[The Workers Revolutionary Party' paper Newsline has been…]

Scan page 15

The Workers Revolutionary Party' paper Newsline has been campaigning against the 'witch-hunt' Programme' recently looked into the WRP's possible financial connections with Libya - and Soci drawn attention to this issue. Sean Matgamna replies with an open letter to Newsline, and to WRE room. It's dark, and murky, overcrowded too, with bugs, etc. absolutely filthy, with nothing Staff are generally recruited from Homelessness and housing conditions in Tower Hamlets have been highlighted in an Observer article (Sunday April 10) on TB.

The report outlines how tuberculosis is thriving in Tower Hamlets with 80 cases per 100,000 of the population, compared with the national average of just over 15. The death rate from TB is nearly In Tower House, the TB rate is 100 times higher than the IN THE last four weeks Newsline has run a frantic campaign against the BBC and... against Socialist Bluster as you will, howéver, the important question in this matter - whatever the BBC's intentions - is this: are the allegations true? Do you get money from Libya? • You have sued us for - among other things - comparing you to certain religious sects. Yourselves claiming to be part of the labour movement, you answer your labour movement opponents and critics with the law courts. Yet you try to answer the BBC, which you say witch-hunts and libeis you, with a 'political' campaign in the labour movement! You invoke the state against a section of the labour movement, and appeal to the labour movement against what you call an arm of the state!

Why, Ms Redgrave, don't you sue the BBC? Why have you allowed me for two years to say and repeat that there is circumstantial evidence of WRP getting money from Gaddafi, and not added another item to the string of writs your lawyers have served on me?

You are probably the most litigious people in Britain today! The fact that you don't go to court on this question, when you rush to the lawyers so easily on much smaller matters, suggests that you don't dare do it.

nears You say that the BBC cleared it with lawyers first, and therefore are not open to being sued? I have not cleared .. this letter with lawyers. I'll say it again for you as plainly as I can.

All the political and circumstantial evidence indicates that you receive money-from the reactionary Islamic government of Libya - whose 'anti-imperialism' you mocked, calling Gaddafi (inaccurately) a fascist, when you were a political organisation; that you are impressed not by the green but by the gold in Gaddafi's 'Green Revolution' The opulence of your tiny organisation would not be possible without that. Nor would Newsline, the first colour daily paper with a four-figure circulation. Nor would be the huge sum you spend on law suits. According to the US Militant, for example (15.4,83), you spent $750,000 to $1 million on an unsuccessful lawsuit against the US Socialist Workers' Party by your associate Alan Gelfand.

The evidence also suggests that until two or three years ago you were in the pay of the Iraqi government or its agents. Certainly you published sycophantic articles and a pamphlet glorifying Saddam Hussein and his vicious anti working class military dictatorship. At that time you publicly Gerry Healy.

Tower House is one of the hostels for homeless people run by the Rowtons company. JIM LAWRIE, from the residents' committee, speaks to Sue Carlyle about conditions in the hostel, and how the residents are fighting.

LIVING conditions are appalling. There are 700 homeless men in Tower House, with a large proportion of OAPs. Many of them are for fire hazards.

Tower House is often wrongly labelled as "full of dossers and drinkers", , but many residents are victims of economic unemployWhen people book in, it's £15 smelly, and bed bugged) in a justified Hussein's execution of members of the Communist Party of lraq.

Whether you have been paid directly by the governments concerned or by their agents, I do not know, and anyway it is a detail.

The evidence is strong enough to make urgent a labour movement inquiry into your relations with these regimes.

Is that plain enough? In that case sue me - or shut up. It you don't sue me, it will amount to an admission that the charges are true.' In the Newsline campaign you rely on the idea that an allegation can't be true because the left has good reason to distrust those who make it.

