Northite Blood Money (1991)

Workers Vanguard No. 523 (29 March 1991)

Northite Blood Money

“Lenin received German gold.” “Leon Trotsky was an agent of the Mikado.” “Spartacist — Finger Man for the FBI.” The first slander was supplied by self-proclaimed “socialists” and other elements in 1917 Russia who wanted to continue the imperialist carnage of World War I, the second by J.V. Stalin and the last by David North’s Workers League. In the 8 February issue of the Workers League’s press the Bulletin we read: “As American bombs are dropping on Baghdad, Workers Vanguard uses rhetoric indistinguishable from that of the Bush administration…. It willingly places itself on the ‘left’ flank of the bourgeois media propaganda blitz which seeks to demonize Saddam Hussein and whip up hatred for the Iraqi people.”

At least when the pro-war forces in imperial Russia lyingly accused Lenin of being a German agent they attempted to give a political façade to this slander by pointing to Lenin’s opposition to Russian imperialism and to the war. But for the Workers League to accuse the Spartacist League of trying to undermine the defense of Iraq while U.S. imperialism was raining down death on Baghdad is such a shameless lie that it would make the tsarist writers of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” blush.

In our banners at antiwar demonstrations, in the headlines of Workers Vanguard, in our speeches to protesters — the Spartacist League forthrightly fought for the defeat of U.S. imperialism and military defense of Iraq (without failing to note the crimes of Hussein’s regime against the Iraqi toiling masses). We sought to mobilize the social power of the working class in labor political strikes against the war. And what of the Workers League? As American bombs rained down on Baghdad, North’s outfit campaigned for a “democratic” referendum on the war! At the red-white-and-blue “antiwar” demonstration in Washington, D.C. on January 26, the Northites marched under a banner reading: “Stop War Against Laos — Let the People Vote on War.” This is worse than the most abject social-pacifism, appealing to the imperialist butchers to give a more “democratic” cover to their genocidal war against the Iraqi people. At the time, the American “people,” in their overwhelming majority, supported Bush’s war!

Crime and Dividends

What really has the Workers League frothing at the mouth is the one subject truly close to their hearts — lucre, as filthy as it comes. Earlier this year we Ian a short article entitled “Healyites Got Blood Money” (WV No. 517, 4 January), which detailed how the late Gerry Healy’s “International Committee” was on the take from a number of Near East despotic regimes, including Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. And we pointed to the Healyites’ criminal cheering for the 1978 execution of Iraqi Communist Party members.

The Workers League headed by David North — the current representative of unadulterated Healyism here on earth — is squealing like stuck pigs. The Bulletin decries our exposure of their direct and immediate ancestors for being on the payroll of virtually every sheik and military bonapartist in the region as an attempt “to provide the FBI with a pretext to frame up the Workers League.”

The Northites certainly have an elastic view of their own history — similar to their relation to any question of Marxist principle or proletarian morality. We nailed the Workers League as “shameless apologists for white terror in Iraq” more than a decade ago. At the time Hussein was a client of U.S. imperialism, which was providing him with military aid and intelligence. (As we have reported, the first anti-Communist bloodbath carried out by the Ba’ath used hit lists supplied by the CIA.) In our most recent article we also noted that at the same time Healy et al. were raking in thousands from those other clients of American imperialism, the Kuwaiti emirs!

The Workers League probably has plenty to fear for the crimes they have committed, but getting in trouble with the FBI is at the bottom of the list (if they are on any FBI list at all). After all, the Healyites were working the same side of the street as U.S. intelligence! In 1979, North’s Bulletin reprinted articles from Healy’s News Line hailing the execution of 21 Iraqi Communist Party members by Hussein’s government. The Bulletin (30 March 1979) even reprinted from News Line an Iraqi communiqué, under the grotesque headline, “Where the Iraqi Communist Party Went Wrong.”

According to the 1985 International Committee Control Commission report — which the Bulletin tries to hide behind as proof of their “innocence” — the Healyites got close to £20,000 from Iraq in the late 1970s. And this figure can only be the tip of the iceberg, given that the IC “investigation” into their organization’s financial dealings in the Near East was carried out by the guilty themselves.

The Bulletin doesn’t deny that it cheered the murder of Communist worker militants in Iraq. It simply whines that the Workers League didn’t know Healy’s Workers Revolutionary Party got paid for this and other crimes. This, it is claimed, was done “without the agreement or knowledge of the International Committee.” For the Northites to claim that they didn’t know is about as believable as Bush and Reagan’s protests that they were “out of the loop” while another criminal by the name of North, first name Oliver, was running the Contragate arms-and-drugs scam out of the White House basement.

Healy’s financial ties to Arab regimes were a notorious scandal on the left. From the time the WRP started up its daily News Line in May 1976, it was clear that Healy’s organization was on the take from Muammar Qaddafi’s Libyan regime. Less than three months earlier, the WRP had folded its previous paper Workers Press following months of publicity pleading for funds for a press “Crisis Fund.” Then amidst great fanfare out comes a flashy new four-color daily full of articles extolling the Libyan dictator and “special reports” from Tripoli. Where did the money come from in this rags-to-riches story?

As early as May 1977, we ran an article entitled “Healyites, Messengers of Qaddafi,” which concluded that “even a cursory look at News Line’s yearlong pandering to the oil-rich Qaddafi forces the observation that there is indeed something very rotten in the state of Denmark.” Two years later we picketed Workers League meetings with signs reading “Workers League — Press Agents for Libyan Dictatorship!” and “Healyites: From Political Bandits on the Left to Pimps for Qaddafi.”

Then in 1980, Sean Matgamna, editor of the British Socialist Organiser, observed that the WRP must have been subsidized by “one or more Arab governments.” In a vengeful attempt to destroy Matgamna’s organization, the WRP (under the aegis of jet-setting actress Vanessa Redgrave) filed a libel suit against Matgamna for his scathing and eminently truthful expose of these unprincipled political bandits, gangsters and cultists. Interestingly, the one statement in Matgamna’s article which the suit did not take up was the central charge that the Healyites were being funded by bourgeois Arab regimes.

