Head of one of the biggest far-left groups in 1970s Britain, Gerry Healy was accused of rape and sexual abuse. A new biography reflects on the swamp from which he emerged — and how his group’s authoritarian model facilitated his crimes.
The front page of the Workers Revolutionary Party’s newspaper announces the expulsion of longtime leader Gerry Healy on October 30, 1985. (Courtesy of Aidan Beatty)
In the annals of British Trotskyism, a grotesque figure looms large. First involved in the Trotskyist movement in 1937, Gerry Healy would after World War II become a leading figure, going on to head the Socialist Labour League and, from 1973, the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP). For a time among Britain’s biggest far-left organizations, the WRP was famous for its coterie of celebrity members, its relationship with Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya, and its authoritarian leader Healy.
Not only did the WRP have a culture of violent punishment of its own members, but Healy was accused of sexually abusing dozens of female members. Eventually, in 1985, he was expelled from the party, with the WRP fracturing as a result. His longtime impunity is often attributed to the culture of the WRP, from its leader cult around Healy to its control over other members’ behavior. But why were so many thousands of people were willing to join such a party?
Aidan Beatty, a historian at Carnegie Mellon University, is the author of a new biography of Gerry Healy, The Party Is Always Right. Beatty’s work casts the WRP not as a weird aberration but as an extreme version of an authoritarian and failed Trotskyist organizational model. In an interview, he spoke to Jacobin’s David Broder about the WRP’s “vanguardism,” its abusive culture, and Healy’s role as a supposed working-class leader.
David Broder
The Workers Revolutionary Party was one of the largest Trotskyist organizations in the UK. How, in general, would you characterize the kind of people that joined this party — what did they see in it?
Aidan Beatty
The WRP was founded in 1973, when Trotskyism was really ascendant in Britain; the academic John Kelly has rightly called this its “golden age.” There were maybe as many as twenty thousand people in Trotskyist groups — more than the Communist Party, albeit split across multiple groups instead of united in one party. The WRP claimed eight thousand members, but that was an exaggeration; it never had above three thousand members, with a very large turnover. Those who joined were expected to make impossible sacrifices for the party, and so the churn in membership was quite high.
The party had a strong presence in London, in Manchester, in Cardiff, and, to a lesser degree, in coal mining areas in Yorkshire and Nottingham. It had some Irish members, but not as many as we might expect given the numbers of Irish people in Britain and Healy’s own Irish origins; he seemed to have been distrustful of other Irish people. Compared to the International Socialists/Socialist Workers Party and the International Marxist Group, the WRP was far less interested in recruiting students. It was massively male-dominated, which is more typical for these kinds of groups than their members like to admit; the WRP was openly contemptuous of second-wave feminism, and this definitely hurt its ability to recruit women.
Those who joined the WRP were expected to make impossible sacrifices for the party.
The WRP put a big emphasis on workplace organizing, so it was relatively strong, for example, in British Leyland, a famously militant car factory in Oxford (though within a year of its founding it expelled their main union organizer here, Alan Thornett, and he took maybe one to two hundred members with him — a serious cohort for a party of only three thousand).
As counterintuitive as it might seem now, what made the WRP attractive to potential members was its doctrinaire rigidity. After the global upheavals of 1968, when a revolution still seemed possible but was also slipping away bit by bit, the WRP offered a vision of stiff-necked militancy, ideological certainty, and unbending devotion to the revolution. Its dogmatism — and the constant insistence that the revolution was still just over the horizon — was never going to appeal to everyone. But it clearly did appeal to a specific set of people still trying to grasp the possibilities of building a revolution after 1968.
David Broder
The WRP attracted an important coterie of celebrity supporters. You cite Tariq Ali’s assessment of Healy captivating middle-class intellectuals. What allowed him to impress them with the trappings of a “proletarian leader,” and how involved was the party in struggles that gave this some substance? How could Healy confect this image?
Aidan Beatty
Actor Corin Redgrave supposedly once said that he didn’t like the softness of the more hippyish end of the New Left and wanted something more militant, not “soft-centered and flimsy”.
