Spartacist League of Britain

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The Spartacist League of Britain is a Trotskyist political party in Britain. It is the British section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist).

The group was founded at a conference held over the weekend of 4-5 April 1978 at which the Trotskyist Faction, which had split from the Workers Socialist League on 19 February 1978, fused with the London Spartacist Group. The LSG was a grouping of members of other sections of what was then the international Spartacist tendency (iSt) based in London for political purposes. The newly formed Spartacist League was led by Bill Logan and Adaire Hannah who had previously led the Spartacist League of Australia.

Not long after the newly founded SL, with branches in London, Birmingham and Sheffield, recruited a second group splitting from the WSL known as the Leninist Faction. Further individual recruits were won from both Workers Power and the International-Communist League.

Some time later at an international conference of the international Spartacist tendency held in Colchester Logan and Hannah were expelled from the iSt over alleged misconduct including forcing a female comrade to have an abortion when he was the head of the Australian section, although this has never been proven by the Spartacist League. Bill Logan later joined the International Bolshevik Tendency.

With many other groups claiming to be Trotskyist increasingly working within the Labour Party the SL concentrated its polemics on those elements who of their rival groups who objected to the use of entryist tactics. This had its most significant success when a faction within the International Marxist Group left that group and joined the SL in 1981. This was, almost certainly, the numerical high point for the SL/B.

The group publishes the quarterly newspaper Workers Hammer, oringally Spartacist Britain, a paper similar in style and content to the American Spartacist League's Workers Vanguard.

The Youth Group of the ICL are also active, many of its members attending ICL's meetings, and meetings of other various communist organisations.