Healy Enlists P Against Hans

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leadership of the workers kevolunonary rary t--L9 Deuter have been forced into the most contorted and unprincipled positions in their relationship with the capitalist press during the last week. In a matter of days they veered from one extreme to the other.

On Sunday 15th August they received coverage in the sunday Times. A short, completely uncritical article in the 'Atticus' column gave much-wanted publicity tc WRP leader Gerry Healy's campaign to frame up Joseph Hansen (a leader of the US Socialist Workers party as an "accomplice" of the GPU at the time of the murder of Leon Trotsky.

This useful advertisement of the WRP's rally that evening was not challenged in any way by their paper, the Newsline, even though the Sunday Times article was written in such a way as to suggest that Hansen actually murdered Trotsky, and gave no clue as to his present political work.

Instead the wr • were busily calling a post-rally news conference - to which only the capitalist press was invited - not a single workers' paper was informed it was even taking place!

At this news conference, Healy, together with resuscitated exTrotskyists Harold Robins and George Vereeken, repeated the call previously made only within the confines of the WRP's own movement and press - for an 'international enquiry" into the circumstances surrounding the murder of Trotsky by Stalin's agent in 1940.

Rather than campaign within the working class movement they choose to enlist the Tory gutter press to spread their slanderous accusations.

There is no doubt either that they knew by Monday that their accusations were baseless. Hansen's full reply, published in the latest Intercontinental Press gives irrefutable evidence that, whatever may be said for the internal security of the SWP itself, the allegations made by the WRP are without foundation.

By Thursday, however, the WR were confronted by the reai lace of the allies whose help they had enlisted against Hansen.

A centre-page witch-hunting spread giving a detailed account of a week at the WRP cadre school in Derbyshire appeared in the Daily Mail and exposed the flimsy "security" within the WRP itself.

The reporter pointed out that she had simply filled in the form and applied for a week's tuition at the school - and had been able to stroll around and see, a delegation of German youth along with WRP members!

The almost farcical zig-zags and sectarian antics of Healy and the WRP leadership clearly have nothing to do with a real concern for "security"

They centre on the need to hold together a degenerating, bankrupt party which long ago gave up any serious fight for leadership in the working class.

*A full article on the Hansen case will appear in the next issue of Socialist Press.

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SOCIALIST PRESS. Wednesde, 35th 155487 1976 that demands the participation of the people themselves in driving the British out of Ireland has created the conditions that allow 10,000 people to attend the Peace march in Belfast and direct their anger not at the real cause of the violence - the British occupation of Ireland - but at the Republicans who, for all their wrong policies, are actually fighting against imperialist aggression.

Republicans who harrassed the march and denounced the marchers as "Brit lovers" were obviously correct as far as the leaders and would-be leaders are concerned. That is indeed the objective pro imperialist logic of such a movement.

IMPASSE

But for the mass of the marchers no pro-British sentiments were felt or expressed. The Irish Times quoted a marcher that expressed the impasse to which Provisional policy has led their nationalist supporters, Describing himself as a life-long