THE PARTY  IS ALWAYS RIGHT : THE UNTOLD STORY OF GERRY HEALY AND BRITISH TROTSKYISM

By Aidan Beatty

Pluto Press. 214 pages. £16.99. ISBN 978-0-7453-4872-8

Reviewed by Jim Burns

Years ago, when “alternative” bookshops flourished in many towns and cities, I enjoyed sifting through the racks of newspapers and magazines published by the various left-wing groups then active. The Trotskyist publications particularly caught my attention, not because I was attracted to their ideas but more because they often seemed to be at war with each other, rather than with the capitalist system. I couldn’t help wondering just what, if anything, they were ever likely to achieve in terms of a substantial membership when a tendency to purge, split and create new small parties kept them forever struggling to survive. As a regular contributor to the weekly Tribune, and an occasional contributor to more-obscure titles like The Industrial Unionist and Workers Opposition, I could sympathise with most people on the Left of the political divide, at least in principle, but the bickering and hostility between the supposed “comrades”, coupled with the retreat into theory rather than practice,  inclined me to think that the Trotskyists were eventually doomed to, if not extinction, then irrelevance.

Aidan Beatty’s well-researched and readable history of the rise and fall of one Trotskyist group and its leader may well stand to encapsulate many of the problems common to all similar organisations. But one thing does perhaps make it different. Gerry Healy didn’t only dominate the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP). He appears to have been able for a long time to get away with a catalogue of violence and sexual abuse that, in normal circumstances, would have brought about a reaction not only from his victims, but also from  the supposedly enlightened fellow-members of the party. That the reaction only occurred after many years says a great deal about the nature of the control that Healy exercised over those he led.

Healy was born in 1913 in Galway, Ireland, but was always vague about his early days and claimed that they were “poverty-stricken”. In fact, Beatty says, his family was relatively well-off and owned a 109-acre farm. Healy also claimed to have seen his father killed by the Black and Tans during the Irish War of Independence, a lie he could get away with because the British left tended to be largely ignorant of Irish history. He left Ireland when he was 14 to train as a ship’s radio operator in Britain. How long he spent at sea isn’t known, and many other facts relating to Healy’s life need to be treated with caution. He may have joined the Young Communist League when he was 18, but “The first definite record of him being a member of the Communist Party was not until 1936”. He was, initially, a loyal communist, but in 1937 switched his allegiance to the Trotskyists. It’s not my intention to provide a detailed account of what Trotskyism added up to. Beatty sums up its basic difference to Stalinism : “In opposition to the Stalinist position that the USSR should develop Socialism in One Country, Trotskyists advocated Permanent Revolution in which Communism would be spread rapidly and globally”.  There was more to it than that, but this isn’t the place to go into all the factors that differentiated Trotskyism from Stalinist communism.

Beatty additionally refers to the problems facing small groups like the Trotskyists who can do little to shape events : “Without any practical ways to settle debates, by actually putting them into practice, theoretical debates take precedence. Trotskyist groups often exist in a world of theory, with little in the way of practice”.   It’s worth noting what Beatty says about a Scottish Trotskyist named Jock Haston, who claimed to have “won Healy over to the Trotskyist movement”.  He had been a merchant seaman and helped to distribute socialist literature in Nazi Germany, “but was expelled from the Communist Party in 1934 after questioning Soviet trade links with the Third Reich”.  According to Beatty, some of what Healy claimed were his experiences while in the merchant navy were too close for comfort to Halston’s.

Healy worked in factories during the Second World War, and married Betty Russell, a secretary and teacher and a one-time member of the Communist Party. Without going too much into the ins and outs of Trotskyists groupings, which tend to be of interest only to those obsessed with such matters, the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) was formed in 1944, and within it Healy pushed for a policy of entryism into the Labour Party in order to gain  new recruits for Trotskyism. Not everyone agreed with him and his faction became known as “The Club”.  Beatty is of the opinion that this marks the point where Healy began to become a leading light of British Trotskyism. And soon started to display “authoritarian tendencies”.

I’m moving events along quickly to avoid becoming bogged down in factional disputes and the like. It was in the 1950s that Healy and other members of “The Club” were expelled from the Labour Party.  In response, and “adding to the Trotskyist alphabet soup, the Socialist Labour League (SLL] was born”. Again, fast-forwarding takes us to the early-1970s when Healy was able to bring a number of what would be called “celebrities” to  the “debating parties” held in homes around London. They included the playwrights Jim Allen and David Mercer, the filmmaker Ken Loach, and the actor Corin Redgrave. Some were impressed by Healy’s seeming command of Marxist and Trotskyist ideology, others less so.

But, for Healy, these gatherings were a handy way of raising funds : “When Corin Redgrave joined the party, Healy allegedly told party members that he still needed to recruit Vanessa, Corin’s sister, and the wealthier of the two : ‘it’s the big one I’m interested in, the one with the money’ “. The SLL started to pick up new members, and “Healy rebranded it in July 1973 as the Workers Revolutionary Party” : “it was now a true vanguard party in the Leninist mould, one that would lead the British working classes to victory in the looming terminal crisis of capitalism”. The WRP was to be the high point of Healy’s political life, and is where the story of his downfall also begins.

