Workers Revolutionary Party (UK) - Socialist Labour League

Socialist Labour League

The group grew, in part as people grew disillusioned with the Communist Party of Great Britain's position on the Hungarian Revolution and in part from recruits from trade union activities. One of their best-known recruits from the CPGB was Peter Fryer, who had been the Daily Worker's correspondent in Budapest during the suppression of the uprising by Soviet troops, and who edited The Newsletter, a weekly which began publication in May 1958, over a year before the launching of the SLL. This paper and their publication of a number of Trotsky's then hard-to-find books further helped them recruit from among those disillusioned by the CPGB. Among these recruits were many of the group's best-known intellectuals and leaders such as Cliff Slaughter and Brian Pearce.

This, coupled with pressure from a group around leading industrial activist Brian Behan, led them to form the Socialist Labour League in 1959, independent and for the first time openly Trotskyist, although still with most of its members in the Labour Party. They were also very active in Labour Party youth organisation, the Young Socialists, and gained control until it was shut down in 1964.

However, during this period they did experience considerable internal tensions. Fryer quit in 1959 and in 1960 a group of members left to form Solidarity, which became a theoretically influential, industrially oriented organisation strongly influenced by the ideas of Paul Cardan.

In 1963, the SLL leadership claimed that they had identified a revolutionary situation in Britain. In their view this meant the most important activity was building the party. They started a daily paper, Workers Press, in the early 1970s and increased the turnover of membership, and began to fear police infiltration. Crisis mongering would become an increasingly prominent part of their public profile and internal and external dissidents were dealt with harshly. One incident saw Ernie Tate, a Canadian Trotskyist, attacked in public while distributing anti-Healy leaflets.