Statement on the Expulsion of Gerry Healy¶
Core Argument¶
The Political Bureau of the Workers’ International League (WIL) issued this statement in February 1943 to justify the expulsion of Gerry Healy, an act that had occurred at the Central Committee meeting of 7 February. The core argument is that Healy’s expulsion was not a sudden or politically motivated purge, but the culmination of a long pattern of disruptive behaviour, personal ultimatums, and repeated resignations, which the leadership had tolerated for years in the hope of reclaiming his organisational talents. The immediate trigger was Healy’s announcement, at the conclusion of his own industrial report to a national meeting attended by provincial delegates and London District Committee officials, that he was resigning to join the Independent Labour Party (ILP) the following day. He explicitly stated this was not due to political differences but to his personal inability to continue working with three named comrades: J. Haston, M. Lee, and E. Grant. He then left the meeting, and the Central Committee unanimously expelled him. The statement reveals that Healy had already discussed entering the ILP with two leading London ILP members that same afternoon, who informed Fenner Brockway.
The document provides a detailed chronology of Healy’s prior offences, stretching back to 1939. The first ‘resignation’ occurred when Youth for Socialism was changed from a duplicated to a printed journal, a technical decision taken in his absence, which he took as a personal slight. Later in 1939, he resigned again on a similarly trivial basis. While in Éire (Ireland) at the end of 1939 as part of a delegation, he resigned from the local group over secondary tactical issues and threatened to join the Irish Labour Party to fight the WIL; the Irish group expelled him, but the national leadership, after discussion, allowed him to return to England without public denunciation. The first serious political breach came in 1940, when Healy, as national organiser and representative of the Executive Committee (EC) in Scotland, used his position to press opportunist amendments to the organisation’s constitution through locals under his influence, seeking to shift it from a centralised to a federal basis. When challenged by the EC, he offered no political defence but launched personal slanders against two leading comrades and resigned again. The statement emphasises that on each occasion the EC made concessions, held discussions, and refrained from publicly branding his actions as irresponsible, precisely to preserve his authority and harness his energy for the party. The final resignation, however, was the ‘last straw’ because it occurred at a national Central Committee meeting, causing revulsion among provincial members, disrupting the meeting’s work, and forcing the readjustment of organisational decisions. The Political Bureau frames the expulsion as a necessary defence of Bolshevik norms: the WIL was no longer a small body but a nationally growing organisation whose leading members must conduct themselves as revolutionaries. Healy’s action was condemned as either a fundamental break with Bolshevism along the road of personal opportunism and political degeneration, or at best a light-minded irresponsibility that could no longer be tolerated. The polemic is directed not at an external political opponent but at a factional behaviour pattern within the Trotskyist movement, where personal pique and ultimatums were dressed up as political principle. The statement is a defence of centralised party discipline against what it presents as a long history of petty-bourgeois indiscipline and careerism.