Yes, the BBC were trying to smear the left in general: the programme talked vaguely and in general about Gaddati financing 'the left press' and 'the ethnic press' - but when it came to it had nothing to say about any "press' but yours and those who could be implicated because they could be linked to the WRP press (Labour Herald, Dundee Standard)

Nevertheless it is a matter of public concern in the labour movement whether or not you do have golden links with Gaddafi. It is of concern to those like the publishers of the Dundee Standard room that's filthy, never cleaned, with the walls caked with dirt, graffiti. There's no furniture, except a cupboard on a wall with an odd chair. It's like a prison cell.

A lot of the residents spend most of their time in the day six times the national average.

national average.

but wooden benches and tables.

The other 'lounging areas consist of hard chairs, undecorated walls, no heating - and a television halfway up the wall. Again, there's hardly any light.

The canteen, where a big majority of the men eat, is filthy. Tables are never wiped. Bread and cakes are set out on tables, with no hygienic covering. It's cleaner whether or not by an innocent commercial association with your press they lay themselves open to being witch-hunted. It is of concern to George Galloway, a prominent advocate of Palestinian rights, whether he unknowingly lays. himself open to having his motives impugned because of the Dundee Herald's links with you and your private dealings.

If there is truth in the allegations, then you are a major liability to the left.

You talk about the dangers of the state prying into your affairs. The state has means of keeping itself informed about such, matters anyway. It is the labour movement activists who think you are just an especially eccentric variety of "Trotskyist' who don't know. It is the youth and those who struggle and scrape to help finance your organisation who don't know.

Your campaign has two objectives: you want to use the tact that the BBC has said a fraction of what could be said, to inoculate your members and those seetions of the left who occasionally see Newsline: Cashing in on the hatred the left feels for the hostile, red-baiting and anti-Labour media, you want to seize the chance to line people up on your sidé and thereby commit them to in prison - and the food is better! Tower House uses reject food, that's been offloaded cheap. There are bouts of food poisoning every so often.

The kitchen conditions are residents, and have to work in awful conditions at low pay. They receive their bed and board, but they can't complain, because they'd be slung out. There are pressures within the hostel against trade unionism, but many workers are joining the residents' association.

We want the Borough of Tower. Hamlets to make a compulsory purchase of Tower House, and then to improve the living conditions, and start a phased closure of Tower House, rehousing the residents according to their wishes and needs.

That way the residents association would be dealing with people who are directly answerable to those who are elected to office. We want co-management between residents and the council, and to work with properly negotiated conditions, and trade union rates.

Private enterprise will not look after the needs of the residents. Management has no intention of fulfilling their legal and moral obligations to residents, they are answerable only to shareholders via the profit motive. the belief that leaders of your organisation are being libelled.

You calculate that people who are themselves victims of the media will not stop to ask: is there any truth in what the BBC said? As always you hope to benefit from the fact that the WRP and its antics strain credulity.

That is why you take us to court, and appeal to the labour movement against the BBC.

Your second objective is to tie Socialist Organiser to the BBC by way of an 'amalgam'. You tried the same sort of trick with your lying and libellous allegation that Socialist Organiser supporter Peter Mcintyre had worked with the police to prepare the Oxford raids on social security claimants an allegation for which you were condemned by the National Union of Journalists.

The 'logic seems to be that because Socialist Organiser, which in the last two years has repeatedly pointed to your probable financial links with Gaddati and others, now repeats the allegation and reports on the BBC version of it, we bear responsibility for the programme and for its smear against the left in general.

A remarkable logic! We don't denounce the BBC programme for repeating what we have said by the BBC - whose Money alist Organiser, which has long 'leaders Vanessa Red! ¡rave and Gaddat repeatedly - so we are responsible. We witch-hunt' and 'smear' you.

No we don't! We use our right to comment on the affairs of the "left' You, hope to create a spin-off effect against Socialist Organiser by rallying a reflex left defence against the BBC. The fact, however, is that if the BBC can launch a plausible witch-hunt, and drag the Dundee Standard into it that i! because you cannot give a proper account of yourselves.

Bluff, bluster, smokescreens and diversions won't get you away from that.

Only a labour movement inquiry can properly establish the facts about your relations with Lioya and Iraq. Either sue me, agree to such a labour movement inquiry, or shut up!