In Search of Gerry Healy

by Dermot Hudson 

My Search for Revolution & how we brought down an abusive leader : Clare Cowen, Troubador Publishing Ltd 2019, 200 pp, rrp £19.99

About a month ago I was walking around Ipswich when I came across a charity shop actually giving away free books. The title of this book caught my eye. It turned  out to be a book about the scandal in the 1980s around the Workers’ Revolutionary Party(WRP), a Trotskyist party, which led to the WRP splitting into eight factions – yes eight factions!
 I vaguely recall reading about the implosion of the WRP in 1985  so the book excited some interest in me. The Cowen book is basically an expose of the WRP and a narrative of the events around the expulsion of Gerry Healy, the founder and leader of the WRP.
This self-published tell-all account was written by Clare Cowen, a WRP full-timer (of which there were 100 at one time) and a member of the party’s leadership.
When I first became interested in politics in my youth during the mid-1970s the WRP’s main claim to fame was its support from the glitterati that included the famous actress Vanessa Redgrave and her brother Corin and  a host of other celebrity members. In those days the WRP was possibly the biggest Trotskyist party in Britain. It was certainly the most sectarian – though that was challenged by rivals that included the Socialist Workers Party and the International Marxist Group then led by former student leader Tariq Ali.
The WRP’s ascendancy on the Trotskyist left was in part due to the huge amount of money they had not just received from the Redgraves but other wealthy members of the WRP including the author of this book, Ms Cowen.
Clare Cowen herself was not from a poor working-class background. She was actually from a bourgeois family – in fact a White Zimbabwean whose family had black servants and owned gold mines. Some of Ms Cowen’s money was used to bankroll the WRP and if I read it correctly some of the WRP’s companies and properties were partly owned by her. To me the book not only illustrates the bankruptcy of Trotskyism but the dangers of what happens when revolutionary movements get mixed up with people from wealthy backgrounds who always see things differently to a worker.  
Sects like the WRP grew after 1956 when Khrushchev's attack on Stalin opened  the door to Trotskyism as well as modern revisionism. The old revisionist CPGB failed to deal with Trotskyism. They simply labelled different Trotskyist groups as “ultra left” (even though most Trotskyist groups in the UK actually existed as entryist factions, like the Militant Tendency, within the reformist Labour party) . Little did  the burnt-out revisionists of the old CPGB realise that trailing behind left social-democrats with their third-rate “Euro-communist” drivel actually drove many young people out of the party and into the arms of the likes of the WRP.
The WRP tried to organise the unemployed through its “Right to Work “ marches. It had a trendy youth section called the Young Socialists. The WRP was, unlike the old CPGB, a very disciplined party that demanded hard work from its activists and not paper members sitting at home.
The real power in the WRP, however, rested not with the Redgraves or people like Clare Cowen but with the founder, leader and guru of the WRP, one Gerry Healy. Healy, a renowned ranter, once described as having a “Hitlerite” speaking technique, liked to pose as a master of Marxism. But in the last years of his life Healy became a supporter of ‘perestroika’ and ‘glasnost’ Gorbachovite revisionism. This may be viewed as bizarre but it can be argued as appropriate because Trotskyism is really a form of revisionism.
Curiously the WRP, despite proclaiming to be “revolutionary “ and implying by their name that they were for proletarian revolution, actually began as a sect inside the Labour party believing in the parliamentary road to socialism and standing candidates in general elections. Like the CPGB modern revisionists who dumped the Daily Worker and launched the Morning Star, the WRP rebranded their Workers Press as Newsline.
Healy and other Trotskyists continually denounced what they called “Stalinist bureaucracy “ but Healy ran the WRP in an extremely bureaucratic fashion with a huge full-time staff plus his own security . In fact reading between the lines it was clear that the WRP was run like some of the worst capitalist companies; Healy was overbearing, pushy and authoritarian. He bullied staff, sacked people he did not like and even had his own BMW. In the capitalist corporate world bosses sleeping around and demanding sexual favours is common. This is exactly what Healy did. Healy had sexual relationships with his secretary Aileen Jennings and the author of this book, Clare Cowen. Although both women remained in these relationships for a long time  it was also alleged that Healy had sexual relations with dozens of other female WRP members. 
By the 1980s the WRP’s luck was running out. Its dominance of British Trotskyism was challenged by the likes of the SWP and the Militant Tendency. The WRP was overstretched and ran into financial trouble .Rows over money erupted. It was then Aileen Jennings and Clare Cowen  who decided to spill the beans on the scandalous activities of Healy and the rest is history .
Although the book is a great account of the workings of a Trotskyist faction Ms Cowen has not broken with the tradition it comes from. She repeats Trotskyist anti-Stalin propaganda. Cowen also criticises the WRP for some of the better positions that it took like support for the Libyan Jamahuriya and Baathist Iraq and the defence of the Iranian revolution. Cowen also repeats some of the dafter claims about the WRP such as it having 10,000 members in the 1980s (it was about one tenth of that)! I was myself disappointed because I had expected to find an account of the split between the WRP and Royston Bull who founded the International Leninist Workers Party(ILWP) and later briefly rose to fame in Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party.  But all mention of Royston Bull and his ILWP is omitted.
To conclude, although the book is a good read for those who like a bit of scandal, it fell very short of offering any serious insight into the WRP and the bankruptcy of Healyism.