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James "Jock" Ritchie Haston (1913–1986) was a Trotskyist politician and General Secretary of the Revolutionary Communist Party in Great Britain. ==Early years== Haston was a member of a small group of members of the Communist Party of Great Britain who moved towards Trotskyism in the late 1930s after splitting with the CPGB in 1934. The group he led, known as the Paddington group, joined the Militant Group led by Denzil Dean Harber and when in 1937 a group of South African Trotskyists appeared in London it was Haston who moved their acceptance into membership of the Militant Group. The South Africans were led by Ralph Lee, hence they were referred to as the ''Lee Group'' and had been active in that country. 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 in dispute. These allegations would in time be proven to be lies but were reported to the Militant Group by Charlie van Gelderen, an earlier immigrant from South Africa, and led to the split of those members of the group working with Lee. By the time the truth had been established and the International Secretariat of the Trotskyist movement had exonerated Lee the damage had been done and the comrades had formed a new organisation. The new group known as the Workers International League (WIL) as organised in late 1937. In its first days the small group was led by Lee but when he returned to South Africa in 1941 Haston became the leading figure within the growing organisation. He would also form a personal alliance with Millie Lee at this time. In contrast to the official British Section of the Fourth International, the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL), the WIL was to experience serious growth in this period recruiting supporters from the CPGB, the RSL and from within the Labour Party. Again unlike the official section the WIL accepted the Fourth International Proletarian Military Policy (PMP) although not without an internal struggle that pitted a minority around Haston, Millie Lee and Sam Levy against Ted Grant and Gerry Healy. Haston emerged the victor from this factional tussle and the PMP was adapted to the needs of the WIL. Haston was also a member of a delegation of the WIL which was sent to Ireland early in the war to prepare a fall back party centre in the event of their being made illegal and having to function underground as had happened to revolutionaries in the previous war. In the event they remained legal, although they were persecuted at one point and the Government spied on them, and the delegation returned to Britain one by one. While in Ireland they did recruit further supporters to their cause aiding in the establishment of an Irish Trotskyist movement. Haston was the last to return from Ireland and found himself arrested and jailed as he was travelling on false papers, his own having been passed to a comrade evading military service. After 1941 and the turn of the CPGB to support of the war the WIL recruited a number of militants from the CPGB in large part due to their concentration on industrial work. They also sought and succeeded in recruiting from the declining Independent Labour Party picking up members in the Tyneside region. When an apprentices' dispute developed in that area they were then well placed to intervene and as a result Haston was to find himself in jail. This short term behind bars was because the ''Trades Disputes Act'' of 1927 was used against the supporters of the strike among whom the WIL were prominent. Their earlier support for unofficial strikes in the coalfields, particularly in Kent, had also drawn upon them the attention of the authorities. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Jock Haston」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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