WRP law suit

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action to the WRP must be counted in excess of the huge sum of money paid over to the Observer.

A. full reckoning must also take account of the compromising and outright reformist statement made by these supposed "revolutionaries" in testimony in a legal hearing brought about on their own initiative.

Central Committee member Corin Redgrave went into the witness box to declare that not only did the WRP reject armed struggle but that at the moment the Party adopted a policy of armed struggle he would resign!

Clearly he has ambitions to serve as a latter-day Kamenev or Zinoviev-reneging on the very eve of the Socialist revolution!

Vanessa Redgrave also declared that she hoped that the socialist transformation would come "through legal, constitutional and peaceful struggie" (Newsline). BOUR Redgrave: talked of "legal, constitutional and. peaceju struggie Jor sociorism.

Reading these statements it is hard to recall that the WRP is the Party which for the last six years has incessantly, and with a monotony relieved only slightly by its hysterical language, warned the British working class of the imminence of a counter revolutionary military coup!

If such dire predictions were being taken seriously, it would be reasonable to assume that, far from opposing the arming of the working class, and seeking racompense for 3-year-old libels through the bourgeois courts, the WRP. leaders would be devoting their energies to campaigning for and organising the formation of armed workers' militia, and mobilising the working class on programme of transitional demands.

But of course the WAP Central Committee does not seriously believe its own "analysis". And it reserves its special venom for the Workers Socialist League which is the oniy political tendency that does fight consistently for transitional demands to mobilise the working class.

And while falsely accusing us of reformism, WRP leaders find themselves in the dock preaching what amounts to a peaceful road to socialism.

Vanessa Redgrave in particular declared, according Newsline that the programmatic call for an armed uprising of the working elass referred only to specific conditions-where a socialist government elected on socialist programme was attacked by right-wing minority groups.

Parliamentary road

Aside from the way in which this conception spells out an entirely parliamentary road, Redgrave rounded off the reformist perspective by quoting as an example of such a socialist government Allende's Popular. Front government in Chile in 1973!

Redgrave will be best remembered by many WRP contacts members, for her grotesquely sympathisers and embarrassing display in which in an agonising sequence in the WRP film The Palestinian she performs a dance waving a machine gun above her head Yet she declared in couri that: "My whole life | have struggled politically against violence, war and terror (News!ine).

She was , not lying to the court. Rather, her testimony revealed that she has not in any way broken from the liberalism pacifism and protest politics that for years before her sudden "recruitment made her an obstacle to the political struggles of the Socialist Labour League and the WRP.

Protest Rather than winning over Redgrave to Trotskyist politics, the WAl has been shown to have fallen victim to her particular brand of middle-class protest.

It is the WRP's posturing alongside Palestinian liberation fighters, its cynical warnings of immediate military coups and its ultra-laft retoric which are the tarade for its real positions.

Bahind this thin veneer of "revolurionary" phraseology and picy-acting, lurks the real wretches face of the WRP-its opportunist evasion of any serious struggle for the Trotskyist programme in the international workers movement; its cowardly compromises with the petty bourgeois leaders of the PLO, and vich the tradi and Libyan dictatorships; and its abstention from or adaptation to almost every one of the daily struggles of the British working class.

Slandered

wynen, late in iytg the founder mambers of the Workers Socielist League, then members of the Whi, first challenged the Heaty leadership's abandonment of the method and demands of the Trotskyist programme, we were slandered, abused, vilified and bureaucratically expciled.

Every one of bur criticisms has since been amply borne out in practice.

Though six of its members have now-at great labour and expense-cleared their names in the bourgeois courts of the ludicrous and libellous charges laid against them in the Observer articie. WRP members shorid now address themselves to the far more serious political charges that remain to be answered by their leaders.

John Lister