When Vanessa Redgrave sued us

Submitted by Anon on 5 March, 2006 - 10:47

Concern for clarity and consistency of political ideas is not just pedantry; and of that there is clear proof in the sad history of the Socialist Labour League.

Renamed the Workers' Revolutionary Party (WRP) in 1973, it was until 1974 at least by far the biggest and most visible organisation of the revolutionary left in Britain. It was still a sizeable operation up to its spectacular final collapse in 1985.

Apt though it was to denounce any rival as "revisionist" and "opportunist", the SLL/ WRP's guiding principle was that it could say or do anything so long as it would "build the revolutionary party" (i.e. its organisation). From 1976, in order to sustain its daily paper, the WRP took money from Libya, Iraq and other vicious dictatorships, rewarding its paymasters with anti-Jewish propaganda and support for those regimes, dressed up as "anti-imperialism".

In 1981, actress Vanessa Redgrave, the WRP's best known member, sued our comrades John Bloxam and Sean Matgamna for libel for comparing them to the Moonie sect and the Scientologists, and for reporting that they used systematic emotional, political and physical violence against vulnerable young people. The WRP tied us up us in expensive and potentially ruinous legal processes for four and a half years, although they never took the case to court. In response, we launched a campaign for a labour movement inquiry.

We repeated in our paper that there was "circumstantial evidence" the WRP was getting money from one or more Arab governments. We challenged them to sue us on that. They never did. Their paper Newsline spoke glowingly of the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and the Libyan despot Gaddafi. And they raged against "the Zionists".

From 1983 the WRP fomented a heresy hunt against us because we told the truth about them. They organised meetings to denounce us at which local shop stewards, convenors and secretaries of trades councils appeared on the platform. Ken Livingstone, now Mayor of London, also backed them.

We were vindicated in late 1985 when the WRP imploded. It expelled its 72 year old leader Gerry Healy, accusing him of sexually abusing young women members. As the fall-out increased, Healy's associates admitted that the organisation had, in return for money, spied on Arab dissidents and prominent Jews in Britain. They helped to get a number of Iraqi CP members shot by Saddam Hussein.

Only tiny splinters of the WRP survive today.

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