Wrp 'principles'

Scan page 3

Since the mass expulsions from the WRP of those sections which now comprise the Workers Socialist League, the departure of the WRP leadership from basic class principle has been spectacular. When 22 expelled members lobbied the WRP Annual Conference on December 15th last year, to hand out documents, Healy called the police. Recently Healy has been systematically identifying our members in Workers Press. The letters reprinted below were sent to Healy on 28th December 1974 and April 8th 1975. We have received no reply. This week, after receipt of our letter, Healy printed a photograph of yet another of our members in Workers Press whom he knew at the time was being harassed by the immigration authorities. We therefore publish this correspondence to the labour movement.

28th December 1974 Dear Comrade Healy, We write to you as the Executive Committee of the Workers Socialist League, which was provisionally constituted on Sunday December 22nd, 1974. Our movement, which will maintain an ongoing critique of the wrong perspectives of the leadership of the Workers Revolutionary Party part of the fight for the continuation of Trotskyism in Britain and internationally, will of course fight on its own perspectives in the workers movement. The foundation of our movement was entirely precipitated by your bureaucratic response to the political questions advanced for discussion by Comrade Thornett, culminating to the mass expulsion, prior to the Conference, of everyone who in any way supported his position. It was at all times our wish that these issues should have been fought out in a principled way, within the raks of the Workers Revolutionary Party, and under its constitution. This you were determined to avoid.

Some of the expulsions were carried out by an (unconstitutional) sub-committee of the Political Committee, and still more by correspondence with no hearing being afforded at all. As a result, a number ol us, some still in the WRP. found it necessary. because of the suppression of views and the distortions presented serenate and to distribute London Area Aggregate, and Alan Thornett's Second Document (which you had agreed to distribute and then suppressed) at the First Annual Conference of the WRP.

We arrived at the Conference at Battersea Town Hall) just after 9.00 pm with the intention of handing out our literature. On arrival, we found that a large number of police, including dog vans, special branch and police women were already deployed around the building, with others held in reserve close by. We estimate the number of police involved to be close on 1 hundred. It was clear from the approaches the police attempted to make to us that not only had they been called in by the Workers Revolutionary Party leadership, but had been told that it was our intention to instigate considerable violence. As a resmit of this our comrades who wanted to exercise the normal right to distribute literature at a Conference, were harassed continuously by this large force of police. In audition your action exposed WRP mem bers in the Conference nad the WRP an an organisation, to the surveillance and penetration by the police.

Politically of course your action is unprecedented. We had the incredible spectacle of the 1st Annual Conference of the WRP being held under the protecton of the State, or more precisely the use by the leadership of the Workers Revolutionary Party of the forces of the state in a factional conflict with a group of members and expelled members wishing to express the views for which they had been denied expressior within the party.

We therefore wish to register the strongest poss ible protest against your actions, whicht are so completely contrary to Communist principles. We think you are obliged to give a political explanation of your actions, and we call upon you to print this letter, together with your reply, in Workers Press.

Yours fraternally.

Executive 8th April, 1975 Dear Comrade Healy, On the gates of the BLMC Cowley Assembly Plant this morning the Economic League distributing leatlets adverrasins a cossien militant workers in the industry, giving their politica afflations (with an address to send for postal copies). This dossier is published in order that those workers identified in it can be witch-hunted or blacklisted by employers are supplied with copies.

wonder Atter reading today's Workers Press, however, we distribute information regarding members of the SL. It seems the employers are being supplied with all they need through the medium of the Workers Press, which has engaged in a systematic identification of our members. We are not here talking about wellnown members, but militant workers in factories, nd comrades in jobs where direct victimisation is a constant factor.

In your centre page article "Thornett's Philosopher" in today's Workers Press for example, you publish photographs of BLM workers and identity them as WS members. You are well aware that this opens these workers to victimisation, You know the individual workers concerned, the fight they are in with the employer and their vulnerability to victimisations. You also know from our past joint experiences that the BLM management scrutinises the Workers Press daily for such information. It is clear ou have not forgotten this by the care you take correctly) to avoid the unnecessary identification of your own members.

We are happy that Cde Slaughter defends your in reply to There is much yet to be said about the philosophical and we expect you to reply. But when in doing so you expose our members to victimisation by the employersthat is something quite different.

You did this knowing full well that the comrade concerned not only works for a notoriously ruthless employer, but that he was recently sacked and politically witch-hunted. and although successiully defended he stands constantly close to victimisation.

Let us take another example. In the last of your three recent articles on Thornett's Expulsion' you published a photograph and named one of our comrades, even revealing the position he had previously held in the WRP.

We consider the protection of any militant worker or a member of any political tendency in the labour movement against the employer to be a principle. The Workers Scoialist League will stand by the principle under all circumstances.

We therefore demand that you politically explain the incidents detailed in this letter, and that you give us a firm assurance - publicly or privately - that you will in future act in a principled manner.

Yours fraternally Executive (