Spinning a Yarn

One of the challenges confronting any biographer and historian of Gerry Healy is the subject’s unreliability as narrator of his own past. Born in Galway in 1913, Healy claimed to have grown up in an impoverished farming family and to have seen his father shot dead in front of him by the Black and Tans in the 1920s. On both counts, Healy seems to have been economical with the truth: his family was, it appears, part of Ireland’s modest but reasonably comfortable rural petit bourgeoisie, and the story about his father’s death was, according to Beatty, an ‘outright lie’; Beatty speculates that Healy’s father may have suffered mental health problems and died instead in a psychiatric hospital. Healy’s discomfort with his family background, and his tendency to conceal inconvenient realities about it, was reciprocated: Healy’s immediate family apparently told relatives that he had died at sea in 1940, presumably out of embarrassment at his politics.

After a spell in the Communist Party of Great Britain, Healy defected to Trotskyism. Even in this early phase, in the 1930s, Trotskyist groups displayed a marked predisposition to ‘splinter into tiny irrelevance’. The turn of official Communism away from the sectarian line of the Third Period and towards the left-liberal alliance of the Popular Front saw the CPGB make renewed headway among the working class, even if it never seriously threatened Labour’s pre-eminence. Trotskyism, however, remained confined to the fringes of the labour movement, and the death of its great lodestar, Trotsky himself, in 1940 compounded its isolation; Trotskyist sects lived, Beatty notes, ‘in a world of theory, with little in the way of practice,’ turning inwards and engaging in continual, internecine disputes among themselves. However, the wartime ban on strikes, supported by the CPGB, did enable Trotskyists to channel some working-class grievances and fill part of the vacuum.

By the late 1940s, Gerry Healy had established himself as a prominent figure in the still small milieu of British Trotskyism, adeptly navigating his way through a series of splits through a combination of personal charisma, organisational discipline, theoretical rigidity and craftiness. With the Labour Party elected to office in a landslide in 1945, it became a more attractive target for entryist groups. Healy thus led a small pro-entryist faction out of the Revolutionary Communist Party, which became known simply as ‘The Club’. While Healy’s attempts to get himself selected as a Labour parliamentary candidate were unsuccessful, The Club did get a handful of its cadres elected as Labour councillors and exerted some sway over the Labour left through its newspaper, Socialist Outlook.

The Club’s uncompromising anti-imperialist line on the Korean War would cost it much of this influence, clashing sharply as it did with the Labour leadership’s alignment with US Cold War prerogatives and ultimately resulting in Socialist Outlook’s proscription by the Labour Party in 1954. In 1959, The Club reconstituted itself as the Socialist Labour League, and although it continued to organise within the Labour Party, its influence was by now largely confined to its youth wing, the Young Socialists, which the SLL gained control of in 1964 and ran from its own headquarters in Clapham. In time-honoured fashion — and as it had already done with the Labour Party League of Youth in 1960, after it became too leftwing for comfort — the right-wing Labour leadership responded by shutting the Young Socialists down.

Violence — directed not at class enemies but internal adversaries who had fallen foul of Healy — was already a marked feature of Healyism at this stage. In one incident, Canadian Trotskyist Ernie Tate was set upon by a six-strong gang of Healyite heavies while selling pamphlets critical of Healy outside a Socialist Labour League event, with Healy himself said to have supervised the attack personally. Healy was later pressured into apologising for the assault to Isaac Deutscher — venerated author of the definitive, three-volume Trotsky biography, The Prophet — then serving as a kind of mediator between the squabbling sects of British Trotskyism. Opponents of the SLL within Labour’s Young Socialists were also allegedly subjected to verbal and physical attacks.

West End Revolutionary Party

The Socialist Labour League was refounded as the Workers Revolutionary Party in 1973. Symbolic of Healy’s ambition to lead the British revolution at the head of its definitive vanguard party, the establishment of the WRP was not merely an organisational reshuffle but strategic: it was intended that the WRP would function as a disciplined Leninist party capable of providing the British working class with the firm, clear-sighted leadership it would need during the anticipated revolutionary crisis, which would not, Healy repeatedly told his followers, be long in coming.

