Sunshine on the

Scan page 11

JOHN HARRIS Nobody can doubt that most Fleet Street and national news journalists are careerists. but it does seem unlikely that all of them, like James, leave their bedridden old mothers to die unattended.

But perhaps we should just be grateful that the film spares us the hypocritical soul-searching and moralising by individual journalists which so many previous films on newspaper and radio journalists have concocted. James Penfield, soulless hack, is much more a reality than the crusading journalists and tortured individuals of standard fiction.

The film is expertly made, but somehow the story line is not quite up to the technique. Rather than a Ploughman's Lunch, it is more like a long cheese and onion sandwich.

Star

LAST week's fine weather enabled Stalinism to put on Es most sociable and sunny face -in the London "Mars with Sparx" rally and in Prague a: the catchily-titled "World Assembly for Peace and Life and Against Nuclear War"

The hardline Czech leadership had orchestrated an elaborate display of conviviality, which involved large meals, lots of dancing by well drilled children. visits to showpiece farms and factories, and stage-managed "anti-war meetings" in towns and villages.

As dissidents from Chare: 77 attempted to introduce a note of reality, they were brutally clubbed by Stalinis police.

But most 'delegates were from Stalinist-ruled • States. where such behaviour is routine. Others were from Stalinistdominated parties and liberation movements in the Third World who have been educsted to see things Moscow's war.

Some, however, were simply carried away by the sellrehearsed emotionalism and rhetoric of the occasion - failing to grasp that the official "peace" movement in Easter Europe is an arm of the suste. while genuine movements rep resenting the independence of the working classes - like Sobaarnose in Poland and Charter T - are brutally repressed.

The Morning Star's 'Marx with Sparx" event at least was hosted by a section of the labour movement rather than by a ruling state machine.

There were no truncheons in evidence for the several thousand who participated in the Alexandra Palace festivities.

But only a few weeks ago the friendly shirt-sleeved people -some sporting "Ask me about the Communist Party" rosettes - had been brutally intimidating young workers on the People's March.

Just as the Prague event was camouflaged by the attendance of delegates from liberation forces actually fighting imperialism, so the Morning Star event was lent a spurious left wing credibility. It secured co-sponsorship from Tribune, and non-Communist Party " speakers included Arthur Scargill, Tony Benn, Judith Hart and Tribune editor Chris Mullin. There were also representatives from a range of liberation struggles.

The Star on Monday was able to retail quotes from Mullin "If anybody thinks the Communist Party 1s dead, then they should look at this great rally" and Tony Benn: "If only every Labour voter read the Morning Star, Tribune and Labour Weekly, the recent history of this country would be very diffeent."

With CP and Morning Star influence in the unions being thrown behind the witch-hunting Neil Kinnock for the Labour leadership, and the paper committed to an extension of its wretched 'bishops and brickies" concept of a 'broad democratic alliance': against Thatcher, any growth of Star readership and support could in practice help to undermine the policies and democratic reforms both Benn and Tribune have argued for in the Labour Party.

Fortunately, there are no grounds to expect such a revival in the flagging fortunes of the CP or its crisis-ridden daily paper. Were it not for the misguided support lent to them by sections of the Labour left, the Stalinists would face even sooner the financial bankruptcy their politics so richly deserve: