It is not the BNP but the Labour Party that needs exposing
BECTU members received the
following email from their union in February:
“I am writing to let you
know about EXPOSE, a new campaign of media workers and students – journalists,
technicians, designers, musicians and actors – that is dedicated to exposing
the British National Party as the racists, homophobes, anti-Semites,
women-haters and fascists that they are.
“BECTU are working with our colleagues from the
NUJ to support the launch of ‘EXPOSE’, a campaigning group set up to provide
well-researched information and background briefings for reporters, news
editors and others in our industry in order to challenge the BNP’s statements
and spokespersons, and the racism and criminality at the heart of their
organisation.”
___________________________________
Below is how one member
responded:
It’s not the BNP, but the Labour Party
that needs exposing. Everyone knows what the BNP is about. And it is Labour’s
racism that has created the conditions in which the BNP has grown and thrived.
Labour has dehumanised and massacred
millions of innocent people in the Middle East. Labour has demonised British
Muslims. Labour has built concentration camps for immigrants. Labour has
brought in ‘anti-terror’ legislation that it uses against peaceful
demonstrators and the entire Muslim community. Labour has dismantled British
civil liberties. Labour has given billions to the failed banks, while
encouraging working people to believe that it is immigrants who are to blame for
the lack of health care, child care, education, jobs, pensions and houses.
Labour continues to use anti-trade union legislation to crush working peoples’
attempts at resistance to cuts in their pay and conditions.
All these things have helped the BNP to grow.
Labour has the blood of millions on its hands and yet our unions try to tell us
that voting Labour is the only option if we want to ‘keep the Tories out’ or
‘keep the BNP out’. This campaign has less to do with exposing the BNP, who are
already fairly well exposed, than with trying to save the electoral chances of
the current government of Labour war criminals. Meanwhile, the side effect is
that you will give lots of publicity to the BNP!
The fact is that the capitalists are more
than happy for people who feel abandoned by and disillusioned with Labour to
turn to the BNP, since the BNP further encourages racism and division between
working people. This division is the very thing that keeps workers weak and at
the mercy of big corporations and the state. As far as the capitalists are
concerned, the BNP is a perfectly acceptable ‘alternative’ vote, since it
doesn’t threaten their ability to continue to plunder and exploit at home or
abroad. They see it merely as a safety valve in times of economic crisis, when
people are becoming more militantly disaffected.
But, despite all the
publicity it receives, and the recruiting work that the Labour party and
corporate media does for it, the BNP is not currently anywhere near to power.
The real threat to working people right now is the Labour party. And the best
way to explain that, and to keep people away from the BNP too, is to ditch
Labour and become part of a real workers’ movement against the failed system of
capitalism and for socialism – the only system that is capable of abolishing
all forms of inequality and putting workers’ interests and needs first.
With the bank crisis
fresh in people’s minds and the prospect of a fresh assault on workers’ jobs,
houses, pay and pensions after the election, no matter which party of capital
wins, there has never been a better time to get involved in the real struggle
for workers’ rights: the anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist struggle for
socialism. On the other hand, there is no better way to reveal our uselessness
than to go flogging the same old dead horse of trying to bring people back into
the Labour party fold, and tie them to the system that has created all the
problems we see today: economic meltdown, a gap of 100 times between Britain’s
richest and poorest, criminal genocidal wars, stealth privatisation of
essential services, spiralling unemployment, racist and anti-immigrant
hysteria, the increasing criminalisation of protest, etc.
As media workers, we should be looking a bit closer
to home in our battle to fight all this. The propaganda that fuels support for
criminal wars and anti-terror and anti-immigrant legislation and demonisation
couldn’t be put out without our members’ cooperation. Journalists write this
rubbish to order. Technicians print and broadcast it. How about a campaign to
stop helping the capitalists to make us complicit in their crimes?