The creation of the WRP came at a time of mounting economic turmoil and industrial unrest in Britain. But the party’s lofty goals were far removed from the realities it faced, and its establishment merely signalled an accelerated descent into cultish insularity and Healy’s personal dictatorship. Contemptuous of other left-wing groups, the WRP positioned itself as the leading edge of revolutionary socialism in Britain, emphasising the militant activism and rigid internal discipline befitting of a vanguard party. It established a daily newspaper, News Line, and maintained a visible presence on picket lines and protests. Yet despite this, the party failed to significantly expand either its membership or its support base in the wider working-class movement.

Where the WRP did succeed in recruiting supporters was in the world of film, television and theatre, earning it the derisive tag of ‘West End Revolutionary Party’ from other groups on the left. From the late 1960s, Healy had attracted interest from some well-known actors and writers, among them playwrights David Mercer, Jim Allen and Trevor Griffiths — whose play The Party featured a central character, John Tagg, modelled on Healy — as well as filmmaker Roy Battersby and actors Frances de la Tour, star of the hit sitcom Rising Damp, and Corin Redgrave. Redgrave would succeed in recruiting his more illustrious sister, Vanessa, to the WRP; for years thereafter, the pair would be among Healy’s most devoted acolytes and would remain so even after his public fall from grace.

The presence of these middle-class, artistic recruits had a number of advantages for Gerry Healy. Firstly, as people of ample financial means they were able and willing to supply the fledgling WRP with a steady stream of donations, but also, having had little if any prior involvement in the working-class movement, they tended to be more loyal to Healy personally and were therefore less likely to assert themselves against him. As such, they were generally spared the more onerous and time-consuming demands imposed on their less well-to-do comrades, as well as his violent rages. They did their bit for the cause nevertheless: actor Kate Beckinsale, stepdaughter of Roy Battersby, has recalled selling copies of News Line during her early childhood.

The undeniably high profile of these recruits to the WRP did little to win new activists or supporters to the party. Although this period — from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s — marked the high water mark of British Trotskyism’s influence, the WRP’s membership likely peaked at between 2,000 and 3,000, and even this figure may be inflated somewhat by the inclusion of sympathisers and loosely aligned activists. Vanessa Redgrave’s personal fame and acclaim likewise failed to translate into votes for the WRP, standing as she did as a parliamentary candidate on three occasions and winning only a few hundred votes each time; her campaigning efforts and attempts to relate to the locals in working-class areas, though doubtless sincere and well-intentioned, proved predictably awkward.

In contrast to the acting fraternity, those intellectuals who found their way into Healyite circles tended not to remain there for long. Peter Fryer — who later authored Staying Power, a landmark work of Black British history — had departed the SLL in 1959 after attacking the autocratic leadership of Healy and his clique, ultimately having to threaten to drag Healy through the courts unless he ended his campaign of harassment towards Fryer. Alasdair MacIntyre, who became an influential moral philosopher after moving away from Marxism, similarly concluded that as no dissent was possible within the SLL, he could not remain a supporter. Beneath Healy’s charisma and revolutionary rhetoric lay a deeply authoritarian streak, which served to transform his organisations into mere instruments of his personal domination — and which would sow the seeds of the WRP’s eventual collapse.

Crisisism and Cultism

Healy’s leadership was built on a foundation of unsustainable demands and unrealistic expectations. A defining characteristic of the SLL and WRP was Healy’s tendency to continually play up the severity of political and economic crises beyond their actual significance, always implying that the decisive revolutionary crisis was looming on the horizon. This tendency, which Beatty terms ‘crisisism’, was such a consistent feature that, on occasion, Healy would inevitably appear — like a broken clock — to be on the right track. It also meant, however, that every minor, localised flare-up tended to be presented as if it were a prelude to the impending final conflagration.