When Corin or his sister Vanessa Redgrave joined, they were fast-tracked into leadership positions. Healy paid them careful attention and flattered their egos, and they were never targets of his infamously violent temper. There was a lot of unfair speculation about Vanessa Redgrave at the time — that this was just another acting role for her, or that she latched on to Healy because she wanted a strong father figure. It’s telling that nobody speculates about her brother’s motivations in the same sexist ways. I’m always wary of speculating about deep-seated psychological motivations, though there does seem to be a desire, for both Redgrave siblings, to be part of a “tough” or “hard” movement.
By 1973, Healy had been involved in Trotskyism for almost forty years; that record, going back to anti-fascism in the 1930s and to a time when [Leon] Trotsky himself was still alive, definitely helped him. But Healy very carefully curated his self-image. He claimed to be a product of extreme poverty in the west of Ireland (when his family were actually quite affluent); he claimed to have seen Black and Tans shoot and kill his father in 1919 (which was an outright lie); he claimed to have personally witnessed the rise of fascism while visiting continental Europe as a merchant marine sailor and claimed he was expelled from the Communist Party for questioning the USSR’s continued trade links with fascist Italy (again a lie — he plagiarized that story from the biography of Jock Haston, an early Scottish Trotskyist leader). Notwithstanding how false these claims are, they do line up with the desire that the Redgraves and others had to be members of an ostensibly serious and militant party.
David Broder
The WRP pulled off some amazing organizational feats for a party of its small size — notably having the first color daily paper in Britain. Was this a question of foreign money, generous donors, or just self-exploitation by its militants? What kind of atmosphere sustained such intense activity?
Aidan Beatty
The accusation you’re alluding to here about “Arab gold” dogged the WRP from the late 1970s onward. Until the revelations about Healy and sexual abuse came into the open in 1985 it was one of the most notorious things that outsiders associated with them. Essentially, from 1977, when the WRP issued a joint declaration with the Libyan government condemning imperialism and Zionism, there were persistent accusations that the party was either being funded by the Libyan government or was even a kind of outpost of Libyan influence in Britain. From 1979 or so, there are similar accusations about funds coming from Iraq.
There is undoubtedly some truth to these accusations; probably five-figure sums were being given to the party and the WRP was also using its high-tech printing press in the north of England for paid print contracts for the Libyan government. Members of the WRP at the time — and since — have more or less admitted all this. The Iraqi money is a bit harder to pin down. My sense is that this involved far smaller amounts of money and in general the Ba’athists knew enough to stay away from the WRP. But I also think this gets exaggerated, both by other Trotskyist groups who could use it as a stick with which to beat the WRP but also by Healy and the WRP themselves, who I think wanted to overemphasize their international importance.
The WRP offered a vision of stiff-necked militancy, ideological certainty, and unbending devotion to the revolution.
In general, I think the far less intriguing and far more depressing truth is that a lot of the infrastructure the party built up — a full-color printing press and daily newspaper, a network of youth training centers, a network of bookshops, a small mansion in Derbyshire used for Marxist educational retreats — was paid for more with money sweated out of party members rather than secret riches coming from Tripoli. And along the way, some of the higher-profile celebrity members seemed to have paid for this too. The house in Derbyshire was legally owned by Corin Redgrave.
The daily News Line is a good example of what the WRP was capable of achieving as well as the costs that all this entailed. It was the first full-color paper in Britain, and party members sold about seven to ten thousand copies a day from the mid-1970s up until the WRP split in 1985. At first, when I was researching all this, when I saw that circulation figure, I thought something like “well that’s not great” given how many copies the Mirror or the Sun would sell each day. But then I realized how genuinely impressive it was — it would be hard to imagine any leftist group today being able to pull that off (or whatever the online news equivalent would even be).
