I never get tired of this material. Comrade Cohen has an article in this month’s Standpoint about the late Corin Redgrave. Naturally, not least because he could not resist it, Cde Cohen discusses the Workers’ Revolutionary Party, the Trotskyist political party to which Cde C. Redgrave was devoted to for much of the 1970s and 1980s. The WRP was the self-declared true vanguard party of the working class, the one that was going to lead the working class to power. It failed.
Cde Cohen comments on Gerry Healy, the leader of the party:
One WRP member, Kate Blakeney, described the process. She spent so much time and money supporting the party that she could not afford to feed her own children. “We were too busy, always busy, and could hope only to catch a few hours’ sleep.” One day Healy asked to meet her in his London flat. She went hoping to convince him to give her and her comrades in Oxford a respite from his demands: “[He] opened the door for me. He had been drinking. Something was all wrong. I pushed by his large body, sat down in the chair and started to make my report. Healy came towards me, was hovering over me. He was not listening to a word I was saying. He wanted only one thing from me, my sexual submission. For a moment, I just stared at him: fat, ugly, red-faced. Something inside of me snapped. I, my husband, my children, my comrades had sacrificed so much, had worked so hard for this…animal.”
This provides an excuse for the latest in my series of “From the Vaults” posts. The following is extracted from an article in the Sunday Mirror:
SECRETS OF RANDY COMRADE CASANOVA
Andrew Golden and Guy Simpson
Sunday Mirror, November 3, 1985, pp.1-2.
Randy “Red in the bed” Gerry Healy seduced a long line of women by telling them “Love me – for the sake of the Party” it was claimed yesterday.
Healy, 73-year-old founder of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party, is said to have preyed on females dedicated to the Trotskyite group’s cause….
[A] source deep within the party, said:
He would throw his arms around the women and tell them to submit.
If they protested, and some of them did, he would say: “You are doing this for the Party and I AM the Party.”
Each of them were under the impression that they were the only ones who had been used by Healy.
Most of the women were in their twenties and thirties and were selected for their vulnerability.
More than 26 girls are said to have been seduced by the bespectacled, balding Healy….
He is now in hiding.