Now, the Bulletin writes that following the Control Commission investigation “the International Committee, with the support of the Workers League… denounced the WRP’s ‘pursuit of unprincipled relations with sections of the colonial bourgeoisie in return for money’.” But what did the Workers League find ”unprincipled”? Obviously not acting as press agents for Qaddafi (celebrating the ”Tenth Anniversary of the Libyan Revolution,” the WL sent a telegram to Qaddafi praising his “progressive socialist policies”) or cheering the execution of Iraqi Communists. North’s “defense” is that Healy did it for money, while the Workers League did it for free! But did they?

Who Got the Money?

After the IC Control Commission had delivered its report, in 1986 Cliff Slaughter, another of Healy’s former lieutenants, wrote a letter to all WRP members asking

“Is it only the WRP which received financial assistance from one or other Middle Eastern bourgeois national governments? Which other sections did so? “Is it not a fact that the Australian section did receive a sum of (tens of thousand [sic] of dollars) in 1983?…
“Is it not true that Cde Beams failed to report the matter to the IC or to the WRP delegates, but that he did report it to at least some of the delegates who supported the WRP suspension and certainly to Comrade North? That is what happened. “Finally: is it not true that Comrade North and Beams agreed the matter should not be raised at the IC because they considered it did not constitute a ‘class betrayal’? How did they differentiate between the class betrayal of the WRP in this matter — on which was based the argument for suspending the WRP from the IC without charges and without a hearing — and the actions taken on behalf of the SLL (Australia)?”

Slaughter’s accusations against North’s cover-up for his colleague Nick Beams, leader of the Australian Socialist Labour League, have the ring of (self-serving) truth. A month after Slaughter’s letter was circulated, the Central Committee of the SLL seems to have felt constrained to censure Beams for failure to report receipt of money from Arab regimes to the IC. Further information came from former SLL leader Phil Sandford, who revealed how another leading Australian Healyite was slapped down by Healy for attempting to poach on his Iraqi preserve to get $100,000 for a printing press (see “Some Political Bandits at the End,” Spartacist No. 43-44, Summer 1989). Sandford reports that their relations with Libya were much more lucrative.

_____________________________
Only the Tip of the Iceberg…

Libya - £542,267
Kuwait - 156,500
Qatar - 50,000
Abu Dhabi - 25,000
PLO - 19,997
Iraq - 19,697
Unidentified or other sources - 261,702
Total : £1,075,163
(Reprinted in Workers News, April 1988)

Account of monies from Near East paymasters received by Healy’s WRP as reported by 1985 IC Control Commission — an “Investigation” carried out by the guilty.
_______________________________

But was North’s only role in this sordid affair to alibi for Beams? Not according to a letter from Healy lieutenant Tony Banda to the American Workers League Central Committee of 23 January 1986. Responding to accusations that leading members of the WRP, following the ouster of Healy, were refusing to make IC documents available to WRP members, Banda writes:

”This I find extremely interesting coming from you, who through your minions, have suppressed virtually the entire discussion on Healyism…. This is like the thief in the crowded bazaar crying,’ Stop, thief’ to distract attention from his own misdeeds. Up north Mr. Holier-Than-Thou makes his getaway with 90 grand, while his apprentice/accomplice makes off with another 25 grand down south. Is this your revolutionary morality? Is this your kind of internationalism?”
— printed in Fourth International, Autumn 1986

Tony Banda’s “we were all crooks” indictment of “Mr. Holier-Than-Thou” North captures the cynical quality of this falling-out among thieves.

It seems evident that when it looked like Healy was collecting all of the big payoffs from the Near East, the rest of his mob were driven into a shark-like feeding frenzy to get their share of the blood money. As we have noted many times, none of Healy’s epigones protested the vicious betrayals that were perpetrated by their organization in order to get money from Near East bourgeois governments. It was only when this revenue dried up that they moved in to depose Healy.

According to a financial report by Corin Redgrave, dated 8 October 1985, in 1984-85 “scarcely a single rent or rates demand was paid on time. Bailiffs took walking possession of the contents of the party’s printshop in Runcorn, the party bookshops, and on one occasion at least, the party headquarters at Clapham.” At first the WRP tried to blame the whole mess on their financial apparatus. But by the summer of 1985 it became clear that the whole stinking house that Healy had built was about to come crumbling down. Well-trained by their “founder-leader,” Healy’s longtime henchmen went, like sharks, for the kill.

North desperately wanted to declare himself as the new leader and wielded the IC Control Commission for his own cynical power play. Today, the Bulletin claims that the Workers League’s participation in this commission clears them of all crimes. Yet, curiously, they have chosen never to print the results of even this heavily censored and self-serving ”investigation” into the IC’s sordid financial wheeling and dealing.

The Commission’s report was completed in a big hurry, and this was not simply because Healy & Co. had allegedly spirited away the WRP’s financial records. No attempt was made to investigate allegations that other IC sections had been on the take. The names of implicated senior WRP members who had not left with Healy were deleted from the report. North used the “findings” to get the leftovers from Healy’s WRP out of his way. Slaughter’s rump WRP was suspended from membership and North anointed himself king of the remaining Healyite dung heap.

The Workers League tries to palm, themselves off as Trotskyists and from time to time, when it suits their purposes, they can sound quite orthodox. We recognized them for what they were twenty years ago when we publicly exposed the Healyites as “political bandits” whose positions were tailored to their own opportunistic and unsavory advantage. In their further degeneration they became outright bandits, and far worse.

Talk about fingermen: for a fistful of petrodollars, the Healyites took pictures of protesters at an anti-Hussein demo in London and turned them over to the Iraqi embassy! For cash they cheered the murder of Iraqi CP members. One of Healy’s main bagmen in Baghdad was none other than Alex Mitchell, who together with North co-authored “Security and the Fourth International” — the sinister campaign to smear the leadership of the American Socialist Workers Party as agents of the FBI and the GPU!

While Mitchell today plies his pen for the capitalist press in Australia, North continues to use his for new installment of “Security.” After spending a fortune trying to get the capitalist courts rule that the SWP was being run FBI agents in the notorious case of provocateur Alan Gelfand, the Northites waged an international campaign as fingermen for the American imperialist state’s prosecution of a young SWP Mark Curtis — who is now behind bars sentenced to 25 years in jail on trumped! up rape charges. But why would the cope jail one of their own agents? And why does the Workers League profess to be worried about the FBI going after them? On the face of it, the U.S. government ought to be satisfied with their work. As for the Arab dictators, sheiks and colonels that the Healyites shook down for cash — doubtless on the claim that the IC was an organization with “mass” influence which could help them out — they might rightly feel duped, not to mention vindictive.

