HOW SCURRILOUS CAN THEY GET? 1. WRP publishes burgled documents

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almost unparallelled dishonesty they themselves brazenly utilise and siander that supposedly material obtained by daylight Early in December 1977 highly sophisticated burglary was staged in Trade union files, an entire filing cabinet full of personal correspondence and other material belonging to Cowley shop steward Alan Thornett were stolen in a day-time burglary on his house.. amounted to about 2 cwt of The continuing campaign by the Spartacist League to slander and discredit their opponents on the left and set them up for victimisation has taken a new turn at BL's Rover factories in Birmingham-where several Sparts have managed to obtain jobs.

This move towards "exemplary" trade union work", however has not led the Sparts to attempt to establish any basic support among Rover workers, or in the union bodies in the plant.

Rather it has been seen as offering a vantage point from which to launch vicious attacks on left wing opponents both in Rovers and elsewhere in BL.

Height of struggle

With this in view, the Spart carworkers attended last week's Birmingham meeting of the Leyland Action Committee-at the • WRP leader Healy documents covering twenty years of trade union activity.

The raid took place at the very point where the right wing TGWU bureaucracy on a national level was preparing the ground to victimise Thornett and other Cowley militants, barring them from union office, or, hopefully, expelling them from the union.

The burglary deprived Thornett of a wealth of docuAt Solihull there are three Rover plants on the same site. The Land Rover and Range Rover were the first to strike. The SD1 plant however voted narrowly not to strike, and to cross the picket lines set up by mentary material that would have assisted in defeating the frame-up disciplinary charges raised against him by the But also included among this material were political documents dating back to the period of the expulsion of Thornett and 200 other members from Gerry Healy's Workers Revolutionary Party in 1974 and the formation of the Workers Socialist League.

Following the raid WSL members have closely monitored the press and other material for evidence to the whereabouts of the files.

The fact that none of the stolen material has been published, or used in the subsequent TGWU witch-hunt against the "Cowley 9' (which was successfully defeated by a national campaign), together with the detailed preparation that was clearly involved in the burglary, pointed clearly to this being the work of the 'dirty tricks' department of the state.

No clue And, as reported in Socialist Press 84 (January 25 1978), Oxford CID not surprisingly failed to turn up the slightest clue as to the culprits.

Yet now-some 2½ years later-material from this burglary has at last begun to surface: not in the pages of the Tory press but in the pages of the so-called "Trotskyist" daily paper Newsline!

In a series of six articles of the others.

Militant stewards from the SD1 decided to go in with them -both to avoid what would be inevitable victimisation if a mere handful took isolated action, and to fight on to reverse the characterise the Workers Socialist League, Healy's paper last. week unashamedly reprinted a facsimile document that could only have been obtained from the material burgled from Thornett's files.

It is a letter dated 16 January 1976 to Thornett from Dr. G. Picton Davies of the Police College-inviting Thornett to take part in a TV film.

Ignored

The letter was ignored at the time. No copies of it were made and it was simply placed among other letters in Thornett's files. It was subsequently stolen in the raid.

Yet Newsline (April 15) reproduces the original lettercomplete with Police College letterhead!

Newsline laughably claims that its documentary material from the series of articles was all obtained from "ex-members of Thornett's group." Yet no members or ex-members of the WSL would have possessed that letter: until December 1977 it was in Thornett's filing cabinet; and from then on it was ir the hands of the extreme right wing or the state!

It is characterstic of the WRP that even in a non-political series of articles seeking solely to prove the WSL to be "provocateurs" manipulated behind the scenes by the police, by alleged KGB/FBI agents and by revisionist political currents, wrong decision that had been taken, and pull the SD1 plant out on strike.

They were successful i 1 this struggle, and three days later the plant was out.

For engaging in this struggle the militants were branded as "scabs" by the Sparts.

But this was not the worst of it.

One SD1 militant got up in the meeting to declare that he had, as an individual, refused to cross the picket line-but had been completely wrong to take such a stand.

Not only should he have been inside fighting for strike action, but he had suddenly realised he was wide open to victimisation.

He was promptly answered by one Spart who proudly declared that he had not crossed the picket line, and had not been victimised.

The cynicism of this argument was at once exposed when the Spart was forced to admit that he had taken steps to cover himself by getting a sick note from his doctor! robbery!

To cover themselves, the Newsline hacks resorted on Friday to the crudest of double bluff manoeuvres. Under the headline 'Thornett's provocation" , they complained bitterly that:

"Thornett . . . is publicly claiming that documents and information used in these articles were stolen from his home in Oxford in a burglary.

This is a complete lie and a deliberate frame-up attempt [!].

The aim is to invoke the police, if he possibly can, in a raid (...)

We take this opportunity to warn all members of the WRP and the wider labour and trade union movement about the foul methods of the WSL organisation and to maintain their vigilence."

The Friday article goes on to pose the ludicrous hypothesis that the WSL has adopted a position that the WRP is "outside the labour movement" , and that this is supposedly "to prepare WSL members for violence against WRP leaders and members"

Crisis

This desperate attempt to whip up the WRP's members and supporters into a subjective frenzy of hostility against the WSL and every other tendency on the left has its roots in the profound political crisis now facing the Healy leadership, and the growing impact of the political fight carried through by the WSL.

Two members of the newly-elected WSL National Commitstrike action on the SD1 was being carried out inside the plant by the very stewards branded as "scabs" by the Sparts!

With their first excursion into trade union work during the steel strike having proved an unmitigated fiasco, and with their demoralised forces hated and despised by workers wheretee are former leading SLL/ WRP supporters who have been recruited to our ranks in the past year.

And new layers of WRP members and supporters, repelled by the movement's positions on the Middle East and the abstention from the British class struggle continue to look towards the WSL for a principled alternative.

Meantime the WRP's biggest ever slander campaign-designed to portray the late American SWP leader Joseph Hansen as an FBI/KGB "double agent" —has totally collapsed in the face of evidence from the newly-opened Trotsky archives.

Danger signal

But Healy's desperation is also a danger signal. The WRP's gangster leadership has shown itself ready in the past to use violence against political opponents, and to collaborate with the right wing TGWU bureaucracy in the witch-hunting of WSL members.

Their series of articles against the WSL seem timed to coincide with the crucial point of the long struggle by our comrades in British Leyland for action against Edwardes 5%with-strings union-busting package-and place a welter of information in the hands of every right wing and management witch-hunter.

We leave it up to the objective reader, therefore, to assess who is engaged in a major provocation.

ever they make an appearance, the Sparts have developed their latest ultra-syndicalist fetish over picket lines as a desperate bid for self-preservation.

These provocative positions -which could only lead to the wholesale sacking of the Sparts' political opponents-must be regarded as highly dangerous to the workers' movement.

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