SWP: In the footsteps of WRP?

international | anti-war / imperialism | other press Monday November 05, 2007 12:06 by John Cornford

Jamers Turley outlines the history of the WRP and how it recieved money from despots such as Saddam and went to pretend that Iraq was a democracy. This raises questions as to why the SWP support the Iran Regime and portray it as progressive.

It is now indisputable that Healy was looking beyond his own members and supporters for funds. It was this that led him in 1976 to send a WRP delegation to visit the Libyan government of Mu’ammar al-Qaddafi and to request money for a new printing press. Healy himself apparently visited Libya the following year.6 It is unclear the extent to which financial assistance was ultimately procured from Qaddafi. In his investigative documents relating to the 1985 split, David North claimed over £1 million in total from Libya, Ba’athist Iraq and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation.7

Some of this was undoubtedly given a ‘legitimate’ veneer. The WRP’s print shop took on contracts to print, for example, 250,000 copies of Qaddafi’s Green book. Various other ‘favours’ are well documented and now infamous. News Line journalists were ordered to take pictures of communist demonstrators outside the Iraqi embassy and print off extra-large copies to be handed to the WRP’s Ba’athist paymasters.8 No less repulsively, money was taken from Libya for “information-gathering” with “openly anti-semitic undertones” - the defunct libertarian-socialist paper Solidarity describes it plainly as “Jew-spotting in the media, politics and business”.9

Likewise, there is a political imperative behind the SWP’s new-found appreciation of Tehran. I am not for a moment suggesting that the SWP is doing it for the money, but its recent popular frontism could lead it in all manner of directions. The presence of an Iranian state television crew at the STWC conference is certainly worrying, for example, demonstrating at the very least a degree of cooperation with the Iranian embassy. It is clear that the SWP has talked itself into regarding the foul Tehran regime as basically anti-imperialist and therefore progressive. Rotten politics will lead socialists to rotten actions.