Defeat Messengers of Qaddafi! (1981)

English Language Spartacist No. 31-32 (Summer 1981)

Defeat Messengers of Qaddafi!

Healyite Libel Suit: An Attack on Workers Movement

We reprint below material documenting the attempt by the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) of Gerry Healy and Michael Banda to silence, through the bourgeois courts, Socialist Organiser (SO), a fortnightly newspaper of a tendency within the British Labour Party initiated by and politically identified with Sean Matgamna’s Workers Action grouping. The WRP (formerly the Socialist Labour League) had long been notorious for seeking to bludgeon left-wing critics into silence through physical gangsterism and use of the agencies of the bourgeois state. After more than a decade of political banditry of the most extreme sort, the Healyites decisively departed the ranks of the workers movement by 1978 by politically and materially subordinating themselves to a host of murderous Muslim dictatorships, most notably that of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi of Libya, protector of Idi Amin and self-proclaimed apologist for Adolf Hitler. The current threat of libel action against SO (with the WRP’s Vanessa Redgrave fronting for them) represents a sinister attack against the right of political expression by the workers movement as a whole, and must he vigorously opposed by all tendencies of the left and labor movement.

To the best of our not uninformed knowledge, we affirm that, the charges and characterizations alleged against the WRP by SO are true. We emphasize comrade Matgamna’s observation that Redgrave’s attorneys conspicuously choose not to contest the allegation of the WRP’s ties with the oil-rich bloodthirsty bourgeois tyrant of Libya. In April 1979, we noted the WRP’s role as “shameless apologists for white terror in Iraq” through its open support for the murder of 21 Iraqi Communist Party militants by the bourgeois nationalist Ba’ath regime:

“For a small propaganda group without a significant mass base, moreover, program is decisive in determining a group’s class character. In the case of the Healy/Banda organization, the contradiction between its ‘Trotskyist’ pretensions and the dictates of its Libyan patrons has repetitively come down in favor of the latter.”
– Workers Vanguard No. 230, 27 April 1979

We explained in the same article that this action, though decisive, was by no means isolated, but capped a long period of bizarre and venomous behavior, targeted in more than one brutal instance against supporters of the international Spartacist tendency:

“The Healy/Banda tendency has long had an extremely unsavory flavor. It combines idiot organizational sectarianism with the wildest gyrations of gross political opportunism to create an aura of extreme instability. Its penchant for elaborate conspiracy theories and its well-known readiness to employ physical gangsterism against left-wing opponents denote more than a trace of paranoia. But in the past couple of years the Healyites have added another clement to their political banditry: they have become the British press agents for Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, the fanatical dictator of Libya.”

In Spartacist (No. 9, January-February 1967) we publicized the savage beating of Canadian United Secretariat supporter Ernie Tate outside a Healyite meeting at London’s Caxton Hall which inflicted injuries so severe as to require Tate’s hospitalization. The Healyites then sought to cover their tracks, not by denying that they beat up Tate, but (as today) by instituting legal proceedings against him to stop the circulation of an open letter by Tate describing the thug attack. In fact, Healy succeeded in frightening two weak-kneed British left-wing publications into publishing retractions of Tate’s letter under threats of libel actions against them. Healy’s then-loyal American toad, Tim Wohlforth, shamelessly defended the vicious beating with typically convoluted Healyite “logic” (workers rightly beat up scabs, Tate was scabbing on the Healyite International Committee, (Q.E.D...).

As noted, the libel action against SO is taken in the name of performer Vanessa Redgrave, the most well known, of the WRP’s dwindling constellation of supporters and “angels” within the entertainment industry. Though it is common practice under British libel law to set up a personality to pursue a libel suit (organizations generally have a very difficult time pursuing a libel case), the use of Redgrave’s name and money against a working-class tendency is particularly scandalous. Nor is it the first time they have done this. In 1975 Redgrave dragged former Healyite Alan Thornett, a car worker, into court over an outstanding personal loan. This action against Thornett was taken by one who, as we noted at the time, has a lifestyle which would do no shame to Princess Grace of Monaco or Princess Ashraf, lately of Iran.

Since the material we are reprinting below came in hand, five writs, used to secure prior censorship through vicious and punitive methods, have been served against SO, its printing firm and the secretary of the defense committee. Indeed, one of those writs was used to prevent publication at the last minute of an article in Socialist Press, weekly paper of Thornett’s Workers Socialist League (WSL), which is printed at the same firm (which also prints a number of other left-wing papers in Britain). Some clients have already been intimidated into withdrawing their business from this printer.

Every working-class militant should look forward to the day when the Healy/ Banda gang is politically removed as a menace to the left and labor movement. A victory by SO against this attack would constitute a step toward that goal and we are therefore compelled by basic class principle to offer such resources as we can to assist in the defense of this case, including fund-raising and publicity, not least internationally. (The very English Healyites have a few shriveling international connections known as the “International Committee of the Fourth International.”) We offer as well to make available our extensive files documenting the Healyites’ history of slander, internal intimidation and violent hooliganism. We urge our readers to likewise support this important defense of the workers movement.

* * *

SOCIALIST ORGANISER,
c/o 214 Sickert Court,
London N1 2SY.

2nd March 1981.

The Editor,
Spartacist Publications,
26
Harrison St.,
London W.C.1

Dear Friend,
Socialist Organiser appeals for support to the left wing and labour movement press
against the attempt by the WRP to stifle accurate reporting and fair comment
about them. The enclosed documents give the details of the WRP’s threatened
legal action and the case which looks likely to go to court.

I draw your attention to the curious fact that the WRP have not chosen to regard as
libellous the statements about their relationship with Colonel Gaddafi, and to the proposals that were made at the end of Sean Matgamna’s letter of 26th February 1981, including for a jointly agreed working class movement inquiry on the issue.

Yours fraternally,
John Bloxam. Secretary.

____________________________

5th February, 1981

Sean Matgamna, Esq.,
Socialist Organiser,
5 Stamford Hill,
London, N.I6.

Dear Sir,

We are instructed by our Client Miss Vanessa Redgrave
a well known member of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party
(WRP). The WRP is referred to on page 10 of the issue of Socialist
Organiser No. 33 dated January 24, 1980, and in particular in an article at
the bottom of page 10 under your name, with the headline “GADDAFI’S FOREIGN
LEGION TO KNIGHT’S RESCUE”. The Knight in question is Ted Knight and your
article referred to the support by the WRP for Lambeth Council’s rent and rate
rises discussed, on January 17, 1981, at the second “Local Government in Crisis”
conference. It is therefore obvious that this issue of Socialist Organiser should have been dated 1981 and not 1980.

