A word to the wise

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Hansen's leadership SWP exposed FBI provocations a Friend, yi records" Blue 0195 HERBLOCK UNDERCOVER WORK tion.

No figures fact less than half of the 200 expelled members came together to form the WSL. They were subsequently joined by a few former SLL/WRP members who had left the movement prior to the split.

The SL has of course never published k any membership figures, let alone falsified ones. Suffice it to say that the Newsline "investigators" fall far short of the mark with their fanciful guess that we have only 70 members.

Conclusion drew from these. formally place! correct criticisms a liquidationParty-the points raised could ours! not be brushed aside.

Lenin and Trotsky.

As the two documents were in the Newsline series and falsely linked to the politics of the WSL is taken from the On these questions, there5) A consistent thread to liquidate into.

In the fevered and paranoid

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WRP chosen ally: Iraqi dictators Bakr and Hussein various categories of provocateurs, spies and agents, to go so far as to hold a political discussion with an opposing political tendency is obviously tantamount to a "capitulation" and, more than likely, -a manoeuvre against the WRP!

Thus every exchange and discussion that the WSL has engaged in is regarded as a "negotiation" or an "intrigue" to be catalogued in a list of allegations.

•Thornett has been involved with the French OCI group, the Chartists, Hansen's SWP in the United States, the Pabloite IMG, the Moreno (Bolshevik) faction of the IMG and small groups of Labour 'entrists'...

"Sometimes he has held talks with two and three groups set toe tams behind the aer one's back. In every single case, the membership have been kept in the dark."

But as every WSL member knows, the Newsline's list of groups with whom we have discussed is incomplete. We have and continue to, , meet far more groups both in Britain and internationally.

As a movement that fights seriously and consistently for the reconstruction • of the Trotskyist Fourth International we regard it as our duty to seek to maximise political debate and discussion with other organisations within the world Trotskyist movement.

There can be no progress in this fight unless steps are taken to clarify what differences exist: whether they involve tactical or principled questions; and whether there is sufficient common ground to make further discussion productive.

The WRP approach is, of course, the cavalier one of simply branding every rival organisation as "spies" ОГ "provocateurs".

The WSL has fought since its formation for a more serious political attitude to the struggle for Trotskyism in Britain and internationally.

In every major instance of discussions between us and other organisations documentary material has been circulated in our Internal Bulletin and reports made to national aggregates.

One prime example of thisof which the WRP obviously remains blissfully ignorant-was the decision of the WSL to send an observer to a conference of Moreno's Bolshevik Faction in Bogota, Columbia in 1978.

The visit was prefaced and followed by extensive documentary material to WSL members WRP chosen ally: Gaddafi attempting a full political assessment of the BF and the forces it represents.

But since the bulk of the WRP's material came from files stolen in December 1977, the Newsline investigators know nothing of this trip or the subsequent discussions in the WSL.

Indeed they offer nothing but hearsay and gossip based on wildly inaccurate information from 1977 onwards.

We would contrast our position on discussions with other groups with the conspiratorial nature of international work within the WRP.

What do WRP members really know for instance of the political liaison between the Healy leadership and the anticommunist Iraqi and Libyan dictatorships?

Has the membership a clear picture of the links between the WRP and the PLO leadership? Were members consulted over these links-or did they only subsequently discover them through the pages of Newsline?

Of course the Newsline series is designed precisely to protect the WRP leadership from criticism on such matters-and hence skirts round the WRP's own shady practice.

Yet what is clearly designed to be the showpiece in Newsline's allegations of WSL fusionmongering-the claim that we "capitulated" to the IMGproves to be an unmitigated failure.

Since the alleged events were only last vear. the WRP leaders cannot even utilise their hoard of stolen documents, ana are forced to fabricate their story from snippets of gossip. As a result they falsely claim that last summer the WSL:

66* •.. agreed to 'submerge political differences with the IMG (and the SWP also) [!] in the Cowley factory and to work together with them.

* • . agreed to withdraw from all public discussion the WSI. Ancument on revisionism [!] entitled "The Poisoned Well'.

• . agreed to suspend criticism of the Pabloites in Socialist Press for the open-ended duration of the talks.

In reality there are no IMG members in the Cowley factory; the Poisoned Well was republished and widely sold throughout 1979 and circulated to IMG members; and Socialist Press in the 17 weeks between July and November 1979 carriad no less than 13 centrespread articles slamming the political positions of the IMG and the USFI!

Such facts of course make no impact on the Newsline's hard-headed "investigators".

6) But the most sinister and grotesque line peddled in the Newsline series" is that. which attempts to reinforce and extend the WRP's five year slander campaign against Joseph Hansen to embrace the WSL.

The object of this is to buttress the sagging anti-Hansen campaign and foster the notion that the WSL is a hardened grouping of police provocateurs.

We have as a movement consistently rejected the assertions in Newsline and Workers Press that Healy's "investigations" had "proven' Hansen to be an FBI/GPU double agent.

We have also opposed attempts from this spurious premise to extend the scope of the WRP's police allegations to Hansen's wide circle of contacts and supporters-with all of whom, needless to say, the WSL has profound political disagreements.

Now the Newsline series has furnished further proof that the Healy "investigators" will not shrink in the least from inventing completely fictitious "evidence" to support their foul allegations against their political opponents.

Their whole attempt to link up the WSL with Hansen revolves around a secret meeting in London in December 1974, in which, according to Newsline:

"Hansen and his two accomplices Jack Barnes and Mary Alice Waters held private talks with Blick, Jenkins and Mrs Betty Hamilton of the OCI, and Thornett and Richardson.

