WRP hits huge cash crisis
Socialist Press1979 1979-06-06Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 12 →
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The British Workers headed by Gerry Healy. has entered what its Political Committee describes as "our worst financial crisis for decade"
Now, according to the WRP's daily Vewsline inancial problems make it necessary to "reduce" the Party's extensive body of full-time staff and cut the size of Newsline from 16 to The Political Committee stempt to offer a political statement avoids explanation for this crisis citing chiefly the £48,000 O00 General Election Fund, designed to finance 60 candidates.
No campaign Few of these candidates in fact mounted any campaign at all.
Though the decision to field so many candidatesa sizable proportion of the WRP's total active membership-is defended in the PC statement, the leadership find it impossible to deny that such a campaign was well beyond the reach of the WRP, and met with little or no response from the Party's periphery.
The explanation for this failure is, of course, located firmly and method o Programme the WRP itself, whose • shameless the WRP help explain not only the shortfall of the Election Fund but also Newsline's shortfall on its £4,000 Monthly Fund.
Clearly the WRP has now shrunk to a size where the leadership has been forced effectively to abandon hope of maintaining its top-heavy apparatus, and been driven to publicise its crisis in this striking way.
Seemingly: bewildered, the • Political Committee statement asks Newsline readers:
Healy "Why, then, are we falling back when everyone can see that the Tories are on the warpath in no uncertain terms?"
Degenerate
The WRP are of course "falling back" because their degenerate blend of ultraleft sectarianism and opportunist adaptation to petty bourgeois nationalism correctly seen by militant workers as incapable of resolving the crisis of working class leadership.
It is crucial that WRP members and supporters draw the harsh political lessons from this new inner party crisis, and look seriously back to the principles and programme on which the Trotskyist movement was founded, and which the WRP has so cynically abandoned.
The detailed critique of the record and the method of the WRP developed by the Workers Socialist League and our experience of struggle for the Transitional Programme offer opponents of Healy's line a principled and positive way forward.