Healy's Latest Exposed

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Vanessa Reagrave endorsing WRP sectarian line on Labour government AMONYMOUS-LETTERS AND FALSE WITNESS DEPT.

Though the Bulletin Group period after this split had taken List conclusion-that revolution- fore, the W$L has no case. to aries should abandon their face answer: the positions attacked and simply enter the Labour are not and never have been In conflict with the line of running through the unsavoury both the WRP and the Bulletin verbiage of the Newsline articles Group, Thornett and the is the suggestion that the WSL founders of the SL struggled Icadership spends its entire time for a return to the method of searching for other organisations compiled-comprising material view of Healyism, in which the written by Alan Thornett, John world is largely populated by It's wonderful what you can do with a lively and scurrilous imagination, a handful of stolen documents and the fine art of innuendo.

Anyone who doubts the scope that such raw materials offer for the production of a work of destructive fiction should study the six-part series "Thornett's Weasels" that filled no less than fourteen pages of the Workers evolutionary Party's daily Newsline at the beginning of April.

The anonymous "Newsline investigation" is a further extension of the WRP's now obsessive theory of the post-war history of the Trotskyist movement as a history of police/FBI/CIA/ KGB/GPU conspiracies against the WRP, in which politics play only an incidental role.

Thus the Newsline series sets out not to challenge the political positions of the Workers Socialist League: indeed it only refers to our positions in the most absurdly falsified form.

Wall off

Rather its objective is to wall off WRP members and sympathisers from discussion with us, by portraying the WL as a bunch of police provocateurs, intriguers, schemers, liars and thugs.

The series has therefore the character not of a serious polemic but of a catalogue of increasingly grotesque and slanderous allegations.

Many of these are hoary old lies shamelessly re-hashed even though long since rebuffed.

Others have been especially fabricated for the occasion, with the aid of material stolen in a raid on Alan Thornett's house in 1977 and now clearly furnished to the WRP by the extreme right wing or the forces of the state.

Crisis

We intend in this article simply to expose the falsity of the allegations raised by Newsline. A subsequent articie will look in more detail at the more important question of why the WRP, as a result of its own ongoing political crisis, has felt obliged to unleash such a tirade of lies at this point in time.

The articles. incoherent, inconsistent and rambling though they are, raise essentially six inter-related allegations against the founders of the Workers Socialist League:

1) That we have consistently hed about our expulsion from the WRP in 1974, and falsified the numerical size of the WSL.

2) That we condone violence within our movement.

3) That we have liquidated into Social Democracy and anti-communism. 4) That in our struggle for the Trotskyist programme within the WRP we were working for the Bulletin (BlickJenkins) Group-then the British section of the 'International' headed by the French OCI. 5) That we are on the point of fusion with an array of revisionist groups.

6) That we were also working with Joseph Hansen, the late American SWP leader and alleged FBI/GPU "double agent"; and that this made the WSL part of an elaborate series of police provocations against the WRP.

Needless to say none of these charges has any validity in fact-as a brief answer to each can demonstrate.

1) The Newsline "investigation" claims that a mere 59 WRP members were expelled at the time of Alan Thornett being purged from the party for his political differences.

Yet this fails to square with the fact that three whole subdistricts of the WRP's biggest Region outside London were. expelled 'en bloc by a bureaucratic sweep of Healy's pen.

Using a technique tried and tested by a line of bureaucrats from Joseph Stalin to Jack' Jones, the WRP leadership "reorganised" the branches in the Oxford, Swindon and Reading sub-districts.

The Oxford sub-district alone comprised at that point (on standard WRP reckoning), in excess of 100 members: only three of these complied with Healy's demand that they sign a declaration supporting Thornett's expulsion.

Handful

The Swindon sub-district contained in excess of 30 WRP members: a tiny handful of them stayed with Healy. In Reading a 50-strong sub-district including branches in Reading, Basingstoke and Bracknell was reduced to a skeleton crew of Healy stalwarts.

Elsewhere, as part of the same purge, (and documented in the WSL account of the split, The Battle for Trotskyism) WRP members were expelled in London and Yorkshire for allegedly supporting Thornett. The total easily amounts to the 200 claimed by. Thornett at the time.

Nobody ever claimed that all 200 joined the Workers Socialist League when it was formed a week later.

Many of them-having been for some years loyal WRP members were appalled at what they saw as the bureaucratic degeneration of Trotskyism itself, and were alienated from revolutionary politics. They became casualties of Healy's degeneraBut let us add a couple of questions for the WRP. In 1972 and 1973 the SLL staged a highly successful Right to Work march-with a rally of 7,000 in Wembley Pool; and a Pageant of working class history attended by 10,000 workers and youth. The WRP itself was launched in 1973 with over 3,000 members.

