In 1950, Ted Grant and his supporters were expelled from The Club, eventually forming the Revolutionary Socialist League in 1956, holding its first congress the following year.
[3] One of their recruits from the CPGB was Peter Fryer, who had been the Daily Worker's correspondent in Budapest during the suppression of the uprising by Soviet troops, and who edited The Newsletter, a weekly which began publication in May 1958.
Coupled with pressure from a group around industrial activist Brian Behan led to the formation of the Socialist Labour League.
"The principal group is so well disciplined and financed that it is slowly emerging as a serious nuisance to the democratic Socialism which it outwardly accepts and covertly derides", he wrote in an April 1959 letter to the secretaries of Constituency Labour Parties and affiliated trade unions.
Fryer left in 1959 and in 1960 a group of members split away to form Solidarity, which became a theoretically influential, industrially oriented organization strongly influenced by the ideas of Paul Cardan.
The SLL remained active in the Labour Party's youth organization, the Young Socialists, and gained control of it until the YS was wound up in 1964.
They started a daily paper, Workers Press, in the early 1970s and increased the turnover of membership, and began to fear police infiltration.
While a SLL-organised meeting at the Alexandra Palace, London in February 1971 had an attendance of 4,000, the SLL and the other Trotskyist groups had a very limited industrial presence incapable of organising such a level of protest, according to a contemporary report by Paul Routledge in The Times.
The group sued Observer editor David Astor over the report, in a case marked by discussion of an armed police raid of the building in which bullets were found.
[15] In 1976, the WRP launched an inquiry into the details of Trotsky's death, following claims from Joseph Hansen that Harold Robins, a founding member of the American Socialist Workers Party might have been a Soviet agent.
[18] The WRP met with Libyan officials in 1977 and issued a joint statement, opposing Zionism, U.S. imperialism and Anwar Sadat.
As printed by Solidarity, the report claimed £1,075,163 had been received by the group from Libya and several Middle Eastern governments, between 1977 and 1983.
[33] There was a counter-claim that the expulsion had been motivated by a failed political coup attempted by party general secretary Michael Banda.
"This is part of a political frame-up by Mr Banda who wants to dissolve the WRP because he has moved to the right", asserted Vanessa Redgrave, who also said at this time that Healy's accusers were "liars".
[34][35] Banda was the leader of the majority on the party council, and was accused by Healy and Vanessa Redgrave of "unprincipled and unsupportable" deviation from the Trotskyist road to Socialism.
[36] Healy and his followers continued to claim to be the WRP, and for a time two versions of the group were in existence, each publishing its own daily News Line paper.
The first split in Healy's WRP (Newsline) came when a section of the London membership around full-timer Richard Price revolted and were expelled in due course.
When the organisation printed an article reviewing Healy's contribution to Trotskyism, he concluded that his forced retirement was being finalised.
[37] The Marxist Party in turn experienced another small split after Healy's death which formed the Communist League.
Torrance's WRP is the only surviving Workers Revolutionary Party in the UK and still produces The News Line as a daily paper, and it is also included in a website.
[39] It remains electorally active and stood seven candidates for the 2015 UK General Election, six in London and one in Sheffield,[40] gaining a total of 488 votes.