But the level of commitment this required was massively unsustainable. Party members would get up at 4 a.m., perhaps have to travel across the country to a collection point to meet a lorry driver coming down from the printing press (in Runcorn, close to Liverpool) and then bring them back to London, Glasgow, Cardiff or another city, sell them outside factories or train stations, then go to their regular job, and still be expected to sell more in the evenings in pubs or attend a party branch meeting. This caused massive burnout. Party branches were given ever-increasing quotas of copies to sell and there was a complicated accounting system used where they were billed for their quota of daily papers, regardless of whether they sold them or not.
There are definitely periods when the newspaper was a loss-making enterprise and the work of selling the papers became all-consuming for the membership; they became a newspaper with a party attached, rather than a party that can use a paper to promote its ideas.
David Broder
The WRP was remarkable for its culture of physical violence and punishment, as well as Healy’s extreme personal authoritarianism. Probably we both know former WRP members who were people who wanted to overthrow capitalist society, were critical of authoritarian models of socialism, and were otherwise articulate in defying oppression — but were also part of this culture. Why did they allow this to happen?
Aidan Beatty
Some of this is very easy to answer; the violence itself prevented opposition from emerging. Violence was a crude organizing tool for the WRP. I interviewed quite a few former members, and even going back to the early 1960s and the Socialist Labour League [the WRP’s predecessor], it is clear that party members were terrified of Healy. Healy’s use of violence was, in the main, quite systematic and intentional. He knew when to turn on his anger and when and where to deploy it. He would lambast intellectuals in the party for being too academic and detached, and he would attack workers for being too uneducated and unversed in Marxist theory. It was quite obvious to all members that if you tried to come out against Healy, you would at best be slandered and verbally denounced, and at worst you would be physically attacked. Why risk speaking out if you know those results are waiting for you?
There is quite a notorious incident in 1966 when Ernie Tate, a Northern Irish member of the International Marxist Group, was very violently attacked by a group of Healy’s supporters outside a party meeting in London; Healy was present for this and essentially supervised the assault. The attack was bad enough that not only was Tate hospitalized but Healy was later forced to appear at a meeting with Isaac Deutscher and apologize. This assault was unplanned, but as I say in the book, “Healy propagated an aura of total ruthlessness but then could benefit from that aura, since potential followers believed he was totally ruthless, in a kind of feedback loop.”
One former member told me that he never questioned that the party had to be structured in a very top-down, authoritarian manner, because that was what would be needed to carry out a revolution in Britain. In general, I think many people who stuck with Healy accepted the verbal and physical abuse because they believed it was necessary to maintain discipline or because the revolution was more important than their own personal well-being.
David Broder
Your book describes Gerry Healy as a rapist. He was ultimately ousted from the leadership because of this. In the words of Clare Cowen — one of the activists who helped this happen — the long inaction over his criminal and vile behavior owed to the party lacking the “language” to talk about it, also due to its strong rejection of feminism. What about the structure and ideology of the WRP specifically “enabled” Healy’s crimes? What effect did broader social changes, or movements like those seen in the post-1968 period, have on the members?
Aidan Beatty
When I interviewed Clare Cowen, she said that even if people “knew” what Healy was doing, they did not know the extent of his abuse of women. I definitely think she’s correct in saying that. When Cowen, Aileen Jennings, and other party members circulated a letter exposing Healy in 1985, they named twenty-six women that he had either raped or coerced into sex. The total number is higher than that, in a pattern of abuse going back at least to 1964. Like many sexual abusers, Healy used his authority to isolate the women he targeted; it is not really until Cowen and Jennings start carefully contacting other female members that they all learned how many others had been targeted.
But we also need to recognize that Healy’s abuse of female party members wasn’t happening in a vacuum. The WRP was not just critical of liberal feminism; it was openly contemptuous of all forms of feminism, even socialist feminism. I have always seen that as politically inseparable from Healy’s abusiveness.
There was a very pronounced masculinist culture that predominated within the WRP — very severe and austere, totally dour and humorless, arrogantly convinced you are right on every issue. It very much endorsed the idea that members should be able to withstand pain and privation. The party was abusive by design. In addition, the WRP would always close ranks in the face of any criticism, no matter how meaningful or real that criticism was. An organization where you can’t criticize the leadership in any way is an organization that is incubating abusers like this.
