[REVIEW OF 1ST EDITION by John Lister. A…]

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REVIEW OF 1ST EDITION by John Lister.

A clear retreat from principled politics in order to create the illusion of a massbased organisation. This is the only way to describe the new daily paper of the Workers Revolutionary Party, "The News Line'.

In dropping all evidence of socialist politics from title and masthead, and putting on a mask of popular journalism, the diehard sectarians in the leadership of the WRP seek to conceal the continued political liquidation of their movement.

They turn their backs on the principled fight waged in the mid1960s by the Socialist Labour League (forerunner of the WRP) against the Stalinists' renaming of the Daily Worker as the Morning Star. At that time they correctly labelled the change of name as a turn to the middle class. What judgement then are workers to make today of the neutral-titled NewsLine?

Sporting a large front-page photograph of "Doc's Red Army" of Manchester football supporters and dressed up like a cross between Leyland Mirror and Socialist Worker the first edition appeared on May Day.

Despite WRP claims that it follows is "impeccable tradition" the NewsLine is in no way a return to the days of Workers Press, the daily paper which they wound up in February of this year.

Workers Press was built in five years of struggle by the youth and working class cadre of the Socialist Labour League. It was launched as the world's first Trotskyist daily paper in 1969.

It was integrally linked with the SLU's struggles in the trade unions and was founded on a solid base of support within advanced layers of the working class.

it was the Healy leadership's growing inability to train and develop this basic layer of supporters or expand and renew the national leadership of the SLI/ WRP itself which led the party increasingly towards propagandism and sectarianism.

And after the election of the minority Labour government in February 1974 this degeneration turned into a rout of sterile mass "recruitment" campaigns which Equidated the experienced cadre of the party. and at the same time exposed a bankruptcy of programme and perspective which led to the political crisis in the autumn of that TI.

The Healy leadership, unable to toterate the emergence of a political opposition or the possibility of discussion within the WRP, moved i December 1974 to bureaucraticaly expel over 200 members mcluding the entire proletarian adre in the Cowley car factories zou the sorking class base in the Siestern area. 'ary and current Secretary M. Banda After these expulsions the rake's progress continued to lay waste the ranks of the WRP, leaving only the middle class layers of journalists, actors, intellectuals and professional workers to carry on the direction of the work of the movement on the sidelines of the working class. This led to the collapse of Workers Press.

COMMENTATORS

From its role in the 1960s and early 1970s as the sole organised challenge to the leadership of the Stalinists and right-wing, the WRP has degenerated into a sect of commentators on the class struggle, sheltering behind a maximum programme of ultimatistic demands.

The "popular" format of their new daily paper tends to exclude those demands from the news articles, which thus take on the character of left-radical journalism.

But a look at the WRP May Day Manifesto in its centre pages shows clearly the political depths the WRP has reached. It begins with a demand not on the leadership of the working class - but on the working class itself!

"On this historic May Day...the Central Committee of the Workers Revolutionary Party…..calls on the British working class to defend its basic democratic rights and demonstrate its solidarity with the world wide struggle against imperialism, social democracy and Stalinism by forcing the Labour government to resign"

AVENUE Of course it offers no avenue for the working class reader to carry out such a command - and no perspective for what should follow the forced resignation of the government. This is quite consistent for the WRP leaders who put such demands for show, not for action.

The question of whether revolutionaries should launch a popular daily press is not one of principle but one of tactics. We are not opposed to such a step as such.

But today's attempts by the WRP to substitute a low-protie "mass" approach for the necessary qualitative building of a revolutionary cadre, shows that today's continuator of the best traditions of Workers Press is not The NewsLine but the WSL's paper, Socialist Press.

*A fuller account of the degeneration of the WRP and the political opposition to that degeneration can be read in The Battle for Trotskyism advertised elsewhere in this paper.

LETTERS We welcome letters from readers. Letters for publication should be kept as brief as possible. Send to the editor, 31, Dartmouth Park Hill, NW5 IHR