In view of her widely known association with the WRP our Client regards the attack on the WRP in your article in this issue of Socialist Organiser as a libel on her as well
as on the Party itself. While we understand that the article contains very many
untrue and defamatory statements and implications (for instance by the headline
quoted above) about the WRP we are instructed to call upon you to undertake to
publish an unequivocal withdrawal of certain of those statements which constitute particularly gross libels. These are contained notably in the second and third full paragraphs of the second column where you state that the WRP:

“is a pseudo-Marxist gobbledegook-spouting cross between the Moonies, the Scientologists, and the Jones Cult which committed mass suicide in the Guyana jungle three years ago.
It recruits and exploits mainly raw, inexperienced, politically socially and psychologically defenceless young people. It employs psychological terror and physicalviolence against its own members (and occasionally against others).”

At the end of the above second paragraph there is an asterisk which refers
to a footnote naming “The Battle for Trotskyism” published by the Workers
Socialist League “For an account of its (i.e. the WRP’s) internal life”. We are
instructed that the publication in question most certainly does not substantiate
the allegations made in the said paragraph which have been completely refuted in
WRP publications published subsequently, e.g. in “The Thornett Clique Exposed”.

As you must know, the WRP bears no resemblance whatsoever to the
Moonies, the Scientologists or the Jones Cult. Nor does it exploit young people
or anyone else amongst its recruits. Further, it not only does not employ
psychological terror and physical violence against its own members or against
anyone else but has gone on record repeatedly to dissociate itself from any
policy of violence in support of its Marxist aims.

If any future issue of the Socialist Organiser is to be published we would ask you to let us hear from you in immediate reply to this letter, that is within seven days of its date, as to the intended or proposed date of such publication and the date when it should go to press, together with the names of the paper’s Editor or members of its editorial committee and its proprietors. We learn that Socialist Organiser is not registered as a business name and note that, contrary to the law, its printer’s name and address do not appear anywhere in its pages, as to which your explanation is awaited. Our Client’s primary concern at this point is to have your undertaking that, with appropriate prominence to be agreed, a disclaimer and apology in the following terms will be published in the next issue of Socialist Organiser or in such other publication as may replace it as the newspaper put out by the publishers of Socialist
Organiser, whoever they may be, or in any such other publication to which you are contributing:

Vanessa Redgrave and the Workers’ Revolutionary Party

”Sean Matgamna and the Editor and Publishers of Socialist Organiser acknowledge that the terms in which they referred to the Workers’ Revolutionary Party (WRP)in their issue of the 24th January last contained wholly unwarranted suggestions that the WRP is a ‘cross between the Moonies, the Scientologists, and the Jones Cult’ or bears a material resemblance to those non-political, non-Marxist organisations. Further, it is acknowledged that the WRP does not, as falsely stated in Sean Matgamna’s article, recruit and exploit ‘mainly raw, inexperienced, politically, socially and psychologically defenceless young people’ or, indeed, exploit anyone; nor does it employ ‘psychological terror and physical violence against its own members’ or others, being on record repeatedly as condemning violence in support of its aims. We apologise to the WRP and to Vanessa Redgrave, who is in particular associated with it, for having published wholly unwarranted and grossly libellous matter which we now expressly withdraw.”

While we await your undertaking as to the arrangements to be made to publish the above disclaimer and apology and your response to our above request for information, we must also ask you to acknowledge receipt of this letter within seven days of its date and to undertake not to repeat the same or any other libels on the WRP or on our Client in the future.

Pending a fully satisfactory reply to this letter our Client’s full rights in the matter are reserved.

Yours faithfully,
Rubinstein Callingham

cc: Morning Litho Printers

* * *

Socialist Organiser
c/o 214 Sickert Court, London NI 2SY.

Your
reference: MR/AS.
26th February 1981.

Rubinstein Callingham, Solicitors,
6 Raymond Buildings, Grays Inn,
London WCIR 5BZ.

Dear Sirs,
I am in receipt of your curious letter of 5th February 1981, which is in fact more an attempt at a political polemic than a normal legal communication.

I hereby formally acknowledge sole responsibility for Socialist Organiser, and declare myself to be the publisher and political editor of the paper. The printer’s name was inadvertently left off Socialist Organiser no. 33, but there was a name and address on the paper. The printer’s name and address has appeared on previous issues. There was therefore no intention of evading legal responsibility. I owe you no explanation, and that section of your letter reads like a rather feeble attempt to intimidate the printer. I do offer you the assurance that our relations with the printer are proper commercial relations, without benefit of subsidies from the Arab or any other bourgeoisies.

I note that your letter refers to the headline of my article ‘Gaddafi’s Foreign Legion to Knight’s Rescue’, alleging that it is “one of the very many untrue and defamatory statements and implications about the WRP”, and goes on to contrast it with what you say are “particularly gross libels” and for which you demand a public apology. You make no reference to the clear statements in the text which clearly imply that you are subsidised by the Libyan Government, and perhaps other Arab Governments. Can it be that Ms Redgrave and the organisation for which she is in this affair acting as a front do not consider important what the labour movement believes about their relations with Libya? The implication is inescapable that your client knows that she must treat this as not libellous because it is true and, moreover being true, not something disreputable nor something which places the WRP outside the ranks of the labour movement because they have every appearance of acting as agents within that movement of the bourgeois Libyan Government. The implied admission in your client’s letter is therefore a valuable, if inadvertent, step to admitting the truth and to enlightening the labour movement on matters that concern it.

As regards your client’s reputation, although my article names three prominent leaders of the WRP organisation (Gerry Healy, Cliff Slaughter, Michael Banda) it makes no reference to Vanessa Redgrave. In my view, our readers would not be likely to consider Ms Redgrave to be a member with control of the WRP. In fact, the invocation of Ms Redgrave’s reputation, such as it is, is a transparent hypocrisy. Those who have decided to threaten a legal action obviously regard Ms Redgrave’s reputation, like Ms Redgrave’s money and her publicity value, as an expendable asset. The attempt to invoke the courts against a labour movement publication, like Socialist Organiser, can only tarnish Ms Redgrave in the eyes of the overwhelming majority of labour movement activists who consider it a fundamental breach of principle to involve the bourgeois state in the affairs of the labour movement. In fact, Ms Redgrave’s threatened action will provide topical illustration to show even more clearly that the WRP has, as my article asserted, ceased to be part of the labour movement.

