Cliff Slaughter

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Cliff Slaughter is a British Trotskyist.

During the Second World War, Cliff Slaughter worked in a coal mine as one of the Bevin Boys. While there, he was injured when kicked by a pit pony.

As a lecturer at the University of Leeds, Slaughter joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. He left in 1956 following the Soviet invasion of Hungary and joined Gerry Healy's group The Club.[1] Slaughter remained with the tendency for many years, during which it became known as the Socialist Labour League and then the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP). During this period, he was regarded as the group's top intellectual, [2] and remained on the Central Committee.

In 1985, Healy faced allegations of sexual harassment, leading Slaughter to team up with Mike Banda in opposition to him. This broadened into a more general criticism of the party's direction. They were able to gain a majority of the group and forced Healy to retire. When Healey again tried to exert authority, Slaughter and Banda led a call for "revolutionary morality" and split the organisation between their supporters and those of Healey and Sheila Torrance. [3]

Slaughter worked with David North's International Committee of the Fourth International to publish a study into the funding of the WRP, which concluded that it had received over £1,000,000 from Libya and various Middle Eastern governments.[4]

Slaughter and Banda formed a new Workers Revolutionary Party and regrouped their international supporters into the Workers International to Rebuild the Fourth International. However, Banda soon split with Slaughter, repudiating Trotskyism. The members of the group which Slaughter led decided that the idea of a vanguard party, was not the way to build towards socialism. Slaughter remains a member of a loose grouping with other former members of the WRP, the Movement for Socialism, and continues to write. In 2007, his work Not Without a Storm: towards a communist manifesto for the age of globalisation was published, intended as the opening of a discussion on contemporary issues and the responsibility of socialists.