My Search For Revolution - Clare Cowen

My Search For Revolution & How we brought down an abusive leader - Clare Cowen (Matador Paperback/£19.99)

This is not a new book having been released last year though this has been on my list of things to blog about since I read a while back. This is the story of a woman and her involvement in the Workers Revolutionary Party and with it's leader Gerry Healy and the abuse both she and other members suffered.

In 1985 the WRP daily newspaper the News Line published a headline that shocked everyone who either was part of or monitored the far left: G. Healy expelled from the WRP. Details were sparse at first but the situation became clearer and the WRP split into two factions both publishing a  newspaper called the News Line it became known that Healy, the party founder and leader had been busing female members of the party including some of it's younger members.

For many years outsiders had viewed the Workers Revolutionary Party as a cult. It was notoriously sectarian and prone to using slander and physical violence against it's opponents and own members on occasion. Healy himself was a former Stalinist who back in the thirties before his conversion had been known to be liberal with his fists against Trotskyists. It seems this habit stayed with hi all his life.

Until the split no one knew the size of the organisation and it was rumoured to be financed by Libyan and Iraqi petro-dollars. In fact this not only turned out to be true it seems Healy utilised Vanessa and Corin Redgrave to facilitate fund raising in the Gulf States.

The WRP had started out as a Trotskyist current inside the Labour Party after the collapse of the Revolutionary Party which contained the three main British Trotskyist leaders, Tony Cliff, Ted Grant and Gerry Healy. Cliff founded the International Socialists,  Grant the Militant Tendency and Healy the WRP.

Over the years the organisations fortunes changed and as the Socialist Labour League managed to attract more than a few activists and in the early sixties even managed to take control of the Labour Party's Young Socialists upon which it became proscribed.



Over the years Healy led an organisation that gradually evolved into  very inward looking sect expelling anyone that dared criticise the great leader himself. Even the WRP's own version of the Fourth International was very heavily controlled by Healy and his acolytes.

Meanwhile one member, Clare Cowen became attracted to the SLL/WRP via their line on the Rhodesian crisis and became heavily involved. The book weaves a tale of how she and her partner became part of the Party Centre and Cowen explains how her partner was manipulated out the Centre over a cupboard by Healy who it turned out had designs on her.

In very forthright terms Cowen explains that healy had in asked her to remove her dress in his private office and she submitted to sex with  him that became a regular occurance. A leader with needs she mused not recognising the controlled abuse at first. these were very different times. Cowen also thought wrongly that she was the only one.



The long road to the collapse of the WRP over two things a financial crisis and a letter from Aileen Jennings, Healy's Private Secretary outlining the sexual abuse he had been undertaking over the years. The shock and betrayal is clear as is the resulting anger not just from the author but so many of those who had made such sacrifices for this man and his cause.

The rest is history as they say and has been documented in many places. Yet even to the end healy had supporters. Despite his death the man still has followers maintaining an archive and he has never been fully written out of the history of the tendency he created as so many were complicit in his political crimes.

The sadness is that after all this the author does try to persuade herself the cause was right as do so many but these lessons seem lost on so many. The Socialist Workers Party split apart after trying to cover abuse by one it's leaders in the Comrade Delta affair. Even now the remnants of the SWP are squabbling over other scandals in UCU and their Tyneside Branch.

History can and does repeat itself in that with power no matter how small the environment is can corrupt and causes harm to those involved. Just as priests and pastors can be perverted, Trotskyists are not immune.