Hard-left Labour Party entryists did not oppose 2011 Nato bombing of Libya

Supporters of lifelong anti-war campaigner Jeremy Corbyn may be surprised to learn that a Trotskyist group accused of attempting to infiltrate Labour did not oppose Nato's 2011 intervention against Libyan despot Muammar Gaddafi.

Alliance of Workers' Liberty (AWL), formerly known as Socialist Organiser, de-registered as a political party in September 2015 and have endeavoured to "intervene constructively" in Labour.

Jill Mountford, who ran against Harriet Harman in the 2010 general election, is an AWL supporter and a member of pro-Corbyn campaign group Momentum's national steering committee, despite Labour expelling her over her membership of the proscribed organisation.

Mountford, who also chairs Momentum's Lewisham branch, was filmed brandishing a copy of AWL's newspaper Solidarity in last night's Channel 4 Dispatches programme. The publication urged left-wingers to "flood into Labour".

Sacha Ismail, another Momentum Lewisham activist and AWL supporter, also featured in the programme. The documentary, however, did not mention Ismail's or AWL's position on the Libyan intervention.

"[AWL] did not call for or support the Nato intervention in Libya, because of the basic (capitalist, imperialist) nature of Nato, but it does not follow that opposing this specific Nato action made sense," he argued in 2011.

The stance has led to mockery from rival Trotskyist group the Socialist Party, formerly known as the Militant Tendency.

A source close to the organisation told IBTimes UK they sometimes jokingly refer to AWL as the "Marxist wing of Nato", something AWL would clearly dispute.

A report from the influential Foreign Affairs Select Committee last week severely criticised the UK's involvement in the intervention.

The group of MPs said David Cameron failed to underpin the campaign with a "strategy to support and shape post-Gaddafi Libya" and blamed the former prime minister for being "ultimately responsible for the failure to develop a coherent Libya strategy".

Corbyn, then a little-known backbench MP and member of the Stop the War Coalition, was just one of 13 MPs who voted against UK intervention in Libya.

"What is the mission all about? Only three weeks ago, we were training Libyan forces and selling arms to Libya," he told MPs in March 2011.

"British companies were happily trading with Libya and British universities were happily accepting vast sums of money from Libya until a few weeks ago.

"It is an awfully short time in our relations with Libya in which to go from hero to zero. The rest of the world may be concerned about that."