[Militant No. 386, 16th December 1977, p. 1 and 12]
At last! A Labour Party political broadcast has hit the mark.
In using brilliant film sequences to connect the National Front with Hitler and Mussolini and the horrors of the concentration camps, the broadcast hammered home the truth.
It was in marked contrast to the bland pap that is usually put out. That is why the Tories and the capitalist press are up in arms. It went home. It was effective.
Any number of different objections have been levelled at the broadcast. But the trivial objections cover the one real objection. It laid it on the line. The enemies of the Labour Party would naturally prefer broadcasts to be confined to sleep-inducing apologies for government policies!
Did the broadcast inflate the importance of the National Front and give them unnecessary publicity?
The real complaint of the “rent-a-quote” Tory MPs who were quick to come out with this argument is that the NF has stolen their clothes and queered their electoral pitch. In any case, advice from them on how to make an effective broadcast is unwanted, to say the least!
As the film showed, no one who lives in Hoxton can be unaware of the National Front and other fascist grouplets. No Labour Party can be sure that its rooms will not be smashed and its meetings broken up. No black worker is free from the fear of attack by fascist thugs. Silence on the media is no answer.
Other critics have complained that some of those interviewed on the film were not properly informed of what it was for. They seem to expect the Labour Party to observe ethical standards that they themselves continually flout. When Labour’s Marxists are interviewed for Nationwide (for example) are they cautioned, “Whatever you say may be distorted and used against you?”
But the broadcast did not distort. The comments of young football supporters about the NF has already been amply confirmed about a week before by a TV documentary on ‘football hooliganism’. A number of Millwall supporters made almost exactly the same comments about the NF’s appeal to frustrated youths out for a “ruck”.
Other opponents of Labour have raised the question of the National Front’s “right to reply.” Here, ‘The Times’, which for some time has been pleasing for public recognition of the NF’s new, ‘respectable’, ‘democratic’, image, has been leading the field.
The Editor of ‘The Times’ however, forgets some important points. Millions of Jews, socialists,. Communists, trade unionists and nameless other victims of fascism who perished in the concentration camps and elsewhere lost their ‘right of reply’ for ever.
True, all that happened some time ago, ‘The Times’ published a whole series of articles attacking and vilifying the ‘Militant’ and its supporters in the Labour Party. Yet they casually refused to print a reply from Nick Bradley, the Young Socialists’ representative on the NEC (later published in ‘Militant’ 338). It is not clear that the capitalist press applies different standards to the National Front?
The broadcast was a great step forward. Yet the beginning was much better than the end. The film which graphically showed the appalling conditions in the Hoxton area of East London, only highlighted the urgency of action – and underlined the lack of real answers in the following comments of Peter Shore, Labour Minister of the Environment.
The Labour Party must not only expose the NF for what it is, but systematically answer the vile propaganda put out by the racialists and fascists. It must hammer home that racialism is not just a threat to immigrants but a weapon aimed at the labour movement and democracy. Only determined, mass opposition to the fascists will be effective.
Above all, the Labour Party must attack the roots of racialism. In the film, an older worker in Hoxton readily agreed with Joe Ashton MP that the area desperately needed “a pot of money” spent on it. In the following commentary, however, Peter Shore merely promised “increased aid to the inner city areas.” He even made a point of saying that there was no “pot of gold” in the offing.
But more than a few promises are needed. Labour must campaign in socialist policies that will provide the wherewithal to transform the rotten environment in which the deadly new virus of fascism is now able to breed.
Lynn Walsh
Schreibe einen Kommentar