Reformist party cannot be reformed: Letter and reply PRESS GANG

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The BBC radio commentator settled himself in his seat and prepared for ninety minutes hard slog on the Scotland/Peru match. His warming up patter bounced off the sattelites and into thousands of radio sets.

"The atmosphere in Cordoba is so relaxed, so cálm. Even the soldiers on duty outside the ground with fixed bayonets look almost inconspicuous."

Whether that statement (or the long close-up TV shots of General Videla at the opening of the 1978 World Cup in Argentina) came into the official BBC category of political reporting, it is difficult to say-if so, it would have been the first football commentary to be vetted by the BBC hierarchy.

For all political reports about the regime in Argentina have been put into a special status by the BBC-with an instruction that they have all to be "referred upwards" for approval.

It says something both about the BBC and about British imperialism that the only other country about which reports are automatically referred upwards is Northern Ireland.

The BBC's reporting is not in itself in a special category. The Press response to the World Cup has been everything that could have been predicted.

There is only 'one standard by which the military junta is being judged and that is its ability to provide the arena for the multi million pound business exercise, and to defend it.

There was more press criticism in Britain about the Argentine regime two months ago when the main stadium grass was found to be scorched black, than if every game was opened with a public hanging and the half time entertainment was provided by a firing squad.

To the starry eyed sports writers, such entertainment would be part of the spectacle and to criticise it would be "bringing politics into sport".

The BBC's monitoring of its reports does however indicate a determination that no journalist will carry out the threat of the fake lefts in the NUJ to turn the World Cup into an opportunity to expose the regime.

The decision to impose special censorship was exposed by the Guardian diary writer, Peter Hillmore, early in May.

There was a stunned silence for a time from the BBC and then a blank denial from the director of news and current affairs at the BBC, Dick Francis, that the director general (lan Trethowan) had ever issued such an instruction.

Hillmore has exposed this lie in its turn. In his diary column of June 2, He quotes from the minutes of a current affairs group of senior executives of the BBC of May 16 that Francis himself had instructed his staff to refer Argentinian stories upwards so that their reports would remain "unrestricted"!

The BBC has admitted these minutes to be genuine, but complained that the meeting was "badly minuted" (presumably forgetting to ensure that the minutes were referred upwards for approval first).

Hillmore himself, despite having exposed the elaborate censorship system imposed by the BBC, refuses to draw any conclusions from it, referring only to "problems for the news media" , and pooh-poohing any notion that the BBC might be applying non-journalistic standards.

If his conclusions were true, the exposure he published would not be of any interest.

Not that it has proved of any interest to other newspapers, to the BBC itself or to commercial radio and television. The truth about the BBC censorship system has remained a downpage, low-key sensation in one paper.

Presumably the others "referred it upwards" and, by applying normal journalistic standards, spiked it. It was after all just a professional foul. contacts and branches of that union in the area to mount a campaign on the While of course being of the opinion that all trade unionists should fight in their unions against bans on unemployed members, the approach I have just put forward appears to me to be practical short term approach to the question.

While the result of this strategy would be that unemployed youth would be concentrated in particular unions, I would consider that a blow against a particular trade union bureaucracy weakends the bureaucracy in general.

Another point that caught my eye was in your article on the Communist Manifesto where you refer to "the inevitability of the proletariat's complete victory' However, it is my view that this is far from inevitable.

To us looking back today it is incredible that the German proletariat in the 1930's did not take Trotsky's adyice on fighting fascism, but the fact remains that they didn't.

What is to stop such situWe reply Our orientation towards the unionisation of youth means that in those cases where youth have trade or are made unemployed they should fight for admission or retain membership in the appropriate union.

Those youth who are denied a job from school and have no trade should fight for admission to the general unions-most obviously the TGWU, where recruitment of unemployed is provided for under rule.

The obstacles placed by officials in the way of recruiting unemployed-particularly unemployed youthmean that the unionisation of youth must be approached as a campaign enlisting the support of employed union members in the struggle against the union bureaucracy.

A conscious leadership developed in such struggles is the only way the power of the officials can effectively be challenged. And the believe that • the Labour Party or any social democratic party can be transformed into a revolutionary party through a change of its leadership.

But we do believe that a fight waged for a consistent socialist programme within the ranks of the Labour Party can expose the treachery of the right wing and the spineless inadequacy of the 'left' talkers, and in this way demonstrate to the best layers of workers in the Labour Party that they must break from reformism and build a revolutionary Such a fight sometimes means. proposing new leaders, on a programme which can sharpen the fight with the official leadership.

As Marxists, we already know that the Labour Party as a reformist party can never solve the problems of the working class.

Our task -carried through by our propaganda and agitation within the mass organisations of the labour movement-is to prove this in practice to the vast number of militants who do not yet agree with US.