Gutter Press!

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the Shah in Iran people self-determina- for tion.

And a leader of the Stalinist-dominated African National Congress in South Africa has been given whole page in The Militant to set out his organisation's guerrillaist strategy which runs at an isolated tangent from the escalating class struggle of the black proletariat against the apartheid capitalist state - again without a word of criticism.

In each case the common factor is that the regime or leadership concerned can be bracketed in the "anti-imperialist" camp, and is politically supported by the Castro regime, which the SWP regards as following a "workclass internationalist foreign policy designed to advance the anti-imperialist struggle and the world socialist revolution."

This leads to problems on the question of Poland. Castro stands, of course, four-square in opposition to the struggles of Solidarnosc, which the SWP notionally supports.

The SWP's answer is as far as possible to separate their references to Castro from those to Poland.

Subsidies

And they remain tactfully silent on the massive economic subsidies provided to Havana by the Kremlin leaders, while seeking to stress the supposed political "differences" between Castro and Brezhnev.

Most ominously, however, for many SWP members - particularly those with any length of exper ience in the Trotskyist movement - the SWP leadership has now gone even further down the Castroite road. Militant coeditor Doug Jenness has put forward at great length a series of arguments which effectively abandon Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution - a cornerstone of the Marxist programme and perspective.

Instead Jenness espouses the position which Lenin held in the years up to 1917 but then abandoned in the light of the experience of the February revolution Russia. The quotations and method used by Jenness in this argument echo many ef the standard texts used for decades by Stalinists in their efforts to prove that Lenin opposed "Trotskyism"

They aie arguments calculated to endear the SWP to Castro - and his Moscow sponsors - and run alongside the SWP's description of the Sandinistas and Grenadan regime as 'workers' and farmers' governments.

This SWP stance has triggered an intensified crisis within the USFI - while the SWP itself argues openly that its prime concern is no lunger with its USFI comrades, but with the creation La new international' based on the Cuban, Nicaraguan and Grenadan leaderships.

Such open repudiation of Trotskyist positions by the USFI's oldest established cothinking group has prompted a huge crisis - not least in the SWP itself.

Hundreds of members have left the organisation, whose weekly paper has dwindled in size and circulation, and whose international iournal has been cut back to fortnightly publication. :

The party's leaders seek on the one hand to crack the authoritarian whip• to contain the criticisms of members - many of them veteran trade unionists and on the other to present the SWP as a party firmly rooted in the American proletariat.

Strike

Yet a level of its serousness can be judged from the recent coverage of the national rail strike in the USA, which was front page story in the Militant one week (October 1) and never mentioned agairi! Having press-ganged half its members into industrial jobs, the SWP leadership has proved incapable of offering. them consistent or coherent policies to fight for in their unions, and effectively reduced them all to simply arguing with individual workers "on the job"

Such politics have also made themselves felt in other USFI sections - not least the IMG, whose weakness in the NHS pay dispute has been linked to their sending members from NHS unions into "proper industrial iobs elsewhere.

So how far will John Ross pursue his tacit polemic against the SWP? How far will he be allowed to go by the strong pro-SWP grouping in the IMG?

Will Ross draw the obvious conclusion from the present situation: that the political problems revealed by the SWP's "junking of the old Trotskyism" ‚require a thorough and serious discussion on the programmatic and methodological basis of the Fourth International?

The crisis of the USFI is nothing new or extraordinary.

Scatter

Since the 'Big Bang' split of the Trotskyist Fourth International in 1953, the vamous national and international "Trotskyist' galaxies have scattered asunder, emitting their various distinctive signals.

Unstable • supernovae, pulsars and quasars and black holes have gone through their own processes of emergence and decay.

Today, the spectrum of groupings claiming to trace their programme and. tradition back to the pre-war Fourth International is indeed a wide one.

Unless : the political lessons of the past are taken into account, in an open and objective appraisal, there can be no progress beyond the present confusion to a principled fight for reconstruction of the Fourth International.

Will Ross face up to this reality? If not, he will never fully answer the question "What is Trotskyism?" which forms the title of his series: • .. IN Britain we pride ourselves on freedom of speech and freedom of the press. But tear the rhetoric aside, and how real are these freedoms in practice?

Of course, aside from the laws of blasphemy. and sedition, we can more or less say and print what we like, except that it is virtually impossible to get socialist ideas into the popular press.

If we do, these ideas are more often than not misrepresented and ridiculed. The individuals concerned are subject to vicious campaigns of personal abuse to discredit them and undermine their public support.

I know because for the last few months I have been on the receiving end of the way in which certain journalists from some some of the popular (sic!) press are more concerned with destroying socialists and denirratinz socialist ideas than with reporting the news.

