The Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) is a Trotskyist political party in Britain.
The group was originally a faction of Revolutionary Communist Party led by Gerry Healy, before splitting off in 1947 to form The Club. The Club existed until 1959 when it became the Socialist Labour League.
The Socialist Labour League would become a political party in 1973, renaming itself to the Workers Revolutionary Party.
In 1985, allegations of sexual assault against Gerry Healy led to the WRP splitting into several smaller groups, one of which retains possession of the name.
History The Club (1948-1959) In 1948, a minority faction led by Gerry Healy split from the Revolutionary Communist Party to form The Club, which then joined the Labour Party.
Healy called for a massive educational effort within the organisation, which angered the old leadership. Though he met with opposition, Healy valued having a well-educated cadre over a large number of mindless followers. Healy set to work purging the group of real and imagined opponents with the result that within months the organisation was a fraction of its former size, but Healy's leadership was unchallenged.
The Club joined with Labour left-wingers to organise The Socialist Fellowship as a vehicle for left-wing Labour Party members and launched the Socialist Outlook. In 1950, Ted Grant and his supporters were expelled from The Club, forming their own marxist tendency. Tony Cliff and his supporters were also expelled from the group during this time, due to Cliff's position of remaining neutral in the Korean War, forming the Socialist Review Group.
A split emerged within The Club in September 1953, relating to the Fourth International. While Healy was associated with the US SWP and the ICFI, John Lawrence supported the ISFI and controlled both Socialist Outlook and its print shop. Healy wrested control of both, and his supporters held a majority on the organisation's national committee.
The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) recognised The Club as its official British section. The Club was one of the ICFI's larger segments. After the American, Austrian, Chinese, Latin American and Swiss parties of the ICFI agreed to reunification with the FI in 1963 (forming the reunified Fourth International), The Club controlled the ICFI until its fragmentation in 1985.
The group gained recruits from among former members of the Communist Party of Great Britain. One of their recruits from the CPGB was Peter Fryer, who had been the Daily Worker's correspondent in Budapest during the suppression of the uprising by Soviet troops, and who edited The Newsletter, a weekly which began publication in May 1958. This paper published some of Trotsky's then hard-to-find books. Among other recruits at this time were Cliff Slaughter and Brian Pearce. Coupled with pressure from a group around industrial activist Brian Behan led to the formation of the Socialist Labour League.
The Club had hoped to become the leaders of the Labour Left, however their position on the Korean War lost them all support in Parliament and led to the Socialist Fellowship being banned by the Labour National Executive Committee in 1951.
Socialist Labour League (1959-1973) In 1959, the Club became the Socialist Labour League. For the first time, the Socialist Labour League was openly Trotskyist, although most of its members remained active in the Labour Party. In 1959, the at the end of February 1959, Membership was "open to all who want to see the vigorous prosecution of the class struggle and the achievement of working class power".
The group's Newsletter, and the SLL itself, were proscribed by the Labour Party in late March 1959, which meant that anyone associated with Healy's group became ineligible for membership of the Labour Party. Morgan Phillips, then general secretary of the Labour Party, addressed the issue of SLL entryism. "The principal group is so well disciplined and financed that it is slowly emerging as a serious nuisance to the democratic Socialism which it outwardly accepts and covertly derides", he wrote in an April 1959 letter to the secretaries of Constituency Labour Parties and affiliated trade unions. By August, 23 people associated with the SLL in the Norwood Constituency Labour Party and eight councilors in Leeds, among others, had been expelled by Labour. As a result of the activities of the SLL activists in Norwood, the local Labour Party branch was re-organised later in the year. Meanwhile, J.R. Campbell, by then the former editor of the Daily Worker, wrote in the Communist weekly World News in October 1959 that the SLL was an "anti-Soviet league" and "a disruptive, Trotskyist organisation", who were in favour of the overthrow of the Soviet government by an unaffiliated working class inside and outside the Soviet Union.
During this period, the SLL did experience considerable internal tensions. Fryer left in 1959 and in 1960 a group of members split away to form Solidarity, which became a theoretically influential, industrially oriented organization strongly influenced by the ideas of Paul Cardan. Brian Behan also severed his involvement with the group after a confrontation with Gerry Healy.
The SLL remained active in the Labour Party's youth organization, the Young Socialists, and gained control of it until the YS was wound up in 1964. The SLL used the YS as their own youth section. It was run through the "centre" in Clapham, the SLL's HQ, in a doctrinaire and almost militaristic fashion. The Annual Conferences of the YS were stage managed by the Healyites. The Labour Party renamed the youth section the "Labour Party Young Socialists" (LPYS).
The SLL leadership claimed in 1963 that they had identified a revolutionary situation in Britain. In their view this meant the most important activity was building the party. They started a daily paper, Workers Press, in the early 1970s and increased the turnover of membership, and began to fear police infiltration. Internal and external dissidents were dealt with harshly. One incident saw Ernie Tate, a Canadian Trotskyist, attacked in public while distributing anti-Healy leaflets. The advocacy of an increasing state of crisis would become a prominent part of their public profile.
