Mail Ool for Slander

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The investigations for this series go back many months to the appeal by Ted Heslin, an Oxford supporter of Socialist Press and leading Labour Party member to the Labour Party NEC against his expulsion by the local CLP.

The Mail covered the lengthy appeal process with headlines like "Victory to Red Ted" and "Labour Lets in the Reds""

Labour Party members lobbying the NEC were photographed and the Mail named them, together with positions that they allegedly held in the WSL.

More recently a Mail freelance photographer turned up on a picket line outside Adwest Engineering in Reading to photograph WS supporters (many of them in the same union as the Reading strikers) and to write a witch-hunting piece alleging, once again without a scrap of proof, WSL "links" with the PLO and the IRA.

But it has been in the last fortnight that the investigation has become most intense. Porter, together with Harry Longmuir have been based at Oxford's plush Randolph Hotel, carrying out a money-no-object, in-depth investigation into the WSL.

Members and supporters have been harassed on the phone and at their front doors; a doctor was followed by a photographer on his afternoon round of patients and a woman was followed through the streets of Oxford for an hour by Porter and Longmuir trying to locate a militant from BL's Cowley factory.

The first article in promises to be a lengthy appeared in Monday's Mail.

On the front page the Mail led on the fact that the WL is to hold a summer school next week for members and supporters which will be attended by international organisations, some of which are affiliated to the Trotskyist International Liaison Committee.

Described as a "school for subversion", the Mail ignores the agenda of the conference which has been published in Socialist Press every week for the last couple of months and which clearly demonstrates that the school is about the fight to win mass support for the policies of the small forces of Trotsk yism.

Instead, the Mail tries to develop the theme of the WL's supposed links with terrorism by pointing out that "some (delegates) face arrest in their home countries and others are actively involved in armed struggles".

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