Trotskyists I'd Be Happy To Have Around For Pints At My Local.

The Alliance for Workers Liberty. I'd ask them what they'd be having, I'd buy them a round, then I'd buy them another. Five reasons.

1. "Nine members, supporters and friends of the AWL are currently in Israel/Palestine on a solidarity delegation. At the time of writing (Sunday 28 November), we are in the Palestinian city of Ramallah. So far we have. . ." not handed a bag of cash to Hamas generalissimo Ismail Haniya.

2. Unlike George Galloway's neo-Trotskyist and blackshirt coterie in Canada, AWL knows a rat by its teeth and its tail: "Following his election as an MP for Respect, for example, Galloway’s voting record in Parliament in 2005 was 634th out of 645. Of the eleven with worse voting records, five were Sinn Fein MPs who refused as a principle to attend Parliament, one was the Speaker, and two were dead. By late 2009 he had voted in only 93 out of a possible 1,113 votes."

3. The AWL defends the Irish people even if they do misspell 'British': "James Connolly, the Irish socialist and trade union leader shot by the Beritish in May 1916 for his part in the Easter Rising, was convinced, early in the last century, that capitalism simply could not develop fully in Ireland. . . The whole international crisis of the last three years is portrayed vividly in the Irish story. Crazily irresponsible, greed-maddened, self-serving private citizens in control of the commanding heights of the economy, and running things for their own benefit."

4. The AWL's Sean Matgamna recognized the "new antisemitism" (a phenomenon that most of the "Left" persists in pretending is a right-wing hoax) as far back as 1988: "It was a doctrine that dared no longer speak its old name except in whispers and occasional back-alley fascist shouting; but by the ’70s it had another name which it dared to speak, indeed to shout, in a loud chorus in which participated most of the governments and states of the world, including some of the worst governments in existence. A new name: anti-Zionism." Matgamna was noticing antisemitism masquerading as "anti-Zionism" in the Irish Workers Group as far back as 1967-68.

5. For refusing to go along with the insane demand for an immediate withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and Iraq, AWL has been loudly traduced by the pseudo-left as "apologists for imperialism." So have I. We could share a few laughs.

There would be all sorts of amusing arguments, of course. But at least there would be a basis for a conversation.

I was privileged to grow up in a world where the revolutionaries, failed or successful (almost all of them failed and many of them martyred) were presented to Irish children, at home as well as at school, as the heroes, the virtuous ones. I had to change much in that, but I’ve never lost the conviction that standing against iniquity, fighting it irreconcilably, is necessary and right. - Sean Matgamna.