I have long accepted the self-evident right-wing bias of the media, though not crudely blaming all Labour's ills upon the press as some seem to do. "But until I actually went thorugh recent experiences myself, I never imagined the ruthless methods and extent of deception, exaggeration, and even outright fabrication, to which sections of the press are prepared to resort.

Peter Tatchell: "I will not be smears of Fleet Street"

Many journalists, whilst not necessarily reporting Bermondsey events in a favourable light, certainly have emerged with their professional ethics intact. Others have not. This article is about them and what they have done to me.

Press attention began in earnest last November following my selection as the Labour PPC for Bermondsey. It has continued on and off ever since, with peaks and troughs of media activity coinciding with the topicality of 'Bermondsey' as an issue.

The constant, insistent phone calls and visits to my flat at all hours of the night and day by journalists who will not take "no" for an answer have perhaps been the least of my worries.

Antics

Of more concern, are antics such as reporters blocking the rubbish chute opposite my flat and sifting through the contents; thereby adding a new dimension to the term "gutter press"

Sometimes for days and nights on end they have "doorstepped" my flat, sitting in cars with telephoto lens to photograph whoever goes in and out -often without their knowledge, let alone their permission!

Occasionally, I have been surreptiously trailed on foot, in cars and even on the tube.

Equally, my neighbours on the Rockingham Estate have been constantly subject to press harassment; frequently. being called upon late at night and early in the morning for days at a time with the evident intention of wearing down their resistance and forcing them to "tell all" in order to get some peace and quiet. Indeed, those neighbours who have consistently refused to speak to the press have been subject to obscene and racist abuse by some journalists.

When these journalists have not been able to get the damning quotes they want from local tenants they have resorted to more devious methods. They have scoured neighbourhood pubs scayenging for gossip and posed as Labour Party members, Southwark Council officers and friends of my family. Even local kids as young as ten years old have 'been quizzed about intimate details of my personal life.

At North Lambeth Day Centre where am employed, my co-workers and the single homeless people whom we assist have been put under enormous strain. For weeks on end, reporters have telephoned and walked into the Day Centre uninvited interrupting our work and demanding to speak to me. At times, the telephone lines have been so jammed with journalists that we have been prevented from carrying on our jobs. When other staff members have quite rightly refused to take this endless stream of press calls for me, they too have been subject to savage abuse and threats by some journalists. In fact, press harassment has so seriously interfered with the operation of the Day Centre that I have been pressured to resign my job.

Sewer.

Throughout these last ten months, myself, my family, friends and neighbours; have all been subject to a never-ending stream of false, but very intimidating, allegations. These range from my alleged membership of the Communist Party and the IRA, monthly trips to Belfast, arrest for terrorist offences, work as a KGB ageat etc. and a sewer of allegations about my private life which are frankly so disgusting that I dare not publicly repeat them for fear that they would be quoted from this article by those very same Fleet Street vultures.

Fabricated

A couple of newspapers have demonstrated a single minded obsession to 'prove' that I am not from a working class background. In a Sun article headlined 'Middle Class Past of Working Class Hero' ', only three 'facts' were offered in the body of the story to substantiate the headline - and even those were wrong!

Perhaps the most extreme examples of misrepresentation were totally fabricated stories in the Sun and Daily Express. The Sun alleged that I had gone to the Gay Olympics in San Francisco. The Daily Express carried a story about myself at the TUC Conference when I was away on holiday and not even in the country!

Related to the Sun story is the 'undercover' methods employed by their reporter Phil Dampier, whom the Sun switchboard now claims does not even exist!

Posing as Phil Wilson, he befriended Bermondsey Labour Party members on the TUC Day of Action. He claimed that he lived locally and wished to join the Labour Party. His masquerade even went so far as to go leafletting with the Young Socialists the following night. Whilst ferreting for information, at no time did he ever indicate that he was a journalist.

It is quite clear that sections of the press are totally unprincipled and without honesty or integrity. They are ready to harass and intimidate individauls and exaggerate and fabricate stories for the politically-motivated purpose of destroying socialists and discrediting the It is an enormous tribute to comrades in Bermondsey Labour Party and to local constituents that they have stood by me despite the immense media pressure.

It is also a great tribute to the courage and determination of comrades such as Ted Knight, Ken Livingstone and Tony Benn that they have withstood vilification by the press for so many years.

Like them, I will not be, intimidated by the lies and smears of Fleet Street. I will continue to speak out for what I believe is right, no matter how controversial!

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no.105 Octöber 21 1982 Page

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Peter Tatchell hits back at the smears and fabrications of Fleet Street