GANG Critical support for Nastase?

Scan page 4

When and how often should Daily Mail reporters be beaten up is the question on everyone's lips.

The surprise is only that it has taken Wimbledon and a highly strung tennis star to do to the Daily Mail what every worker in struggle must have felt like doing.

John Passmore, who fell to the ground with a pair of broken glasses, wrote a defence of his breed in the Mail.

He explained how it was happenstance and coincidence that wherever Nastase went there was Passmore close behind; that it was his sharp sense of tennis reportage that had persuaded him to follow up the question of Nastase's marriage; and how he had been cowering at the back of the crowd of reporters when Nastase struck.

Of course Passmore may or may not share the political ambitions of his fellow reporters on what pass in the Mail for the news pages.

Perhaps it was just his despair at the rain at Wimbledon that had dampened his appetite for reporting tennis and increased his desire to find some off the beat story about the private lives and loves of the over paid spoilt brats of the tennis circuit.

But in managing to be just outside Nastase's room every time he opened the door, in contriving to be in the same lift more or less every time Nastase went downstairs, Passmore has certainly shown that he has got what it takes to become a regular Daily Mail newshound.

The essence of the press gang is not persistance in the face of overwhelming odds, but a dogged determination to crowd the victim until he or she snaps.

That means that if all else fails the dogged ace reporters can at least have a story from his or her hospital bed explaining how it all happened.

The press loves to be hated. The Daily Telegraph used to run regular reports revealing what Pravda had said about it.

The Daily Mail has its own way of getting round the problem that workers approached by its reporters have a temptation to hit' out first and answer questions afterwards.

Reporters are advised not to say that they are from the Daily Mail, but from Associated Newspapers, the controlling group.

The freelance' photographer who was sent to the Adwest picket last week to catch a picture of Ted Heslin for the Mail (and was rumbled by the fact that he seemed totally uninterested in the picketing) reacted with horror When accused of being a witch-hunter.

"I don't do series like that" he said before fleeing in his green MG.

It took a hurried police escort to see him safely on his way. There was a hunted, punch drunk look in his eye. Anyone for tennis?

bomb As hundreds of families in the USA fled from the still-lethal Three Mile Island power station, the French government announced that it has successfully tested a neutron bomb-designed to wipe .. out human life through radiation while leaving capitalist property intact.

The French imperialists have in fact devised am grisly "defence" strategy which involves using neutron bombs to create a barrier of intense radio activity designed to penetrate the armour of invading tanksbut of course also involving the obliteration of all forms of life in the selected "buffer" zone.

Whether in the drive for profits through the reckless proliferation of unsafe nuclear energy programmes, or in the ruthless moves to protect their profits through military attacks on liberation struggles and even on the workers' states, capitalism continuously confirms its contempt for human life.

There can be no doubt that a French imperialism that would consider fouling its own nest with neutron bombs is more than ready to use such barbaric weapons against the oppressed masses internationally-unless brought to heel by the revolutionary mobilisation of the French workers movement.

Scan page 5

The case of extreme right by the party's Organisation not: councils.