Taking over from Economic League
Socialist Press1981 1981-02-18Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 7 →
Read from the scan by machine and not corrected: expect misread words, and now and then a caption or a line from a neighbouring story. For anything you quote, read the scan.
Scan page 7
Gerry Healy's Workers Revolutionary Party seems to have taken over the job of the Economic League in witch-hunting militants in factories.
In a 'money no object' exercise last week Healy sent a busload of leafleters from London to the Cowley Assembly Plant in Oxford to flood the plant with a disgraceful personal attack on Alan Thornettdeputy TGWU convenor of the plant.
The lavishly produced four page, two colour broadsheet carried: a banner headline"Thornett-What Every Cowley Worker Should Know"
Thornett is accused in hysterical language of being a "scab" "crossing a picket line", , "viol ence" and "thuggery" , and of being a police agent.
It is 5,000 words of personal invective, containing barely one coherent political point.
The distribution of such a document outside a factory should be condemned throughout the labour movement.
It purports to "answer" a WSL leaflet which Healy claims was distributed outside the Cowley plants. He knows this is not true.
The leaflet to which Healy refers was distributed at the WRP's Rally in London last month-condemning the WRP's support for rate increases in Lambeth.
It is true an advance copy was given to the WRP's only member in the Cowley plantCC member Tom White-since he defends the WRP position in Lambeth and is refusing to support a rent and rates strike on his own estate in Oxford.
The WS would not polemicise with another group by denouncing them in factory gate leaflets or by personal attacks and smear campaigns.
We will take other groups up politically in our paper and at appropriate political meetings and rallies.
The only beneficiaries from Healy's slanders are the right wing and the management.
The left and the militants in the plant are outraged by the leaflet-any remaining credibility the WRP may have had has been destroyed.
Healy, clearly, is not out to build but to destroy. His answer to serious political criticism is a witch-hunt.
His answer. to his inabilit to develop anything in Cowley since the mass expulsions from the WRP in 1974 is to try to poison the plant against revolutionary politics to stop anyone building a Marxist leadership.
Healy's hysterical and paranoid sect now plays an entirely negative role in the. class It is a stain on the banner of Trotskyism.