For a labour movement inquiry!

Scan page 15

READERS of Socialist Organiser will know that the WRP - specifically, Vanessa Redgrave - is suing us for saying some nasty but (we insist) true things about them.. But they have not sued us for saying that they probably get money from the reactionary Islamic government of Libya.

It was said in the article which provoked the libel writs and repeated in a number of articles since. The circumstantial and poltical evidence for thinking this is overwhelming, and we have discussed it in Socialist The BBC 'Money Programme' said the same thing recently. The super-litigious WRP hasn't sued them either. They don't dare.

Instead they have mounted a political campaign against the BBC. Claiming to be part of the labour movement themselves, they use the courts against a labour movement paper like Socialist Organiser, and rely on a political campaign against the BBC!

Cashing in on the widespread hatred of the witch-hunting anti-left media, they are printing angry denunciations from supporters of the WRP, from those who take the WRP at face value, and from the odd ex-member now prominent in the mainstream labour movement.

The BBC programme did try to smear 'the left' in general by talking about the left press and the 'ethnic press' being financed by Libya, when in face no case on this score was (or as far as I know can be made against any organisation but the WRP.

The fact remain, however, that the BBC didn't invent the charge, and the WRP has no convincing answer to it. That they sue SO for - among other things - comparing them to a religious sect, and don't sue me for saying they are widely believed to be in the pay of a reactionary (though on its own ground somewhat reforming/ paternalistic) bourgeois government, is itself an unmistakeable indicator of where the truth lies.

They don't dare sue me on this. But they are seizing the change to smear me by association with the BBC programme.

Though SO said it all many times before the BBC, they are spreading the lie that we 'repeat' the BBC 'slander' and "jump on the bandwagon' . Thi is the Stalinist technique in poli tics that Trotsky called thi amalgam' - disparate politica tendencies, organisations anı classes are falsely lumped to gether. Thus the Stalinists talk ed of the "Trotsky-fascists' This is bluff • and bluster though. We didn't wait for thi BBC to tell us about the WRP': probable links with Libya. Thi fact that the BBC now says i doesn't make it any less likely ti be true.

A few years ago the WRI justified the shooting by the Iraqi regime of Iraqi Communis Party members in circum stances where there was reasor to suspect that they then hac golden links with Iraq too. If i is true now that the WRP is & pensioner of the Libyan govern. ment, then it does not deserve the support of the labour move. ment.

It would be a service to the labour movement to make the facts available. If the WRP has nothing to hide, let them agree to submit to the scrutiny of a bona fide labour movement Help defend freedom of political comment in the labour movement press against the WRP's use of its money and of the capitalist legal system. A labLour. inquiry, not the courts!

Donations towards • our defence costs to: Labour Movement Press Defence Fund Treasurer, Jonathan Hammond, c/o 214 Sickort Court, London N1 2SY.