An organization where you can’t criticize the leadership in any way is an organization that is incubating abusers.
Many former WRP members I interviewed said they were shocked when the revelations about Healy surfaced in 1985 and yet would also say they had heard rumors or accusations prior to this, which they seemed to have compartmentalized. Other members told me that as soon as they heard the accusations, they knew they were real. They partly knew this was happening already — and now the pieces fell into place in their understanding.
David Broder
Today not just the WRP but Trotskyist organizations in general hold much less sway over the British left than in the 1970s, or even in the 2000s. We could point to certain conjunctural changes (or things like Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of Labour) as encouraging different tactical choices. But do you think there are more fundamental reasons why the “militant vanguard party” model of organization is no longer reproducible? Is it a loss of belief in the socialist end goal, or more to do with the fact that individuals no longer want to be members of such hierarchical parties?
Aidan Beatty
I think the decline is there even earlier. There’s clearly a problem in British Trotskyism from the mid-1980s onward. Aside from the very dramatic fracturing of the WRP, the Militant Tendency was expelled from the Labour Party over the first half of the 1980s. What had been the International Marxist Group (but was operating under a different name by this point) broke apart in 1985. The general problems of the Left in the 1980s — the strength of Thatcherism, the defeat of the miners in 1985 and a general decline in union membership, the sidelining of the Bennites within Labour and the slow rise of the Blairite right — all are massive problems for Trotskyists too. Of the big Trotskyist parties, really only the Socialist Workers Party survived the 1980s fairly unscathed (and they had their own, very grim, internal problems later on).
1989 should have been the Trotskyists’ big moment. Or at least, a lot of them expected that if the Stalinists disappeared, that would leave a void that the Trotskyists could fill. Instead the Trotskyists went into decline with them. It’s not a coincidence that as both Stalinism and social democracy headed into decline in Britain, Trotskyism went into decline also. As much as Trotskyists condemned the orthodox communists and Labour, they also remained somewhat oriented to both in complicated and contradictory ways, and they all sank together.
I think Ireland is a valuable contrast. Trotskyists have been relatively successful there in the last two or three decades, and they’ve done that by clearly demarcating themselves from the Labour Party (which is not hard, given how much further to the right that party has always been) and by being open to, and willing to learn from, feminism, gay rights, transgender rights. And parties like People Before Profit have managed to figure out a way to be politically radical without having to use the insular vocabulary of Trotskyism — calling anyone you don’t like “Pabloites” or “Shachtmanites” or having really long-winded “discussions” about whether the USSR was a deformed workers state.
Even just based on anecdotal evidence, it is clear that the leftist groups or movements that have had any kind of recent successes, even if only partial or limited ones, are not vanguardist in structure: Democratic Socialists of America, Momentum, Black Lives Matter. The Trotskyist parties that remain stuck on the fringes are the ones that refuse to accept that vanguardism or very top-down, authoritarian party structures are off-putting to the vast majority of people today. And bound up with those authoritarian structures, the members of those parties have no avenues to get their leaders to change their tactics. So you find those parties still clinging the same ideas and vocabularies and tactics despite all the evidence that they will not work.
David Broder
I want to push you a little on “vanguardism” and relating to struggles. Almost all Trotskyist groups insist that rival Trotskyist groups are “sects” whereas they themselves relate to real movements. Most probably could cite some struggles where they have some presence, for instance where they happen to have a few members in certain workplaces or campuses. But apart from some local, exceptional cases, in general Trotskyism has a poor record of mass influence.
Reading one of your interviewees, whose own rival Trotskyist group I belonged to as a teenager, I thought about the fact that the organization he led since the 1960s set itself no standards of success — but also that this fundamental issue simply never came up. Its members were sure of being right, had enough relationship to real struggles to keep us occupied, and that was enough to sustain the intense, I would say cultish, activity of a group with a few dozen members, comforted by its pariah status. I wonder how much all this has to do with “Leninist vanguardism” per se, or something more particular to the Trotskyist tradition: an internalization of defeat and an assumption of minoritarianism over such a long period that makes it hard for such groups to hold themselves accountable.
