DEMANDS HEALY BE EXPELLED National Committee, Socialist Labour League November 21, 1966 186 Clapham High St., London, S.W.4, England :
Dear Comrades,
We call your attention to an exceedingly grave occurrence that will forever dis-
grace the Socialist Labour League unless you undertake the most rapid and energetic action.
On November 17, Ernest Tate, an internationally known Trotskyist who has been active in furthering the work of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign and the International War Crimes Tribunal initiated by Bertrand Russell, was set upon by a gang at the entrance of your public meeting on that date at Caxton Hall. He was seriously beaten by six young toughs and had to be hospitalized.
All the evidence shows that these assailants were not would-be fascists attracted to your meeting but members of your organization and that they were acting under the direct personal supervision of your general secretary Thomas Gerard Healy.
The six who overpowered Comrade Tate and kicked him in the head, kidneys and genitals used this way of preventing him from selling literature to people entering the hall.
This literature included copies of the International Socialist Review and a pamphlet, Healy "Reconstructs" the Fourth International.
We ask you to do four things:
(1) To at once place your general secretary on trial for sponsoring such methods. The least that can be said of the employment of physical violence in this way is that it is reminiscent of the tactics employed by the Stalinists against their political opponents in the workers movement, particularly against Trotskyists, in the worst period of the thirties.
(2) To publicly and forthrightly condemn these hoodlum tactics sponsored by your general secretary against a member of a workers organization holding different political views from yours.
(3) To expel all those involved for engaging in an act that dishonors the labor and socialist movement.
(4) To immediately assure all workers organizations in Britain, through a prominently placed notice in your journal, The Newsletter, that you have undertaken measures to prevent any repetition of such criminal assaults on workers holding political views differing from your own and that you will guarantee protection of the democratic right of all opponent groups to offer their literature at the entrance to your meetings.
Fraternally,
National Committee
Socialist Workers Party
Farrell Dobbs, National Secretary
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