consisted of Balakrishnan and seven female followers. The group lived together at various locations around south London. The group house was visited in 1997 by a news organisation seeking an interview which was refused. Arrest and charges In 2013, the arrest of Balakrishnan and wife Chandra for suspicion of enslavement and domestic abuse marked the end of the group. The trial has become known as the Lambeth slavery case. After the arrest the three remaining women, Katy Morgan-Davies (Balakrishnan's daughter), Aisha Wahab and Josie Herivel were taken to safety. Balakrishnan was charged with several offences on 11 December 2014. No further legal action is to be taken against his wife. The hearings for the case began in November 2015. On 4 December 2015 he was found guilty of a string of sex assaults (including rape), child cruelty and false imprisonment. Balakrishnan was sentenced to 23 years in prison by the Southwark crown court on 29 January 2016. Criticism Steve Rayner in his 1979 paper The Classification and Dynamics of Sectarian Forms of Organisation found the group to be millenarian and incapable of critical debate, noting that "disagreement is not merely driven underground but actually goes unrecognised in the interests of group solidarity and an extreme ideology of equality." Robert Griffiths, general secretary of the Communist Party of Britain, said of the group in November 2013: "if one were to be brutally honest they were more of psychiatric interest than political interest. They had nothing to do with the mainstream leftwing and communist politics of the day." Organisation In 1979, Steve Rayner claimed the group practised democratic centralism. References Bibliography Peter Barberis, John McHugh and Mike Tyldesley, Encyclopedia of British and Irish Political Organizations, Pinter, 2000, p. 169. External links Workers' Institute of Marxism–Leninism–Mao Zedong Thought archive on Marxists Internet Archive Defunct communist parties in England Maoist organisations in the United Kingdom Defunct Maoist parties Political parties established in 1974 Cults