Not everyone on the far-left is happy to give the revisionist Jeremy Corbyn a free run in the General Election. Enter the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) a grand sounding name for what is just a tiny fragment of the old WRP that split asunder in 1985 after their founder/guru/leader was found to have have been sexually abusing or rather raping his female members. Young Socialists in particular were to his tastes.
Back in the seventies and early eighties the WRP was one of the four main far-left political parties outside the Labour and Communist Parties. It had originated out of the Revolutionary Communist Party (1944 version) which contained not just WRP founder Gerry Healy but also Ted Grant who went on to found Militant and Tony Cliff who formed the Socialist Workers Party. It was the only tie that most British Trotskyists were in one organisation.
Healy split and entered the Labour Party forming The Club and publishing Socialist Appeal which eventually transformed into The Newsletter in time for Hungary 1956 where it managed to attract many dissident members of the Communist Party not that it hung on to most for long due to it's hard line internal regime in which Healy could not be challenged.
Cutting a long story short Healy went on to found the Socialist Labour League and published the first Trotskyist daily newspaper Workers Press as it transformed itself into the Workers Revolutionary Party. Healy attracted Vanessa and Corin Redgrave giving the WRP influence amongst a certain layer of luvvies and helped the group manage to organise some quite large rallies.
The Workers Press was closed down and a new colour daily newspaper (before the mainstream press it has to be noted) The News Line was published with as we now know money from various dodgy supposedly "anti-Imperialist" Middle Eastern regimes like Libya and Iraq but with help from the luvvies toured around the Gulf States fund raising.
Heavily supportive of the "anti-Zionist" movement and worked towards promoting not just the PLO but eventually ended up a friend of the Ayatollah. When the Iran Iraq war broke out The News Line published a statement calling on them to stand down and face the Zionist common enemy.
The News Line's photographers were used to to take pictures of Iraqi and other Middle Eastern dissidents which ended up being traded to the various despots. At least one walked out of the WRP at the time.
When the rape scandal broke out the WRP split with the Redgrave's backing Healy and for a while there were two WRPs and two editions of the News Line every day which we all joked was just to "double their circulation". However Healy eventually formed The Marxist Party which pandered to Gorbachev and the other WRP founded a weekly paper Workers Press but the group disintegrated as they all fell out.
Amongst the organisations that came out of the WRP were Socialist Fight led by Gerry Downing him of the car crash interview when interviewed by Andrew Neil on the BBC after he was kicked out the Labour Party and the Socialist Equality Party who followed David North of the American Workers League who managed to capture the majority of the WRP's tiny version of the Fourth International.
Then there was the small group around Sheila Torrance who continued with the WRP name and News Line franchise. It's not known how many members they have or how they manage to continue a daily paper! Yet they do and the WRP are running candidates in the General Election.
So far they have declared candidates in Bradford, Southall, Peckham and Kensington. A long way down from their 1979 heyday of 60 candidates which gave the country it's first Trotskyist party political broadcast.
Their votes will be derisory but I might pick up a copy of The News Line if I manage to bump into a paper seller. For old times sake. It was once an "essential read" for Trot spotters and inveterate sectarians.
You can find the WRP here: wrp.org.uk
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