In fact, my article in Socialist Organiser no. 33 (which was written in response to the Newsline editorial of Monday 19th January 1981 which attempted to brand the entire left at the second ‘Local Government in Crisis’ Conference as agents of Thatcher) contains not one single untrue statement or implication about the WRP. Every single statement in the passage you complain of is either true or fair comment and reasonable construction on the stated facts, or both. I would not choose to go to court with you over this. That decision is yours. In the event, however, that you force it on me, I will have no inhibitions or qualms about bringing into court some of the mass of evidence which has accumulated in the labour movement in order to establish that my article was in no way untrue or unfair to the WRP.

In your letter you make the absurd claim that your client’s organisation has “completely refuted” the account of the WRP contained in the publication ‘The Battle for Trotskyism’. This is laughable. One of the prime examples of the mental world of the WRP is the latest pamphlet ‘The Thornett Clique Exposed’ dealing with it. Here I draw your attention to the fact that the cover of that publication consists of a photostat of a document stolen, together with a filing cabinet full of other documents, in a burglary of a house in Oxford in 1977. This burglary was on Alan Thornett’s house. I would be interested in your client’s explanation of where they got this document.

You say that the WRP has gone on record “repeatedly to dissociate itself from any policy of violence in support of its Marxist aims”. This is disingenuous. I know very well that the WRP has publicly disavowed in the courts, during the ‘Observer’ libel case, the Marxis teaching on violence-which is essentially that the bourgeoisie, if faced with defeat by the majority of the people, will impose on the working class the choice to either defend itself and secure its interests by defensive violence or to peacefully accept the alternative which is bloody counter-revolution. My article clearly refers to the internal regime of the WRP. What it said about that regime is, as stated above, factually true and can be substantiated with oral evidence and documents. I want to add here, however, that anything the WRP says, whether by way of denial or affirmation, has little credibility in any existing section of the labour movement which is even slightly familiar with the WRP. That organisation has lied systematically and to a degree never paralleled (except by the Stalinists in the 30s, 40s and 50s) in the entire history of the labour movement, of which the WRP was part until 4 or 5 years ago.

My approach to this matter is governed by the responsibility to tell the truth to the labour movement and to call things by their right names where the WRP is concerned. While I am determined to discharge that responsibility, I nevertheless would not choose to go to court. There can however be no question of gainsaying what I know to be true or of publicly lying for the WRP according to the terms of your proposed letter of apology. I make the following proposals to you however.

1. As I said above, I would be willing publicly to explain that I do not consider Ms Redgrave to be a member with control of the WRP and its policies, with the precise wording of such an explanation to be agreed between us.

2. I would be willing to publish a reply of the same length as my article in Socialist Organiser by Ms Redgrave or even by “the leadership”, namely Mr Gerry Healy. They could probably have had that for the asking, as Socialist Organiser is an open and democratic newspaper. It is offered now, however, only in exchange for one of the following:

(a) an article to be published in Newsline (of the same length as the WRP’s article in Socialist Organiser) by Alan Thornett of the Workers Socialist League, to explain to the readers of Newsline how 20 members of the WRP came to Oxford 2 weeks ago and made a mass distribution at British Leyland’s Cowley plant of a printed broadsheet which, among other things, implied that he was a police agent and was clearly aimed, for the WRP’s own sectarian and. vindictive reasons, to help Michael Edwardes to discredit and then smash the militant rank and file leadership in the Cowley plant;

(b) an article to be published in Newsline (of the same length as the WRP’s article in Socialist Organiser) by George Novack, on behalf of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, to reply to the WRP’s campaign of libel;

(c) an article to be published in Newsline (of the same length as the WRP’s article in Socialist Organiser) by the Stalinist Iraqui Communist Party, the slaughter of whose
members Newsline has publicly justified;

(d) an article to be published in Newsline (of the same length as the WRP’s article in Socialist Organiser) by myself, discussing the recent statement by Colonel Gaddafi calling for the rehabilitation of Hitler and Nazism.

3. I do not consider the WRP to be part of the labour movement any longer. The WRP however pretends that it is. I propose that a working class movement inquiry be set up to investigate the statements in my article and contribute to the public debate on the issue, with the composition and other details of the inquiry to be agreed between us.

4. I would be willing to publish a clarification about the point on violence, explaining clearly that for anyone who knows the WRP the idea that the “leadership” would contemplate violence against the bourgeois state is an absurdity. That, however, would he done in such a way as to make our own Marxist views clear.

Yours faithfully, Sean Matgamna.

Messengers of Qaddafi 2 (1977)

Workers Vanguard No. 174 (23 September 1977)

More from Healy, Messenger of Qaddafi

The Healyite Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) of Britain has intensified its year-long pandering to the despotic regime of Colonel Muamar Qaddafi's underpopulated but oil-rich Libya to new heights of shameless glorification following last month's brief military conflict between Egypt and Libya. The border clashes between Egypt and Libya represented nothing more than a power struggle for influence in the Arab East between two comparable bourgeois-nationalist regimes, which have consistently answered the democratic aspirations of both Libyans and Egyptians with savage repression. Neither side is deserving of support by socialists.

The WRP, now under the leadership of general secretary Michael Banda, seized on the conflict, however, to provide additional services to what it is pleased to revere as the “Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya” the new Qaddafi-inspired name for Libya. Workers Vanguard first exposed the WRP's weirdly grovelling lauding of the Libyan dictator several months ago (see “Healyites, Messengers of Qaddafi,” WV No. 158, 20 May 1977). Since then the WRP's grotesque and fulsome support to Qaddafi has provoked widespread comment in the British left press, as well as in the London Manchester Guardian (16 August).

The WRP (formerly the Socialist Labour League) has a long history of political banditry and Stalin-style organizational methods. Following their hatchet job expulsion of the Spartacist tendency from the 1966 London International Committee (IC) conference, consolidating a rotten bloc of political convenience, the Healyites' cynical organizational methods found political expression a year later in cheerleading a classless “Arab Revolution,” and chronic tailing of Stalinist forces such as Ho chi Minh and the Chinese Maoist Red Guards.