They planned Thornett's 'coming out' and ways to maximise the damage to the WRP Not only was the London meeting kept secret from the WSL and does not even rate a mention in the Battle for Trotskyism', but the American delegation did not even inform their own fraternal organisation in Britain, Tariq Ali's IMG."

(emphasis added)

There is of course a good reason why nobody was told of this meeting. NEVER HAPPENED! It is a complete fabrication of the WRP's school of spy fiction writers.

It is of course possible that Hansen met Blick, Jenkins, Hamiton and any number of others: but there was no meeting between him and WSL leaders (who in any event had all been expelled from the WRP by December 4 1974, and were thus in no position to "come out" with any positions within the Party-with or without Hansen's assistance!)

The Newsline, however, easily straddles this embarassing inconsistency-blandly admitting in the very next column that:

"Hansen flew into London in the days immediately following the expulsion of those belonging to Thornett's antiparty group".

Some planning! What kind of masterspy would arrive to hatch his boldestever plot against Healy only after his potential agents' had been booted out?

But as the whole series shows, WRP "investigators" are troubled neither by facts nor by logic.

The link with Hansen was an essential component of their case: so a link needed to be created.

This is not the first WRP attempt to fabricate a link between WSL leaders and Hansen. Last year, Newsline went so far as to accuse Socialist Press editor John Lister of working with Hansen and "therefore" being an "Attorney of the FBI"!

The WRP's case had only one snag: Lister was not only not connected to the FBI, but had never so much as met, spoken with or received communication from Hansen in any shape or form!

Unruffled, the WRP'S "theoretical" journal Labour Review pronounced that one of the Party's outstanding achievements in the preceding five years had been to:

"expose the late J. Hansen, a close collaborator of John Lister (!] as an FBI agent."

[Vol. 11, No. 12, p.7191 With this kind of cavalier disregard for objective reality the WRP's mountain of investigations are exposed for what they are: a brazen frame-up of Healy's political opponents.

The frame-up is a no-holdsbarred affair. Over and above the fake link with Hansen, every possible form of innuendo, every available scrap of stolen material is thrown into the Newsline narrative to create the impression that the WSL is a police conspiracy.

The reader is told that the "Blick-Jenkins" group's tactics were "the most cynical type of provocation worthy of Scotland Yard itself"; the WRP's opponents are bracketed together as "agent-led groups"; and a stolen letter to Thornett from the Police College asking him to participate in a training film-which Thornett obviously refused-is paraded to "prove" that "the police considered that Thornett was ripe for such an open approach" ; that "The invitation reflects a highly conscious appraisal of Thornett and his group by the top theorists of the police force" , and that "If Thornett and (Tariq) Ali ever do consumate a merger they can supply the police force with regular speaking engagements."

But the sheer ignorance and Tariq Ali malevolence of the WRP "investigation" reach their high point in the final instalment, which revolves around a resolution which Newsline states was "passed by a WSL aggregate in October 1979".

The Newsline hacks complain that:

"This one-and-a-half page resolution has never been published in the Thornett press or anywhere else by the WSL."

What sinister reason is there for test Simply the Wipe Lilt a scab current in the workers' movement" though tabled for discussion, has never been put to the vote by the WSL. It is therefore not WSL policy!

In fact the WSL Fourth Annual Conference last month, after some controversy, explicitly rejected its conclusion, and adopted the contentious position that:

•While recognising the downward trend of the WRP, we still maintain that they remain inside the world Trotskyist movement. Their bankrupt maximalist demands and opportunist deviations are part of the crisis of the fragmented Fourth Internationalof which we are a part."

Political assessment Sooner than examine or challenge the political assessments of the WRP's positions contained in the 1½ page resolution, however -which show clearly why it is now a matter of debate whether or not the WRP can be regarded as in any sense a Trotskyist party-the WRP proceeds to falsify it, and draw dark conclusions as to its motives.

Page y Healy "Is the resolution designed to prepare WSL members for violence against WRP leaders and members? Is the Thornett group getting in first before the foul deeds are done by saying that the WRP is 'outside the workers' movement' ...!

"This is clearly where the police military conspirators would like to quarantine the WRP so they can carry out a policy of provocations and assassinations.' But worse! Perhaps the WSL was not acting alone: perhaps inıs was anotner move to gang up. with Hansen's "network" against the WRP?

«Thornett and Lister wanted to arrive with their secret resolution branding the WRP as 'outside the bounds of Trotskyism' and the workers movement and therefore make our party 'fair game' for every kind of physical "the suppressed resolution is destined for use as ammunition by the capitalist state.

"They were like hit-men with a contract in their back pocket looking for a sponsor."

This final absurd charge rings with particular irony at a time when the best known "hit men" around are • Libyan gunmen implementing the public threat of the WRP's chosen ally Colonel Gaddafi to physically eliminate his political opponents!

But behind the paranoia and hysteria; behind the fanciful schemas and barrage of hollow invective, the real danger is that the WRP leaders are attempting to stave off the growing crisis in their own movement by whipping up a wholly irrational frenzy of hatred in which every other left group and in particular the WSL is regarded as no more than a bunch of police agents.

The frantic barrage of mudslinging in the Newsline is not written to convince any objective reader: it is a desperate attempt to wall off WRP members and supporters from the principled political challenge to Healy's politics posed by the Workers Socialist League.

We can rest assured that Newsline's minute circulation will not reach substantial layers of serious workers. But we will not simply allow such slanders and lies against our movement to go unchallenged.

We call on those WRP members who have not completely surrendered their capacity independent political thought to examine the record and practice of their leadership, and to make a break towards the Trotskyist politics of the Workers Socialist League.

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ODUSTRIAL REDTS The doomed Corby steelworks