AWL even persuaded itself that Blair was “likely to be more vulnerable to working class pressure than the Tories ever could be”.

Now that the “only” perspective for the advance of the working class movement has palpably failed - as predicted by this paper, of course - we see an AWL leadership hopelessly thrashing about and trying to keep its own ranks in order through crass bureaucratic measures.

After 1977 the AWL suffered a crisis of expectations and began to wildly zig-zag. The Labour Party was dropped in favour of half-heartedly engaging with the Socialist Alliance; from there it was the Socialist Party’s Socialist Green Unity Coalition; then it stepped up its agitation for the formation of an LRC; after that it demanded that the LRC, having been formed, split from Labour. Now, having walked out of the founding conference of Respect because it did not want to associate itself with George Galloway, the AWL has embarked upon a totally risible engagement with the Socialist Workers Party’s Respect rump.

In absence of anything resembling a Marxist programme to guide its cadre and their work, we are likely to see the further disorientation of the AWL along with yet more bureaucratic attempts to besmirch, silence and remove critical voices.

Honest AWLers beware …