Aidan Beatty
The ironic thing is that these groups are often quite adept at spotting these problems in each other if not in themselves. Alex Callinicos, for example, wrote a quite solid critique of Trotskyism in 1990 but didn’t seem to recognize that what he was saying was just as true of the Socialist Workers Party that he was a member of as it was of any other of these sects.
Sheila Rowbotham wrote of how ‘forged in the bitterness of failure, Trotskyism subordinated all individuality to the calling of the professional revolutionary.’
One of the most evocative things I’ve ever heard said about Trotskyism — and I quote this at the very end of the book — is Sheila Rowbotham’s view that Trotskyists often displayed an admirable tenacity and a sense of resolution while also holding, as she said, to a worldview that “based on betrayal, forged in the bitterness of failure . . . subordinated all individuality to the calling of the professional revolutionary. For the Trotskyist, personal joy could be expected only as the faintest glimmer of sunlight on grass.”
One thing I appreciate about this observation is how it really gets to the ambiguity I feel about Trotskyism. Tenacity, a resolved sense of political commitment, a willingness to devote yourself to a cause — these are all quite good things. When I was interviewing former WRP members, I always felt that, while we may not agree on everything, I could generally tell that they were very well-meaning, idealistic people willing to make tremendous sacrifices for their political beliefs. These are good attributes for any person to have (even if Healy and other leaders like him completely took advantage of them). There are a lot of people that are either Trotskyists or spent time orbiting Trotskyism for whom I have immense respect: Tariq Ali, Ernest Mandel, Raya Dunayevskaya, Isaac Deutscher, C. L. R. James, Ken Loach, Sheila Rowbotham, Richard Seymour, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor . . .
But some practices within Trotskyism are just really off-putting: the sexism and contempt for any kind of anti-racist politics that is still prevalent within the remnants of Healyist Trotskyism; a culture of bullying, intimidation, and violence; an arrogance about having the right ideas that is out of all proportion to the size of these groups today and their inability to attract (and keep) any significant number of recruits.
One thing I continually found exasperating is the tendency of these groups, even if they are very small, to produce endless reams of documentation. Often it is incredibly long-winded in style, with aggressive and turgid prose. As I was slogging my way through all this material, I would often think: Who is this actually for? Whose opinions are going to be changed by this? How is this building socialism? It seems so inward-looking and insular and serves to push people away, even if not intentionally so (though I do partially think it is intentional). Certainly this kind of material is quite often about attacking other Trotskyist groups, again in ways that close them off from each other and all of them from the non-Trotskyist world.
Most, if not all, of these groups have very rapid turnover in membership. I think that plays a key role — the lack of long-term, grassroots membership prevents a kind of institutional memory from growing up, so often the membership this year won’t know what the party was doing a few years earlier.
The way these groups contest elections is also revealing. They generally do very badly — even cracking 1 percent of the vote in Britain would be hard. Vanessa Redgrave ran three times for the WRP in the 1970s. In one election in Manchester in 1978, she received under four hundred votes, even though she had just won an Oscar.
In their defense, these parties will generally claim they don’t want to actually win; they just want to raise political consciousness. But there are a few problems with this. First, when you run in any election and do this badly, you are embarrassing yourself — and even embarrassing the ideas you claim to be promoting. Second, as I think you’re suggesting, that “raised consciousness” is completely unmeasurable. How can you know you’ve actually raised anyone’s understanding of the world?
Whether working people want these Trotskyist ideas — as well as the reality of working-class support for all kinds of other options — is never really faced up to. I don’t think this is true of the entire gamut of Trotskyism, but certainly the more doctrinaire strands tend to see working-class people as a kind of inert mass, just waiting to be acted upon by a vanguard leadership armed with the correct ideas. That same working class is not stupid — and can easily spot that for the arrogance that it is.