James "Jock" Ritchie Haston (1913–1986) was a Trotskyist politician and General Secretary of the Revolutionary Communist Party in Great Britain.
He moved to Trotskyism in the mid 1930s, after splitting with the CPGB in 1934 upon watching Soviet ships break the public trade boycott of Nazi Germany.
A dispute with the Communist Party of South Africa was to follow them to Britain however, and it was alleged that Lee had stolen strike funds from a group of workers.
However, they had been far too small to be able to break the truce in earlier by-elections, so when the Neath Division fell open they sought to take advantage, and Haston was the obvious choice of candidate.
With the turn of the war against the Nazis, the RCP was at pains to look for any signs of the coming revolutionary upheavals that were expected in line with the perspectives of the Fourth International as outlined in the famous Transitional Program.
This realistic view of events was also prompted by the agreement of the RCP leadership with the documents of the Goldman-Morrow-Heijenoort minority in the American Socialist Workers Party.
However, the FI majority around Ernest Mandel and Michel Pablo, backed by the Socialist Workers Party in the United States, prevailed and the amendnments were rejected.
Second, there was the question of economic perspectives and the growing tendency of the Labour government of Clement Attlee to take various industries into state ownership, as was also happening in eastern Europe.
A complementary document on more general economic perspectives was written for the RCP by Tony Cliff, who later acknowledged that he had been greatly influenced by Haston in this period.
In 1947, however, an FI-sponsored minority led by Gerry Healy was granted permission by the FI to join the Labour Party, against the democratically decided views of the RCP.