Media barrage colours battle

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Peter Tatchell spoke to lan sucialists should work in the wider labour movement and which way they should proceed.

Strategy

Questions over the stra:egy for socialists in local government; over which direction the accountability movement should take; Swindale over the relations the Labour Party should have with groups outside daditional labour movement structures (i.e. ethnic minority groups and, increasingly, the unemployed) over the impact of feminism and the women's movement; and, above all, over how socialists should organise in ' the trade These are the kinds of questions the Conference will discuss. They are among the most important questions for socialists in the Labour Party and it is. hoped that Socialist Organiser supporters will play their part in that discusSiOn.

GRAHAM

We have seen a massive media campaign against you in the last 12 months, what impression do you have of its impact?

We have got eight major complaints into the Press Council about fabricated stories which have appared in the Fleet Street popular press.

The Sun, for example, said that I went to the Gay Olympics. I never went. The Daily Star said that 1 am a member of Militant. 1 am not and never have been. The Daily Express ran a sneer. ing story about me at the TUC conference last ycar when I was away on holiday and was not even in the country at the time.

Undoubtedly stories like these and the whispering and smear campaigns put out by our political opponents locally have had a very damaging effect. A lot of people have been taken in by it.

Now, as a consequence of all these hate stories, which frankly "just. play upon people's prejudice and bigotry, I face daily threatsagainst me - when I'm walking down the street, in the local shopping centre, on the doorstep.

Almost every day i get threats made against me. I've had over two dozen death threats in the last ycar and a fairly uninterrupted strcam of hate mail.

Three weeks ago 1 was chased by two blokes with an iron bar. I've had milk bottles and bricks thrown at me from cars and from balconies on council estates, and last Saturday! had a bloke chase me in East Street market, threatening to shoot me. In fact he was carrying something wrapped up in a newspaper which looked long and very ominous, so I just ran.

I accept that most of these people are just cranks but I have had a lot of near misses and I'm frightened that one day one of these people are actually going to get me.

Nights

To give you one typical example, a couple of nights ago, I was cycling home late at night and a car swerved right in beside me and tried to run me down.

They screamed out of the car window as they went past "Why don't you fuck off back to the Gay Olympics you communist cunt"

That is something which emanates directly from a fabricated story which appeared in a Fleet Street newspaper. And that is the consequence of the hate campaign which Fleet Street has been running.

And I wish the journalists who print these lies had to live with the consequences of, their actions. They wouldn't like it and 1 certainly don't.

What are the main points you are trying to get across in your election campaign?

Mellish and O'Grady attack me, not on political grounds or on policies. mainly because I'm an 'out sider' ', because I wasn't born in Bermondsey. And they claim I don't understand the area, the issues Or the people.

Therefore, to compensate we are putting a lot of effort into fighting a campaign which is very strong on local issues.

Our first point is a rent freeze: The next Labour government is pledged to freeze rents for all tenants for at least one year, and thereafter introduce very strict controls.

Then we want houses and not flats or offices. In North Southwark and Bermondsey we've probably got more flats and less houses than any other place in Britain. It's nearly all very dense estates of flats built in the 1920s and '30s, a lot of them now failing to pieces.

We've got quite a lot of high rise blocks and tower blocks with elderly people and families with kids

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No-curts in women's healthe bruary 3 1983 Page

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JOHN JOHN HARRIS