The Healyite operation during the last decade has been built on the principles of a con game, with a central focus on milking high-income “angels” through gimmicky pretensions to mass influence. Combining internal intimidation of members with violence and slander against left opponents, including dragging them into the capitalist courts when convenient, the shrill tone of the Healyite fake “mass press” (Workers Press, News Line) recently reached a new height of witchhunting frenzy in filthy attempts to smear Joseph Hansen, spokesman for the reformist Socialist Workers Party, as an “accomplice of the GPU” in Trotsky's assassination. But the corrupt Healyite “method” of political banditry has reached a revolting nadir in the WRP/ IC's current fealty to the dictator Qaddafi.

Following the Egypt-Libya clash, the WRP Central Committee issued a statement giving full support to the “Libyan Revolution,” stating that “the overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi would be a major setback for Palestine and for Africa.” “Unlike Sadat, the Colonel enjoys universal support amongst the Libyan workers and peasants,” the WRP Central Committee asserted (News Line, 25 July)-and perhaps there is a grain of truth here, since any Libyan who dared oppose the dictator would be swiftly thrown in jail, or worse!

The WRP organized a picket outside the Egyptian embassy in London on July 25, during which Banda and film actress Vanessa Redgrave personally delivered a letter of protest against Sadat to the ambassador. At a special meeting organized by the WRP in “support of the Palestinian and Libyan revolutions,” Banda made a lengthy speech repeating almost word for word the line of the Libyan government. The crowning glory of the WRP's efforts was a “joint communique” put out by the WRP Central Committee and an official delegation from the “General People's Congress of the Libyan Jamahiriya” – i.e., that fake body (which meets once a year) created by Qaddafi as a facade for his dictatorship. The communique (published in News Line, 10 August) hails former Egyptian leader Nasser and his “1952 revolution” which Qaddafi is asserted to be continuing, and praises Qaddafi and his “people's democracy” to the skies – that “people's democracy” whose slogan is “parties arc treason” and is pledged to “purge all the sick people who talk of Communism, atheism...” (New York Times, 22 May 1973)

This unsavory alliance is being trumpeted by the WRP press. Under the grandiose headline, “Unity of the British and Arab Revolution,” the Young Socialist (20 August), organ of the WRP's youth affiliate, introduces the, communique:

“An anti-imperialist alliance has been established between the Workers Revolutionary Party and the Socialist People's Libyan Jamahiriya which marks a milestone in the development of the world socialist revolution.”

It is indeed a milestone of sorts – but rather of the sordid and corrupt nature of the WRP, whose only hint of distance from strongman, Qaddafi, is a brief statement in their Central Committee statement of July 25 that,

“Colonel Gaddafi is not a communist and certainly not a 'puppet of the Soviet bureaucracy' as Sadat alleges, but hebelieves passionately in the struggle to liberate Arab and colonial people from imperialism. The Workers Revolutionary Party, despite ideological and political differences with Colonel Gaddafi [these are never specified [WV], unconditionally endorses his anti-imperialist views and pledges to defend his leadership against imperialism andits agents.”

Do these “differences” include the recent statement of the Libyan ambassador to Britain that, “If anyone can help find a solution to the Middle East problems, it is Britain” (Arab Dawn, March 1977)? Or does.it include a “difference” over the imprisonment of suspected Trotskyists in Libya? We doubt that the readers of News Line will ever know. The WRP is quite explicit in its allegiance. Its bookshop pushes copies of the Libyan embassy's propaganda brochure on Egypt entitled “The Truth,” which praises Libya's “self restraint and concern for Arab blood in the war.” The printer of this little brochure, interestingly, is the same obscure printer in Runcorn (rather far from London) used by many Healyite publications, including News Line.

While the WRP is wholeheartedly committed to Qaddafi, it is unlikely that the Libyan government's tolerance for even that most loathsome caricature of Trotskyism will be very long-lasting. There may be a certain limited welcome for such prominent personalities as Vanessa Redgrave in the mod, if slightly seedy, Libyan embassy today, which prominently displays a poster advertising Redgrave speaking on Qaddafism in its press suite foyer. But the heat of the “anti-imperialist” colonel's current desires are revealed in the March issue of the Libyan embassy magazing, Arab Dawn, which calls on the cover for “Rapprochement with Britain.” In the interests of this “rapprochement,” Qaddafi has alread ditched the Irish Republican Army. Arab Dawn (October 1976) published an interview with Qaddafi by Arnaud de Borchegrave of Newsweek, who asked, “What about your material support to the Irish Republcan Army?” To this Qaddafi replied: “Our relations with London and Dublin are improving rapidly, and we will soon be exchanging ambassadors with Ireland. The IRA chapter is behind us.”

When the WRP relationship becomes embarrassing to him, Qaddafi will inevitably also put the “WRP chapter” behind him as well. But the WRP will not be able to put behind it this record of crass corruption of revolutionary morality, its utterly revolting glorification of one of the more eccentric, megalomaniacal dictators of the 20th century. The real betrayal, if we can use a word implying a residue of integrity, is that of the Libyan foreign ministry, because the Tripoli government undoubetdly believes it has an important British daily presenting its views, just as in the period before World War II every second-rate power had their press organ in Paris. The venal Banda-led WRP has gotten itself a “good deal” - but not for long.

The WRP's fundamental character as political bandits and con men is well known. However, the WRP's unadorned press pimping for Qaddafi falls well outside the bounds of the working class movement. It is a shameless and shameful act, a truly terrible betrayal of the most elementary class principles. If the WRP can swallow Qaddafi, what other anti-working class forces within Britain itself might they not find it to their advantage to do a deal with?

Healyites, Messengers of Qaddafi (1977)

Workers Vanguard No. 158 (20 May 1977)

Healyites, Messengers of Qaddafi

Something stinks in News Line, daily garbage organ of the British Healyite Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) -and it's not simply that it continues these political bandits’ unsavory record of sectarianism, Stalinist gangsterism and egregious opportunism. Ever since News Line’s inception on May 1976, it has been a mouthpiece for the megalomaniacal ravings and “people's democracy” pretensions of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi of Libya. Month after month articles in News Line have lauded the dictator in weirdly shameless fashion, hailing his “agricultural revolution,” his support to the “Arab Revolution,” detailing his every attack on the “high treason” of Egypt's Anwar Sadat, and so forth.

