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Socialist Appeal
[London]

(1941-1946)

Published in London. Socialist Appeal was organ of the Workers International League and was formed in 1937 by around members of the Militant Group.

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.

We are grateful to the web site of British Trotskyist Bill Hunter who had this limited run of Socialist Appeal digitized.