As a result, Healy’s activists were expected to maintain a frenetic pace of activity, constantly buzzing from the scene of one battle to the next; WRP branches were set unrealistic fundraising and News Line sales targets, and berated when they fell short of them. This produced a high rate of membership turnover and ensured that the ranks were always composed of green, inexperienced new recruits. This prevented a more established cadre from asserting itself or forming the kind of counterweight to Healy that could have potentially mounted an opposition to his dictatorial tendencies. As Healy’s marriage became strained, his control over the organisation grew tighter. He took up residence in the WRP’s Clapham headquarters, while rank-and-file members who were also resident there were expected to report on their movements directly to the party leadership.

There was a constant suspicion that the WRP was being snooped on by state security services, both British and overseas; Healy took to travelling in a car equipped with a two-way radio to avoid surveillance, with an aerial installed at Clapham for direct communication. It must be said that these suspicions were far from groundless. In September 1975, the WRP’s College of Marxist Education in Derbyshire was raided by police after a supposed tip-off that it was being used to store arms. (Suspicions were roused within the WRP when it emerged that a report on the raid had appeared in an early edition of The Observer, which went to print before the raid actually took place.) Though all charges relating to the raid were later dropped, the episode further heightened — perhaps by design — the paranoid and acrid atmosphere in the party.

Beatty is reluctant to describe the WRP as a cult, arguing that this is too glib: it makes it easy to dismiss the WRP merely as eccentric and crankish, in thrall to a single wicked individual, and thereby avoid confronting more fundamental flaws and dangers inherent to the democratic-centralist party model. But by stoking a sense of revolutionary urgency, Healy was able to motivate his followers and maintain his authority, even if it came at a high cost: namely, the frequent burnout of WRP activists — who were, let us not forget, motivated by a sincere commitment to socialism and gave generously of their energies in pursuit of that cause — and the party’s insularity from the wider working-class movement, creating a bunker mentality that would ultimately prove highly pernicious and corrosive, cultivating the abusive internal dynamics that contributed to its eventual disintegration.

Downfall

The collapse of the WRP came in 1985, marking a humiliating end to Gerry Healy’s tenure as its dominant leader and theoretician. Revelations of Healy’s abusive conduct — he is known to have coerced at least 26 women into sexual relationships with him — tore the party asunder, though concerns about the WRP’s financial instability had already caused growing dissent within its ranks. Healy’s autocratic methods and increasingly unaccountable use of party resources had created a deeply corrupt and dysfunctional organisation.

The key figures in Healy’s unravelling were Clare Cowan and Aileen Jennings, who had discovered that they had both been pressured into sex by Healy; although these relations were formally consensual, there was nonetheless coercion involved as the WRP was not the sort of organisation where members said no to Gerry Healy. Jennings had also previously been physically assaulted by Healy: on one occasion, Healy broke a chair over Jennings’ back, leaving her with a permanent disability. Jennings drafted an anonymous letter detailing Healy’s abuse of his position and went into hiding to avoid recriminations.

Jennings’ accusations were backed up by the findings of a subsequent report which identified a clear pattern of behaviour by Healy: coercing young women into having sex with him on party premises and threatening them if they refused his advances. One of Healy’s victims had attempted to kill herself, while another woman said she had been targeted by Healy but that he had backed off after learning that she was below the legal age of consent. According to Tariq Ali, rumours concerning Healy’s predatory conduct towards young women had circulated elsewhere on the British far left from the late 1960s.

While Cowan and Jennings had been motivated by a genuine concern for their comrades who had also suffered at Healy’s hands, there were others who had previously served as his henchmen and now turned opportunistically against him, whether they were jockeying for position to succeed him or simply trying to whitewash their own stained reputations. The culture of coercion, violence and authoritarianism that had long permeated the WRP persisted even as Healy himself fell into disgrace: Beatty notes that some women WRP activists who had remained loyal to Healy were themselves violently assaulted by Mike Banda, the party’s general secretary and a longtime Healy acolyte who came to lead the charge against his former mentor. There were, Beatty observes, ‘many crimes’ in the crumbling WRP, ‘but very few heroes.”

