Gaddafi's Asylum for

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A personal view of the latest 'New Wave' of The Workers Revolutionary Party has created new suspicions as to its relationship with the viciously anticommunist dictatorship of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi of Libya.

The September 14 edition of the WRP's daily paper News Line carried, sandwiched next to ten columns of a speech by Gaddafi, a frenzied attack on the Workers Socialist League.

In particular, News Line attempted to refute an article from Socialist Press 68 in which we highlighted the reactionary nature of the Gaddafi regime and the grovelling support extended to it by the WRP leadership in their press.

We had also shown how this current position of the WRP stood in stark contradiction to earlier, correct assessments made by the same leaders in 1969, and to Trotsky's theory of Permanent DISTORTED The News Line reply felt unable to confront the real points being made and set out instead to distort our argument, accusing the WSt. ot letting Egyptian leader Sadat "off the hook" by our critique of the Gaddafi regime.

Of course the WSL extended no support for Sadat. Not would we extend support to Gaddafi in a war between these two reactionary bourgeois regimes.

Our policy does not start from searching, in the Stalinist manner, for "progressive" sections of the bourgeoisie to give our support to, but from the necessity for the Maudling complete political independence of the working class.

While of course we have not failed to give critical support even to bourgeois leaderships of colonial countries when forced into struggle against imperialism, we have always started from the need for the working class to organise independently within such struggles.

THROWN OVERBOARD The WRP have clearly thrown overboard this cardinal principle of Trotskyism. They make this crystal clear when they assert that:

"If Gaddafi is a 'dictator' he is the first in history to announce the arming of the people with light and heavy weapons."

The WRP are silent question of what independent working class organisations exist in Libya.

They fail therefore to inform us how this limited distribution of weapons to the population clearly under the control of the Libyan state and armed forces, is any more "revolutionary" than the armed Home Guard established in Britain during World War Il.

'SECULAR'

Perhaps more incongruously, the WRP claim that Gaddafi supports the PLO call for a democratic, secular state of Palestine is thrown into doubt by the first five words of Gaddafi's speech on the same 'In the name of God [!] it gives me pleasure first to salute the guests, brothers and friends who have come from all over the world to take part with us in the great popular celebrations which are held today to mark the eighth anniversary of the great First of September DELEGATION These international visitors included an official delegation from the WRP.

But it has proved impossible to confirm whether the WRP delegation was present at the grand British beer-up held on September again to commemorate eight years of Gaddafi's rule.

Certainly the WRP leadership might have felt somewhat uncomfortable at this function, organised in a plush West End hotel on an unlimited budget by the Libyan ambassador.

While champagne at £20 a bottle and the range of expensive French wines and liqueurs would no doubt have gone down easily, it is possible that even the new WRP "principles" might balk at rubbing shoulders with some of the 1,250 guests.

Prominent MPs, High Commissioners and 40 ambassadors flooded pop music, by IAN BURNS.

HN to celebrate the Libyan rev ion, sitting at 100 tables in a bi om banked with flowers.

COALITION MINISTERS Possible conversation partners for any WRP delegation would have included leading members of the Lib-Lab coalition governmentwage cutting Employment Secretary Albert Booth; Social Service destroyer David Ennals; and the man currently in charge of Britain's army of occupation in IrelandRoy Mason.

Of course it was not all Labourites. There were other "revolutionaries" present, unable to resist the lure of unlimited food and drink and overjoyed at the prospect of celebrating the eighth anniversary of Gaddafi's coup.

Perhaps the most famous of these 'revolutionaries' were Lord Longford and financier Sir James Goldsmith, though no such celebration would be complete without the congenial figure of that noted Marxist, Reginald Maudling.

Such a party certainly places a question mark over Gaddafi's statement, quoted straight-faced by News Line, that the Libyan regime is henceforth "a political asylum for revolutionaries from all over the world"

LONG DISTANCE

Socialist Press has been unable to confirm whether or not a WRF delegation was present at thi feast. But if no delegation was sent then the obvious question is wn: the WRP chose to travel thousand: of miles to Tripoli to participate ir an identical event, but not to take i taxi a few miles to the West End?

Is class collaboration only acceptable to the WRP at long distance?

Again we repeat our demand that the WRP account to the international workers movement for their brazen violation of Trotskyist 'principles and their cringing subservience to the reactionary Gaddali regime.