French CP's racist attacks

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threats and their children have Party and of the League for been abused and insulted on the Human Rights have protested Beseiged by a gang of PCF the PCF without result. Mayor to demand an explana- press sees the incident as a tion, only to be told If you further attempt by the PCF to are innocent, you have only to stir up anti-immigrant violence, go outside and explain the fact. L'Humanite, the PCF's daily PRESS The headlong dash by the French Communist Party (PCF) to fill the space in the French political spectrum left by the banning of the neo-fascist FANE reached a new dramatic stage this week.

In the town of 1'Esperance the "communist Mayor, one Robert Hue, has launcnea a campaign to 'drive drugs out of the town.

Publicity

At first this seemed no more than the eccentricity of a small town politician looking for some good local publicity. The sinister aspects of his campaign began to appear when we heard his appeal to parents to inform against their children and their children's friends whom they suspected of drug taking or dealing.

It was not until 7 February however that the real significance of the movement became clear.

The local PCF and the Jeunésse Communiste held a demonstration in the town designed to harass a Moroccan family accused by the Mayor of drug dealing.

Threats

The name and the address of the family were given out in a PCF leaflet, as a result of which they have received a string of way to and from school. skinheads the family phoned the Local police have confirmed that there is no drug problem' in l'Esperance or the surrounding district. The Moroccan family in question had been subject to suspicion last year and theit flat had been searched without result.

Protests

Members of the Socialist strongly against the action of While most of the French paper defends the action vociferously and attacks those who have attempted to defend the rights of immigrants against PCF attacks.

What is clear from this extreme right turn by the PCF is that the growth of support for the •Socialist candidate Mitterand has taken them unawares and that they are reacting desperately to find a new base of support.

Revolutionaries must organise with the Socialist Party and the unions to defend immigrants against the Stalinistswho are now a far more serious threat than the fascists. to get over. There are millions' of people who have never underistood why they should face continued massive increases in the price of stamps and telephone calls when the telephone service records soaring profits.

It is to get over to these millions who refuse to understand the logic of their own oppression that Telecoms decided to paint the telephone boxes yellow.

We could expect from the same papers which now defend the red boxes a later campaign designed to associate yellow with go-ahead excitement and red with lumbering inefficiency which deserves every redundancy it gets.

The campaign has put paid to the details of this. scheme which will have to find some other means of expression.

This is the same problem that the Council for Social Democracy has. Now that Sue Slipman has joined it is not just a question of painting over the pale pink but of eradicating a past which once had the thinnest veneer of red.

I wonder how Fleet Street would react to a plan to paint Shirley Williams and Roy Jenkins yellow?