Unobtainable

Where have they all gone? Why is Newsline almost unobtainable even in former WRP strongholds? What is the current membership of the WRP? Andmore important-what have these members actually done in the class struggle since 1974? We have answered the Newsline's challenge: we await the WRP reply to ours.

2. The Newsline claims that allegations of violence subsequently made by dissident Reading WSL members against the WSL leadership were proven and subjected to a cover-up.

This is a complete Newsline fabrication: the allegations-as the "investigators" must know from their hoard of stolen documents--were shown to be both baseless and factionally motivated by elements who wished to break up the Workers Socialist League and dissolve its forces into the Labour Party.

3) The "investigation" repeats the tawdry old claim that the Thornett opposition represented an adaptation to Social Democracy.

The only "evidence" ever produced to substantiate this absurd claim is a fabricated quotation allegedly uttered by Thornett and subsequently produced in what were described as "minutes" of the WRP Central Committee.

"The working class will be attracted to the reforms of the Labour government • • • The Labour government will come into conflict with the ruling class ... Workers will support the Labour government's reform (See WRP Control Commission interim report. reprinted in The Battle for Trotskyism Parody The "quote" is in fact not Thornett's at all, but a parody of his position by Healy's hatchet-man Cliff Slaughter.

This is obviously why the WRP to this day has not found a single quotation either in Thornett's two WRP internal documents or in the pages of nearly 200 issues of Socialist Press to support their claim that his positions or those of the WSL capitulate to Social Democracy.

Indeed so much are Socialist Press politics a capitulation to Social Democracy that Oxford Socialist Press supporter Ted. Heslin has been subjected to a. national witch-hunt in an endeavour to expel him from the Labour Party, while WSL members and supporters in the unions have repeatedly been subjected to witch-hunts and victimisations at the hands of the bureaucracy as well as management.

4) The allegation that Thornett and his supporters within the WRP were acting as "agents" of the French OCI and the "Blick-Jenkins Group" serves a double purpose for the WRP.

On the one hand it is designed to suggest that the whole opposition was simply a sinister plot-and thus divert attention from the political questions that Thornett raised in opposition to the WRP Bankrupt On the other hand, by falsely linking the founders of the WSL to the bankrupt politics of the "Blick-Jenkins" Group, the WRP can further develop its allegation that we represented a capitulation to social democracy.

What is their evidence for such a claim? It consists entirely of material produced by the Bulletin Group and its supporters!

The Bulletin Group's extraVagant claim that the were "responsible for crystallising the Thornett tendency" is accepted as good coin by Healy, as is their claim that "substantial sections" of the opposition documents were written by a leading member of the Bulletin Group".

The fact is that in the period prior to the struggle within the WRP the Bulletin Group had produced a number of documents raising legitimate criticism of the methods and positions of the Healy leadership, focussing in particular on the ultra-left sectarianism of the WRP, its liquidationist "mass recruitment" campaign in the February 1974 cicction, and on Healy's abandonment of the method of Trotsky's Transitional Programme.

YAS Lister, Tony Richardson and others-they drew also for two sections on quotations and material produced by the Bulletin Group-specifically in the section on the question of workers control of production (composed in the first document almost exclusively, of quotations) and the section on Healy's use of the term "corporatist" to describe reformist leaders.

It has suited the Bulletin Group at the time and since the split to suggest that they played the key role in the struggle: they even persuaded some early WSL members that this was the case-and on this basis organised to wreck WSL branches in Reading and Swindon.

But the reality was very different: the political differences between the founders of the WSL and the Bulletin Group/OCI were sharp from the very outset.

As the WRP well knows from its collection of stolen documents, the very first WSL Internal Bulletin-published only weeks after the WSL was founded-contained a scathing attack on the politics of the OCI written during the split itself by John Lister.

And indeed Newsline itself unblushingly carries a quotation from Tim Horrocks, a Bulletin Group supporter who split from the WSL.

Complaint

In the quote he denounced the WSL leadership for refuşing to collaborate with the OCI, and complains that WSL leaders regarded the level of agreement with tho ArT no d anande of WIll lt Ult do a cuupio vi positions in a thousand"! The facts speak for themselves: the supporters of the Bulletin Group/OCI line of liquidationist "deep entry" into the Labour Party were politically fought within the WSL: a lengthy critique of their positions was written by John Lister and Tony Richardson.

Sooner than argue their positions openly, the OCI supporters walked out of the movement. Everyone of the positions of the Bulleti Group quoted

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FBI Sir: is subversire 7 Prof. Jones

& WHITE UNITE& FIGHT FORCE LABOUR