Healy runs candidates

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the blanket' prisoners of Long Kesh in their three year struggle for political status.

PRESS

standards it set itsert.

One example towaras the end of the strike was a front page article in the Daily Tele• graph which claimed that:

"a grass roots revolt by British Leyland workers demanding the right to work" at the Cowley Body Plant had been launched against the strike.

The article was reporting the attempt by Leyland management to abolish the 'spiv day' at the plant in which by tradition Leyland workers have taken a day's unpaid holiday at the end of the Easter break.

The move to get workers in was launched before the craft strike began, and was nothing whatsoever to do with that strike.

It was notable only for the fact that less than half the workers in the Body. Plant responded despite the best efforts of management and union leadership.

That did not prevent the Telegraph stating that those handful who went into work had done so "in defiance of calls from Mr Roy Fraser, self styled leader of the British Leyland United Craft Organisation."

The decision by the Workers Revolutionary Party to stand 60 candidates in the General Election appears as an astonishing act of bravado.

But it is only the latest example of the Healy leadership's efforts to substitute propaganda stunts and "mass" organisational initiatives for any patient struggle for the Trotskyist programmè within the working class.

The WRP, for all its apparently unlimited financial resources is not of course in any sense a mass party.

The decision to go for 60 candidates in order to secure television and radio broadcasting time could well prove even more destructive to the Party's remaining cadre than Healy's decision to run ten candidates from a much bigger organisation in 1974.

The ensuing campaign then saw the most grotesque liquidation of the Party's programme in an orgy of mass "recruitment' , which piled up more supposed "recruits" in almost every area than the. Party secured in votes, and wreaked havoc with existing WRP branches.

Reduced in size

This outcome must be even more likely in the 1979 elertion, which finds the WRP vastly reduced in size, but saddled with an even bigger, image-building, election campaign.

Nor does the WRP offer any clear programme or direction to the working class.

Despite their• manifesto's. emphasis that the WRP is "not a parliamentary, but a revolutionary party" , WRP candidates will be unable to point to a single instance in which their members have fought in the labour movement for such manifesto demands as the opening of the books of capitalist firms or the "sliding scale of wages and hours"

Their record in practice makes a mockery of the slogan "a vote for this programme is a vote for principle"

Rather the WRP's practical record in the unions over the last five years insofar as it exists includes the support given by Central Committee member Tom White to the reactionary 'workers' participation' set-up in British Leyland, and WRP attempts to sabotage the successful TGWU campaign against the bureaucrats witch-hunting the 'Cowley 9' And on an international level the WRP's cringing subservience to petty bourgeois nationalist regimes in the Middle East is revealed in the manifesto's call for solidarity with not only the freedom fighters of the PLO and the revolutionary Arab masses of the Middle East , but also, astonishingly the dictatorships of "Iraq, the Libyan Jamahiriyah and Syria".

The WRP. has no basis on which it can offer workers the chance to vote for principle.

Instead all they offer them is the chance to vote for a propaganda machine that speaks for the anti-communist butchers of the Iraqi Ba'ath Socialist Party.

Healy STILL AVAILABLE WRP leaders junk the old A WSL Pamphles Price 45p plus from WSL, 31, Dartmouth London NW5 1

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Trotskyism GADDAFI