Beatty’s detailed account of events and personalities within the orbit of the WRP can be quite fascinating, but also disturbing. Healy maintained a strict control and expected his followers (disciples might be a better word) to carry out their duties, such as running the party’s office, selling its papers, raising funds, and more, for little or no pay. If they failed, he raged, and it wasn’t unknown for him to physically assault anyone who offended him. One of the more shocking stories is of him breaking a chair over the back of his secretary,  Aileen Jennings, “an action that was hushed up at the time”, but left her with long-lasting spinal injuries. When summer camps took place it was claimed that violence and intimidation were not unknown as  elements of party discipline.

What is intriguing is how Healy managed to raise money to purchase a property in Derbyshire where in 1975 he established a College of Marxist Education. There’s a photo of White Meadow House in the book, and when adaptations had been carried out it could accommodate up to 60 students. Local people were told that it was a drama school, which tied in with the fact of Corin Redgrave being named as the owner. However, the College was the cause of the WRP receiving the kind of publicity it perhaps didn’t want.

I can remember the furore that arose when the Daily Mail published articles by a journalist named Shelley Rohde exposing the true purpose of the activities at the College. Needless to say, it was all angled to give the impression of a radical group about to promote a revolution and overthrow the government of the United Kingdom, something the paper’s readers were probably prepared to believe. To anyone familiar with the fumblings of minor groups like the WRP it seemed more like a comedy than a real threat. It did, however, lead to a police raid on the premises, ostensibly in a search for arms supposedly hidden there. They did find some bullets but no guns, and there were suggestions that the bullets may not have been there before the police arrived.

Healy’s attitude towards women in general had always been of a negative nature. Beatty says that he saw women as “part of the ‘backward’ elements of society”, and that he was a “misogynist” and he led groups that “had a set of profound gender biases”.  It all came to a head when allegations of sexual abuse surfaced in 1985. This didn’t come as a surprise to some people. Rumours and gossip about Healy’s activities had circulated for some years, but it took a letter from Aileen Jennings to the Political Committee of the WRP to bring it out into the open : “As the letter made clear, Gerry Healy, by then in his early seventies, was using his position within a profoundly hierarchical and authoritarian organisation to coerce women, many of them in their twenties, into having sex with him”.  Jennings named 26 women in her letter as “victims of Healy”. There was also a story involving a 14 year old girl. The result was that he was expelled from the party he had founded. The front page of the issue of The News Line, the party newspaper, dated 30 October 1985, reproduced in the book, has the headline, “G. Healy’s Expulsion : The Facts”.

It’s interesting to note that, as well as the exposures about Healy’s sexual misdemeanours, there may have been an undercurrent of criticism about other matters in circulation. David North, “the leader of the Workers League, the WRP’s sister party in the United States, had begun to tentatively criticise Healy’s pseudo-philosophical posturing”. Not that North himself was a paragon of virtue, if some of the information Beatty supplies about him is anything to go by. But there is a quote from something written by Mike Banda, a “Healy loyalist”,  that may give an idea of the “pseudo-philosophical” nonsense that Healy and his supporters were prone to delivering:

“Dialectical thought concepts are now entering matter through us via the self-impulse of the universal movement of matter. As this takes place we arrive at the moment of actuality, which is causality....At this dialectical moment of causality , the cause (essence) cancels itself into the effect (abstract thought already posited in us as part of a previous dialectical process). Likewise the effect cancels itself into the cause”.    

Beatty tells us that this gobbledegook is from “a theoretically inflected  attack on the trade unionist  Alan Thornett, pubLished in 1975 just after his expulsion from the WRP”, which makes me think that Thornett was lucky to have been expelled. Employed in a car factory in Oxford, he may have been one of the few genuine workers in the Workers Revolutionary Party. He did continue as a Trotskyist and, inevitably, formed a new party, the Workers Socialist League (WSL).

Healy’s departure caused a split in the WRP, one that, to quote Beatty, “was the occasion for a fair amount of financial carpetbagging”. There were properties involved – among them, the so-called college in Derbyshire, a printing press in Runcorn, some Youth Training Centres, and more. But “the generally chaotic and convoluted nature of the party’s finances make it difficult to know who was actually stealing what”. Some of the people who were close to Healy – the Redgraves, for example - refused to believe the accusations made against him. They joined with him in the formation of a new group, the Marxist Party, claiming it as “an event of international significance”. In fact, it “remained tiny to the point of insignificance”, which didn’t stop it functioning true to form: “ Corinna Lot was initially a member of the Marxist Party but was expelled in November 1990 for “subjective idealism and then accused of being an agent provocateur”.

Healy died in 1989, though the Marxist Party lasted until 1995 with Corin Redgrave in charge. He returned to acting, though his years as a member of the WRP had a negative effect on his career. He died in 2010. Beatty says that Vanessa Redgrave “seems to have moved away from far-left politics and generally refuses to discuss her time supporting Healy”. He also notes that she was awarded an OBE in the January 2022 New Year’s Honours List. She has “clearly become acceptable to the British Establishment”.

The Party is Always Right is an absorbing read if you are interested in the ways that corrupt and devious leaders, swayed by power, can manipulate other people where politics are concerned. British Trotskyism seems dead or at least totally irrelevant now, and perhaps  Gerry Healy is partly responsible for it being in that condition?