Career
During the Second World War, Cliff Slaughter worked in a coal mine as one of the Bevin Boys. As a lecturer at the Universities of Leeds and Bradford, 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.
During this period, he was regarded as one of the group"s leading intellectuals, and remained on the Central Committee.
In 1985, Healy faced allegations of sexual harassing WRP members, leading Cliff Slaughter and Mike Banda to oppose 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 Healy again tried to exert authority, Slaughter and Banda led a call for "revolutionary morality" and expelled Healy and his supporters.
This effectively split the organisation between their supporters and those of Healy and Sheila Torrance.
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. Slaughter and Banda"s group at first continued to call itself the Workers Revolutionary Party. The international supporters of this group decided to call themselves the Workers International to Rebuild the Fourth International (WIRFI), and they published both the Workers Press and the International journal.
In 2006, his work Not Without a Storm: towards a communist manifesto for the age of globalisation was published (314 pp), intended as the opening of a discussion on contemporary issues and the responsibility of socialists.
Slaughter"s most recent book is Bonfire of the Certainties - the Second Human Revolution, (186 pp) published in 2013 by Lulu.com Over the past 20 years, Slaughter has - in his theoretical work - been increasingly influenced by the writings of Istvan Meszaros as evidenced by his last two published works "Storm" and "Bonfire".