events had already occurred. This led them to adopt the position that Guy Aldred had taken when he left the Federation to found the USM: that parliamentarism was obsolete, therefore taking an anti-parliamentary position was no longer necessary. This became the impetus for the APCF changing its name to the Workers' Revolutionary League (WRL) in October 1941. In order to coordinate resistance to the war effort, the WRL came together with the USM and the GAF to organise the Scottish No-Conscription League, in which the WRL's Willie McDougall served as chair for a time. A conscientious objector from the WRL, William Dick, defended himself in front of a military tribunal in June 1942 on anarcho-pacifist grounds, declaring his moral opposition to war, the state and violence in general, which granted him an unconditional exemption from conscription. In October 1942, the WRL established one of its main initiatives to combat sectarianism: the Workers' Open Forum, a weekly meeting open to all parties organised on the model of a workers' council. The Forum invited speakers from GAF and the USM, but also from further afield groups such as the Socialist Party of Great Britain (SPGB), Socialist Labour Party (SLP), Workers' International League (WIL), Independent Labour Party (ILP), Common Wealth Party (CWP), Peace Pledge Union (PPU), as well as a number of secularists, Georgists and industrial unionists. Over time, the WRL's activities became more and more subordinated to the "interests of the Workers' Open Forum." By the end of the war, the Workers' Revolutionary League had dissolved itself almost entirely into the activities of the Workers' Open Forum, continuing to provide a regular meeting space in Glasgow until the late 1950s. John Taylor Caldwell commented that the closure of the Open Forum marked the end of an era, one in which public speaking began to die out as audiences left the inner cities for the suburbs. The post–World War II economic expansion brought a definitive end to the anti-parliamentary communist movement, as many of the arguments it had made during the early-20th century no longer held weight. Positions Anti-Parliamentarism The APCF continued to propagate its anti-parliamentary principles, arguing that parliament was a fundamental institution of the capitalist system which could only ever serve the interests of the ruling class. It rejected the idea that parliamentarism could serve as a means for the socialisation of the means of production, holding instead that this could