Thus a brief article in the 26 February News Line hailed the London publication of the Libyan strongman's Green Book as “an uncompromising rejection of parliamentary democracy in favour of ‘the authority of the people’.” Two Labour MP's who pushed the book were taken to task for giving it “a patronizing send-off”; their praise of the Green Book as “challenging, stimulating, moral” is evidently insufficiently fulsome for the WRP’s taste. Qaddafi’s Healyite press agents complain that his “writings and his drive towards people's democracy hardly received the attention they deserve.”

The WRP has in the last year been making up for that with a vengeance. Over 20 articles on Libya have appeared in News Line, not to mention a considerable increase in “special reports” from Tripoli and attacks on Sadat’s Egypt. News Line's castigation of Egypt, described as “near bankruptcy,” for its repression of leftists is completely in accord with Qaddafi's feud with Sadat – and contrasts sharply with the Healyites’ silence on repression in Libya.

An article in the 14 October 1976 News Line, for instance, discussed a BBC television interview with Qaddafi and dismissed the interviewer's inquiry into political prisoners in Libya as one of the bourgeois media’s “stock-in-trade questions.” News Line smugly added, “Gaddafi was unmoved, saying that they were ‘enemies of the revolution’.” The Healyites praised the program for having “broken at least part of the Gaddafi enigma and answered some of the US State Department and Zionist lies,” but complained that the interview was not shown on prime time:

“Miss Kewley's profile rightly belonged in the BBC’s prestige slot, ‘Panorama’.
“It is a measure of the censorship on television that it was squeezed into
the ‘religious programmes’ department where it could not do justice to the subject of Islam or its leading advocate.”

What is perhaps most curious is that Workers Press, the previous Healyite daily –which folded in February 1976 with the presumption of “lack of funds” – paid little or no attention to Qaddafi and his so-called “Revolutionland.” In the six months prior to its collapse, we could locate only one article in Workers Press dealing specifically with Libya, and this was implicitly critical of Qaddafi, reporting a protest by Libyan students in London against the police slaughter of “at least 16 students” at a demonstration at Libya’s Benghazi University (Workers Press, 14 January 1976). On 8 September 1976 News Line carried a centerfold spread on Tripoli’s “anniversary celebration” of Qaddafi’s military coup. Boasting huge photos and snide comments about the bourgeois press’ lack of coverage of the glorious event, News Line’s spread on “Libya's Day” was a sharp departure from the silence of Workers Press the year before. Something has changed, and it wasn’t the Qaddafi regime.

“Revolutionland”

We are more than happy to give Qaddafi’s policies “the attention they deserve.” Qaddafi is fanatical in his devotion to the Koran, which sanctifies the feudal enslavement of women and prescribes legal punishments such as cutting off the tongues of liars and the hands of thieves. At least 700 political prisoners have been reported held in Libyan jails. Regarding one trial of 17 prisoners (acquitted in 1974) against whom Qaddafi personally intervened to impose new sentences of life imprisonment and death, Amnesty International recently noted: “The accused were allegedly Marxists, Trotskyists, and members of the Islamic Liberation Party” (Intercontinental Press, 4 April I977). Qaddafi's 1973 “cultural revolution" laid out his “Five Principles,” including:

“We must purge all the sick people who talk of Communism, atheism, who make propaganda for the Western countries and advocate capitalism. We shall put them in prison.”

And:

“We live by the Koran, God’s book. We will reject any idea that is not based on it. Therefore we enter into a cultural revolution to refute and destroy all misleading books which have made youth sick and insane.”
– New York Times, 22 May 1973

Qaddafi’s idea of “refutation” is simple: he ordered “the burning of books that contain imperialist, capitalist, reactionary, Jewish or Communist thoughts” (New York Times, 18 April 1973).

Grotesque

The sordid history of the Healyites is replete with examples of slavering enthusiasm for left-talking “Third World” nationalists and Stalinists. Workers Press gratuitously proffered “leftist” cheerleading to assorted petty-bourgeois anti-working-class formations, from the Maoist Red Guards to the Angolan MPLA. But the WRP’s pandering to Qaddafi is surely a new low.

Perhaps the most disgusting was a full-page “special News Line interview” with Hamied Jallud, general secretary of the “Libyan trade union federation, equivalent of the British TUC” (14 September 1976). To News Line questions about collective bargaining and the right to strike, the Qaddafi bureaucrats replied, “The role of the trade unions in socialist countries is completely different from capitalist countries”! After all, “the responsibility of the trade unions is to educate the workers and increase production”; Qaddafi's “General People's Congress” will look after the workers' interests. The WRP’s shameless presentation of Qaddafi's repression of the Libyan working class leaves no doubt of its utter subjugation before this capitalist dictator.

News Line hailed the “General People's Congress” held in early March in Shebha, a small desert village distinguished by Qaddafi’s having gone to school there. Fidel Castro was the guest of honor as the “Congress” renamed Libya the “People's Socialist Libyan Arab Public” (sic) and kicked off Qaddafi's “Third Universal Principle” which he modestly claims solves “the problem of democracy.”

The Healyites have had some “problems” with “democracy” themselves; their solution has generally been to beat up political opponents. Qaddafi, who-unlike the WRP-holds state power, has worked out a more elaborate schema. His little Green Book explains that “both administration and supervision become popular” through “committees everywhere” – while Qaddafi becomes head of the “General People's Congress” which runs everything and is so “popular” that it meets once a year. The sinister meaning of this “solution” comes out in the slogans pasted up around Shebha: “Parliaments are defunct.” “representation is a fraud” and “Parties are treason” (London Guardian, 3 March 1977).

“Parties are treason” – what about the Workers Revolutionary Party? In this “People’s Public” where communists are to be jailed and butchered and their books burned, ostensible leftists would have to do some pretty peculiar things to survive – and News Line has made it clear the WRP would be more than willing to do them. The London Times (6 September 1976) reported:

“The repression... in Libya has not, of course, weakened the interest of
left-wing groups in other countries. Representatives of Miss Vanessa Redgrave's Workers' Revolutionary Party, for instance, have visited Libya three times in the past twelve months. Nor has it diminished the affection of those countries like Malta, which feel, with some reason, that Colonel Qaddafi has proved to be their only friend.”

