Gerry Healy
From Conservapedia
Thomas Gerard 'Gerry' Healy (1913-1989) was a British Trotskyist leader, and founder of the Workers' Revolutionary Party. Healy was born in western Ireland, and came to Britain after leaving school in an attempt to find work. He served as a wireless operator on merchant ships,and joined the Communist Party of Great Britain before being expelled for his Trotskyist sympathies. He joined the Trotskyist Militant Group, and when this split in 1938, became a founder of the Workers' International League. Although a capable and energetic organiser and orator, his early talent for causing trouble became evident in his work in the WIL and its successor, the Revolutionary Communist Party. Railing against party discipline, he fomented internal crises, took offense on the mildest of provocation, and 'resigned' on six or seven occasions, always being welcomed back by the party leadership. Following the end of the Second World War, he conspired with the leadership of the Fourth International to split the RCP on the question of entrism, leading his minority faction of the RCP into covert membership of the Labour Party, while the majority faction continued as an 'open' party. However, the dispute had fatally weakened the RCP. It was wound up in early 1950, and when the remnants entered Healy's organization within the Labour Party (known as The Club) he was able to isolate and expel its leaders. many others left, abandoning politics altogether or moving to the right, sickened by the atmosphere of distrust and paranoia that Healy fostered in an attempt to keep control of his organization.
Healy remained within the Labour Party until he and his group was expelled in 1959. He then founded the Socialist Labour League, which was renamed the Workers' Revolutionary Party in 1973.
As leader of his own open party, Healy was able to give full rein to his paranoid and megalomaniacal tendencies. The SLL/WRP was able, through Healy's undoubted charisma, to appeal to young and educated people; but he ran the party in much the same way as a cult, with recourse to intimidation and violence. Absolute adherence to the party line was demanded, and deviation was punished with expulsion (if one was fortunate), or mental and physical intimidation into recanting ones heretical views (if one was not). He compounded his sins by preying on attractive female members of the party.
The WRP became a vogue among the less thoughtful of the fashionable classes in the 1970s, after the actress Vanessa Redgrave, her brother, actor Corin Redgrave, and the actress Frances de la Tour all became members. The Redgraves remained loyal to Healy to the end of his life. However, despite his iron control of the WRP, he was unable to prevent its implosion into combatting fragments in 1985, when he was accused by senior party members of sexual harassment of female members and of pocketing money from foreign governments. By the time he died, largely unlamented, in 1989, his political empire had shrunk to a tiny clique of adherents, grandiloquently named the Marxist Party.
Charming, witty, thuggish and violent by turns, he inspired devotion among his adherents, and hatred among disillusioned adherents. Squat and bald, with, according to Brian Behan, "the sore eyes of a newborn pig", he "abused his limited gifts and betrayed those who placed their trust in him. He did more than anybody else in Britain to discredit Trotskyism as an alternative to Stalinism." (Dictionary of Labour Biography v 12, 2005)