In 1968, the SLL formed the All-Trade Unions Alliance. Among its policies was the immediate replacement of the police by a workers militia.Paul Keel, "The vicarious road to revolution", The Guardian, 11 February 1980 The party slowly lost members from the mid-1970s as demands on members to serve the organisation took their toll, although by now Corin and Vanessa Redgrave had joined.
In order to "kill the bill" which became the Industrial Relations Act 1971, the SLL called for a general strike to force the government of Edward Heath to call a general election. While a SLL-organised meeting at the Alexandra Palace, London in February 1971 had an attendance of 4,000, the SLL and the other Trotskyist groups had a very limited industrial presence incapable of organising such a level of protest, according to a contemporary report by Paul Routledge in The Times.
Workers Revolutionary Party 1973- In 1973, the SLL became a political party, renaming itself to the Workers Revolutionary Party.
A major split occurred when Alan Thornett was expelled, and went on to found the Workers Socialist League.Alan Smith, "Revolutionaries are breaking into a trot", The Guardian, 3 March 1975 In 1979, a smaller group split from the WRP to found the Workers Party.
In 1975, Corin Redgrave bought the White Meadows Villa in Parwich, Derbyshire, and the WRP used the house as a venue for training, under the name 'Red House', run by television director Roy Battersby.Colin Smith and Robert Chesshyre, "Vanessa and the Red House Mystery", The Observer, 28 September 1975 The Observer printed a report alleging that actress Irene Gorst was interrogated while at the school and prevented from leaving. The group sued Observer editor David Astor over the report, in a case marked by discussion of an armed police raid of the building in which bullets were found."Secret report on Redgrave party revealed", The Guardian, 31 October 1978 The jury found that not all words in the article were substantially true, but that the complainants' reputations had not been materially injured."Observer stresses its victory over Vanessa", The Guardian, 13 November 1978
In 1976, the WRP launched an inquiry into the details of Trotsky's death, following claims from Joseph Hansen that Harold Robins, a founding member of the American Socialist Workers Party might have been a Soviet agent.Martin Walker, "The revolutionaries devour their own", The Guardian, 17 August 1976 The eventual report exonerated Robins and claimed that Ramón Mercader was alive in Czechoslovakia.David Pallister, "Trotsky's death ripples down the years", The Guardian, 7 March 1977 In 1979, the group purchased Trotsky's death mask to use as an iconic focus for events."Death mask", The Guardian, 31 October 1979
The WRP met with Libyan officials in 1977 and issued a joint statement, opposing Zionism, U.S. imperialism and Anwar Sadat. There were immediate suggestions that this statement might be linked to Libyan funding for the party's newspaper, News Line.Peter Hillmore, "Diary", The Guardian, 16 August 1977 Close links continued, with party members regularly speaking at official events in Libya.Martin Walker, "High spirits remain on the Tripoli-Gatwick run", The Guardian, 5 September 1981 In 1981, The Sunday Telegraph alleged that News Line was financed by money from Muammar al-Gaddafi's government, which the WRP denied.David Pallister, "£50,000 for facts on foreign gold", The Guardian, 17 September 1981
On 20 March 1983, The Money Programme made similar claims and claimed that the WRP had received £1.5 million from the Gaddafi government. Sean Matgamna wrote in the Socialist Organiser newspaper that while the programming was "both shallow and under-researched", the WRP should be investigated by the labour movement to determine if the WRP was being funded by the Libyan government or others like Saddam Hussein.
When, a little later, the WRP disintegrated, an investigation was carried out by the leadership of the ICFI, with the support of Mike Banda and Cliff Slaughter, leading figures in the WRP. The report concluded that the WRP had collected information for Libyan Intelligence. As printed by Solidarity, the report claimed £1,075,163 had been received by the group from Libya and several Middle Eastern governments, between 1977 and 1983. While only a small proportion of this is alleged to have come from Saddam Hussein's Iraqi government, it draws particular attention to photographs which it claims WRP members were instructed to take of demonstrations of opponents of Saddam Hussein, and it states that those photos were later handed to the Iraqi embassy. Dave Bruce, who oversaw the printing press, claims that income from Libya mostly covered the cost of raw materials for printing work for them, including copies of The Green Book, and that the party could otherwise cover its own costs.
The group also set up youth training centers in various deprived communities across Britain.Patrick Bishop, "How Ms. Redgrave took over church", The Observer, 12 April 1981 Liberal Party MP David Alton claimed in Parliament that youths were being taught anti-police methods at the centres,"Leftist group 'training young'", The Guardian, 17 February 1982 and when he repeated the allegations outside Parliament was sued by the WRP."Actions speak volumes", The Guardian, 29 October 1981
At the meeting of the 7th WRP Congress, held in December 1984, the WRP stated the situation as pre-revolutionary, but warned that the Thatcher government (characterised as a Bonapartist dictatorship) could become a military dictatorship. The 1984–1985 miners' strike massively hurt the party's membership due to lack of expected results.