Statement of the Central Committee of the Workers Revolutionary Party (Healyite)

October 30, 1985

The Workers Revolutionary Party, British section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, has passed through the biggest political crisis in its history.

But it has emerged with its revolutionary principles unimpaired, its fighting traditions upheld and its cadre politically and theoretically strengthened.

A necessary and long over-due split with the revisionist, anti-Trotskyist Banda clique has been carried out successfully.

Banda and Bradford University lecturer Cliff Slaughter have been left with a rump of politically deranged malcontents plus those individuals who are desperately seeking a way out of the intensifying class struggle.

The Workers Revolutionary Party will continue to fight on the platform of the perspectives unanimously decided at the Seventh Congress in December 1984, the Party constitution which embodies the Leninist principle of democratic centralism and the struggle for dialectical materialist theory and practice in the Party and the working class.

At a special congress on October 26, 1985, the Workes [sic] Revolutionary Party decisively split fro [sic] the Banda-Slaughter clique which had attempted to hi jack the Party, the daily News Line and the Young Socialist. (See Special Congress resolution printed on this page).

This impelled the Banda group a further stage in its anti-party frenzy and its rabid political degeneration.

They lined up with the forces of the capitalist state to bring down an unparalleled witchhunt on Trotskyism and its most outstanding post-war leader, Comrade Gerry Healy.

Lying charges against Comrade Healy were published in Banda’s organ, delighting the Tory press, the Stalinists, revisionists and Trotskyist-haters everywhere.

The best elements in the labour and trade union movement are furious with Banda’s cowardly attack on Comrade Healy. They have been outraged by the ferocity of Banda’s onslaught on the Party that he once led as general secretary.

The source of this sudden and virulent attack from within the WRP itself is the immense revolutionary changes in the objective world situation.

The political and economic crisis is deepening all over the world. The Reagan administration has officially adopted pre-emptive terrorism as a weapon of its foreign policy in the Middle East and Latin America; the Israeli regime is lashing out to behead the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO); the Botha dictatorship in South Africa is conducting a systematic slaughter of black militants; and the Thatcher regime is waging a policy of violent class war at home while carrying out murderous military intrigues in Ireland and against its adversaries in the former colonies.

Because of the emergence of Bonapartism in Britain, the capitalist state and its forces of mass repression are now in the forefront of every struggle facing the working class, the youth and the trade unions.

This has imposed new revolutionary tasks and political responsibilities on the Marxist leadership of the working-class movement, the Workers Revolutionary Party.

This is what lies behind Banda’s renegacy and the strange coalition of ex-members, quitters and do-nothings that he now heads.

They have adopted the ‘new realism’ promoted by the Euro-Stalinists. It amounts to defeatism followed by capitulation to the Labour and trade union bureaucracies and to Stalinism.

Their right-wing politics is the real content of their frenzied attack on Comrade Healy and the Party.

To get to their new right-wing postures, they objectively had to try to smash the WRP, its daily News Line and all the great achievements of the Party since its formation in November 1973.

But this political conspiracy failed. They were decisively rebuffed because the cadre of the Party had been trained under Comrade Healy’s leadership in the dialectical materialist method and the principles fought for by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky.

Fifteen members of the old Central Committee resolutely refused to be stampeded by the hysteria whipped up Banda, Slaughter and Workes [sic] League national secretary David North.

North, who heads an organisation of no more than 74 members, now presents himself as the ‘leader’ of the rump ICFI. If he has the same success reregistering Banda’s faction as he has in the US, then the Banda clique will have a dwindling and short-lived existence!

We place on record our revolutionary greetings to the Greek and Spanish sections of the ICFI which unanimously rejected the Banda-Slaughter-North political coup and stood firm with the ICFI and Comrade Healy in the world movement.

We call on all those who stand by the revolutionary traditions, principles and history of the Party to rally immediately and to repel this orchestrated attack on Trotskyism, which serves only teh [sic] state and the ruling class.

We are confident that this struggle is going to strengthen the working class in Britain and internationally and open the way for the building of the ICFI as the world party of socialist revolution.