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Workers' Revolutionary PartyThe Workers' Revolutionary Party was a Trotskyist political party in the United Kingdom. The Club The WRP grew out of the faction Gerry Healy led in the Revolutionary Communist Party which urged that the RCP enter the Labour Party. This policy was also urged on the RCP by the leadership of the Fourth International. When the majority in the RCP rejected the policy in 1947, Healy's faction was granted the right to split from the RCP and work within the Labour Party as a separate body. From this point onwards they became known internally as The Club. They sold Socialist Outlook until it was banned in 1954, then supported Tribune. They formed a new group around The Newsletter newspaper in 1957. This group was the official British section of the Fourth International, and when it split in 1953, they became one of the largest sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International. Under its influence, they put out very anti-Pablo publicity, and fostered their support of Mao Tse-Tung in China. Socialist Labour League The group grew, in part as people grew disillusioned with the Communist Party of Great Britain's position on the Hungarian revolution and in part from recruits from trade union activities. This led them to form the Socialist Labour League in 1959, independent and for the first time openly Trotskyist, although still with most of its members in the Labour Party. They were very active in Labour Party youth organisation, the Young Socialists, and gained control until it was shut down in 1964. Around this time a group split from the SLL to form Solidarity (UK), which became an theoretically influential, industrially oriented, non-sectarian organisation. In 1963, the SLL leadership claimed 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. They formed the All Trade Unions Alliance wholly controlled by them. Workers Revolutionary Party Leaving the Labour Party, they claimed that it was necessary to unconditionally support nationalist groups in various Arabic countries, including Saddam Hussein and Colonel Gaddafi. The party slowly lost members from the mid-1970s as demands on members to serve the organisation took their toll, although Vanessa Redgrave and some minor celebrities joined. A major split occurred when Alan Thornett was expelled, and went on to found the Workers Socialist League. The WRP also notoriously purchased Trotsky's death mask to use as an iconic focus for events. In the early 1980s, the BBC claimed that News Line was financed by money from Colonel Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein's governments. The Socialist Organiser newspaper repeated these claims, and the WRP chose to sue them. The WRP soon abandoned the case, leading many to surmise that they were guilty. At around the same time, Gerry Healy was expelled from the party he founded, having been accused of sexual abuse of twenty-six female members by his secretary. Fragmentation This turmoil led to the WRP fragmenting. At the beginning of what was to be a period of intense factional struggle two versions of the WRP were in existence, each publishing their own daily News Line paper! The split in the WRP also had repercussions in the ICFI and as a result there were two versions of this body, too. The two versions of the WRP soon became known by their newspapers with the version led by Gerry Healy and Sheila Torrence being known as the WRP (Newsline) and that led by Cliff Slaughter known as the WRP (Workers Press). Both would fragment further over the coming years. The first split in the pro-Healy WRP came when a section of the London membership around full timer Richard Price went into revolt and were expelled in due course. They formed the Workers International League which has since evolved into Workers Action and no longer has anything in common with the Healyism it defended when first founded. Another split in the pro-Healy ICFI and WRP would develop when the American section of the ICFI led by David North revolted against Healy's leadership and split to form its own rival movement also called the ICFI. Some members of the WRP sympathetic to North left the WRP at this point to form the International Communist Party based in Yorkshire. This grouping has since been renamed the Socialist Equality Party and largely confines its activity to the publication of texts on the internet. In 1986, the ICFI loyal to Healy expelled the WRP (Newsline) after Healy had been pushed out of the WRP and had formed his own Marxist Party in 1987 with his few remaining supporters including the well-known actors Corin and Vanessa Redgrave. The Marxist Party would in turn lose another small split after Healy's death which formed the Communist League while the Marxist Party would linger on to 2004 before dissolving itself. The WRP (Workers Press) led by Cliff Slaughter meanwhile entered into a period in which its press became the focus of debate on the history of the WRP/ICFI for the members of the WRP and other Trotskyists in Britain and abroad. Moves were made to organise an Open Conference of Trotskyists throughout the world, but this miscarried and in the end a minority of the WRP around veteran Bill Hunter and Martin Ralph were to form the Bolshevik Faction in August 1987. This which split in February 1988 to form the International Socialist League as a section of Argentinian Trotskyist leader Nahuel Moreno's International Workers League (LIT). The ever declining remnant of the WRP(WP) limped on and in 1990 it formed the Workers International to Rebuild the Fourth International with a few other tiny groups including that led by Belaz Nagy called the Group of Opposition and Continuity of the Fourth International (GOCFI). In 1996 the decision was taken to abandon the name WRP, and it renamed itself the Movement for Socialism in 1996. This later split again with Slaughter's group continuing to use the name MFS and the Bob Archer and Dot Gibson group going by the name WIRFI. Neither have any regular press and are now minuscule. Torrance's WRP is now the only surviving Workers' Revolutionary Party in the UK and it still publishes News Line almost daily.
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