Although Healy was expelled from the WRP, the party continued spiralling into chaos and gave way to an alphabet soup of rival factions; in total, ten sects would emerge from the wreckage of the WRP. (The Redgraves dutifully followed Healy into his minute post-WRP formation, the Marxist Party, while Vanessa Redgrave — now a dame — seems to have abandoned socialist politics altogether.) Even so, Healy retained some influential supporters on the left. These included Ken Livingstone, who argued after Healy’s death in 1989 that the final demise of the WRP had been midwifed by MI5, supposedly perturbed by Healy’s domestic influence and Middle East connections. There was indeed state interference in the WRP; the Spycops revelations have demonstrated that there was scarcely a leftwing group in the country that wasn’t infiltrated at some time by undercover police, even down to street theatre troupes. But pinning the blame on the state allowed Healy’s remaining followers to evade the thoroughgoing self-criticism that was desperately needed.

Much subsequent discussion of Healy and the WRP has centred on the party’s alleged relations with Arab nationalist governments, specifically Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya. A report published by anti-Healyites after their former leader’s downfall claimed that the WRP had received more than £1 million from Arab governments and the Palestine Liberation Organisation, though Beatty is rightly sceptical of this; the WRP was sycophantic in its support of Saddam — despite his role as an on-off client of US imperialism — even to the point of endorsing his execution of 21 Iraqi Communists in News Line, but Beatty suggests that Healy deliberately exaggerated his closeness to Arab governments to play up his own international clout. It certainly seems improbable that Iraq or Libya would have had any real illusions in a sect as small as the WRP, let alone the PLO, which had much bigger fish to fry.

Original Sin

The Party is Always Right roots the abuses of Gerry Healy and the degeneration of the Workers Revolutionary Party in the structural failings of the Leninist, democratic-centralist party model. For Beatty, such parties too often create environments where leaders are insulated from accountability, enabling the rise of demagogues and abusers like Healy. Beatty’s account of Healyism thus serves as an argument in favour of left-wing social democracy, as exemplified by figures like Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders (Beatty has had some involvement in the Democratic Socialists of America). Yet, while these parties have remained mercifully free of Healyesque abuses, their very limited progress in advancing the cause of socialism raises serious doubts about their effectiveness.

Left-populist and social-democratic organisations generally permit broad-based participation, eschewing the more rigid hierarchies and disciplinary mechanisms of democratic centralism. This greater openness has fostered a more inclusive political culture at the grassroots level where abuses like those seen in the WRP are much less likely, and this is not insignificant. But the record of these parties is disappointing when it comes to bringing about transformative change. Even where left social democrats have attained high office, their efforts to confront capitalism and imperialism have been thwarted by elites within their own parties, the broader state apparatus, or external pressures from both the bourgeois media and the forces of capital in general, which they have proven ill-equipped to resist.

Moreover, social-democratic parties, and even more so the US Democratic Party, are themselves deeply undemocratic and elitist in practice, particularly when in government. (The more recent wave of left-populist parties, too, tended to become less democratic the closer they got to government office.) While they may give their rank-and-file a degree of freedom to engage in activism and participate in policy debates — though the experience of Starmerism suggests even this space is narrowing — these activities rarely influence the decisions of party leaders, who are usually free to ignore or override them. Power remains concentrated overwhelmingly among professional politicians, bureaucrats and advisors, always closely attended to by a coterie of lobbyists behind closed doors. These parties, preoccupied as they are by the electoral cycle, have also proved unwilling or unable to wage the sort of ideological and cultural struggle necessary to build socialist class consciousness — they have much more often actively lowered popular aspirations than raised them — or build the structures of popular power that might enable a more ambitious challenge to capitalism.

Beatty’s critique of Healyism highlights the dangers of authoritarianism and autocracy in revolutionary socialist parties, but the failures of left populism make clear that abandoning the Leninist model does not automatically resolve the challenges of advancing socialism in nominally liberal-democratic societies. Social-democratic and left-populist movements might be freer internally, but their structural weaknesses and inability to curb capitalist power render them incapable of bringing about fundamental social change. Can a counter-hegemonic, revolutionary party be built that avoids the potential pitfalls of democratic centralism while transcending the limitations of reformism? The question remains open, but the lamentable story of the Workers Revolutionary Party underscores the need for socialists to devise creative, outward-looking new strategies for collective emancipation.