Malta’s reasons are obvious. About to be impoverished by the closing of NATO bases, Malta is now dependent on Qaddafi's aid to remain solvent. The mendicant guerrillas who flock to Tripoli seeking Soviet-made arms and Libyan oil money reportedly have included Muslim secessionists from the Philippines and Ethiopia, opponents of anti-Qaddafi Arab regimes (Sudan, Yemen, Syria, Tunisia, Morocco), the Provisional IRA and various Palestinian organizations. Naturally, such groups do not bite the hand that feeds them and have accorded Qaddafi a high place in the pantheon of “anti-imperialist” leaders.

Corrupt

Workers Press, which folded on 14 February 1976, titled itself the “Daily Organ of the Central Committee of the Workers Revolutionary Party.” Heavy publicity in the preceding months for the paper’s “Crisis Fund” and dire warnings that “the future of the paper is in doubt” would lead to the presumption that it closed up shop for lack of funds. Yet the “Final Edition” Editorial Board statement does not explicitly say so; instead, the Healyites tersely announce that their printing firm, Plough Press, will cease operations.

The Healyites, normally so fond of denying inconvenient reports on the grounds of their bourgeois sources, hid behind an abstract and irrelevant set of statistics from one of the great bourgeois interests, the British Printing Industrial Federation, on “rises in general expenses” increasing printing costs. For two and a half months no Healyite newspaper appeared. Then News Line sprang to life – but not as any kind of party organ – with a format which included paid advertising. At about that same time Healy was replaced by Mike Banda as WRP general secretary.

The WRP ranks have been kept busy with the usual treks across England – and lately the “Children's Crusade” across Europe – designed in part to keep them too exhausted to notice their corrupt leaders’ maneuvering. But even a cursory look at News Line’s year-long pandering to the oil-rich Qaddafi forces the observation that there is indeed something very rotten in the state of Denmark.

Where is the Class Line in News Line? (1976)

Workers Vanguard No. 114 (17 June 1976)

Where's the Class Line in the News Line?

LONDON, May 6 – “At first glance it looks like the Daily Mirror,” writes the weekly London entertainment guide Time Out, comparing to the British equivalent of the New York Daily News and National Enquirer the Workers Revolutionary Party's latest desperate maneuver - a “popular” daily paper featuring big pictures, a “full racing card” and very little politics. The logo is indeed a deliberate imitation of that used by the sex-and-scandal British gutter press.

It looks like the Daily Mirror at second glance, too. The sympathetic article in Time Out notes, “despite appearances, The News Line is closely associated with the Trotskyist Workers Revolutionary Party,” commenting approvingly that most of the WRP’s political views have been removed from the new publication. Most of the news is “straight” reportage; thus News Line reports without comment that General Carvalho is being run for Portuguese President, or that the Italian Communist Party has proposed a grand coalition.

The WRP's daily Workers Press folded in February (see WV No. 97, 20 February 1976). Evidently concluding that even the fake-mass Workers Press had been too political to gain a wide readership, the WRP has now staked its hopes on trying to compete with the bourgeois press on its own terms. The accent is on sensationalism: spy scares, government sex scandals; tidbits of “human interest.”

Even the sports news in News Line is banal. The racing tips are mostly carefully hedged predictions on favourites – and the track record so far is not outstanding.

Once again the WRP’s antics provide fuel for the opponents of Trotskyism. The introduction to an anti-Trotskyist polemic (by Stalinist Monty Johnstone) notes with glee that the WRP “had also bitterly attacked the [CP's Morning] Star for having changed its name from the Daily Worker – only themselves now to adopt one which has not the slightest hint of a connection with working-class traditions and aspirations.”

Desperation

The WRP took the opportunity in the interim between dailies to retire general secretary Gerry Healy, renowned for his political banditry and organizational thuggery, whose place has now been taken by the equally notorious Michael Banda. The Healyites’ organisational fortunes have continued to decline markedly, both in Britain and internationally. The WRP May Day march was claimed to have 2,000 participants, but WV observers counted at most 560, including a large number of children.

Perhaps in desperation, the Healyites have pushed their techniques of “mass recruitment” to bizarre lengths. For instance, the 1 May issue of the Healyite Young Socialist trumpets “200 Members Join Hull YS.” And how did the Hull Healyites “recruit” 200 new members to their Young Socialist branch?

Simple. They just held a disco (dance with records) and “everyone who attended the disco was signed up as a YS member”! Another article on the same page further amplifies the recruitment technique. It explains with an apparently straight face that at a YS “football rally” recently a discussion was precipitated by the arrival of a group of youth wearing swastikas. “In the end,” the article placidly concludes, “it was agreed that such signs could not be worn in a Young Socialists disco and they were taken off.”

By all rights the British ostensibly Trotskyist organisations who mourned the demise of Workers Press should be hailing its rebirth as News Line. If the closing of Workers Press was a “loss” as the International Marxist Group's Red Weekly said, surely News Line is a “gain”? And if, the Workers Socialist League (whose core was expelled from the WRP in 1974) was correct in calling the liquidation of Workers Press “A Blow to Trotskyism” then why is not News Line a “blow for Trotskyism”!

The WSL's assessment of Workers Press showed its failure to draw the proper balance sheet of Healyism, attacking only the organisational sectarianism of the WRP and not its opportunist political practice. The outstanding trait of the Healyite “method,” the pretense at a mass base (a “base” built on discos and not Marxism) was strikingly revealed in the failure of its “mass paper,” which never had any significant support in the working class.

Moreover, the Healy tendency's degeneration into anti-Trotskyist political banditry occurred many years before the expulsion of the WSL. The disorientation of the WSL, and its leanings towards rightist conciliation of the Labour Party, are shown in its insistence that the WRP should never have stood candidates against the Labour Party – at the same time as the WSL insists that the WRP had enough mass support among advanced workers to sustain a daily paper! You cannot have it both ways.

The liquidation of the Workers Press removed a barrier in the fight to create a Trotskyist Party in Britain. The News Line is a last wild gamble that will not succeed. The hoped-for advertising, which was supposed to provide the financial support for the new paper that would enable it to succeed where Workers Press could not, has not materialised, with only a handful of theatres and bookstores taking out classified ads. The modest fund drive goal of £4,000 a month was just barely reached in the first month, and the needed circulation of 30,000 copies a day will not be reached on newsstand sales. The new paper, having effectively liquidated such political face as the WRP has, will carry general secretary Banda and his gang of political bandits down to disaster.