MORGAN PHILLIPS’S LETTER IS A

THE letter sent by Morgan Phillips to local Labour Parties and affiliated trade unions last week-end avoids a political reply to the Socialist Labour League and Instead it rehashes stories about Trotskyism which are reminiscent of the kind of ‘polemic’ engaged in by Stalin and his followers.

Thus a quotation is given from an unnamed source; it does not come from The Newsletter or from any other publication of the Socialist Labour League; indeed none of us knows anything at all about it.

The overwhelming majority of those who support the Socialist Labour League and The Newsletter had nothing to do wi.i any of the Trotskyist organizations mentioned in Morgan Phillips’s letter.

Sauce for the gander?

On the other hand, there are a number of prominent ex-members of the Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist Party who today vigorously support Morgan Phillips and the Right wing of the Labour Party. But these people are not being subjected to bans and proscriptions.

It is only former members of Trotskyist organizations who support Left-wing socialist policies, together with former members of the Communist Party who have repudiated Stalinism, who are being proceeded against.

Clearly, the argument about past associations applies only to Left-wingers, not to those who today support the Right wing.

The Socialist Labour League and The Newsletter have no mon with Stalinism: that both expel minorities in order to avoid a democratic discussion of policies.

Morgan Phillips’s reference to the Militant Workers’ Movement in Birmingham is totally inaccurate (he cannot even get the name right!).

This informal association of shop stewards existed long before the Socialist Labour League was formed; far from being a ‘front’ organization, most of its members were not supporters of The Newsletter until the National Industrial Rank-and-File Conference last November showed that our views and theirs on industrial questions had converged.

In short, Morgan Phillips’s letter is a farrago of nonsense and half-truths, without a shred of evidence or political argument, designed only to distract people’s attention from the issues of policy that are involved in the proscription of the Socialist Labour League and the banning of ‘The Newsletter.