A delegate to the recently-held Bectu (Broadcasting Entertainment Cinematograph and Theatre Union) annual conference reports that virtually the same speech condemning Labour’s attacks on workers at home and extensive imperialist warmongering and war crimes abroad given two years running received a very different response on its second airing.
Last year, the speech was met with stony silence. The media delegates present were, in the main, either indifferent or hostile to the arguments presented and vociferous in their defence of the ‘advantages’ of the union’s links with the imperialist Labour party. This year, a fairly healthy smattering of applause greeted the speaker, and none of the points made were directly attacked at all. Both delegates and platform were muted in their defence of the link, choosing instead to attack the disaffiliation motion on the basis that its wording (couched in terms of ‘finance’) was the wrong basis on which to disaffiliate.
This change is just one small indicator of a wider phenomenon and one which should give all our comrades heart: whether recognised or not, the line adopted by our party in regard to the invasion of Iraq – exposing Labour’s imperialist war for oil and domination and supporting the Iraqi resistance – is being borne out by reality. The strength of the Iraqi resistance, and the damage inflicted by it on the Anglo-American invaders, has forced large swathes of the bourgeois media to accept and talk about these truths, so that it is hard to find anyone who is still prepared to defend either the war or its perpetrators, or who will now disagree with the analysis that our party has been making since the beginning but which was so very unpalatable to many at the start of the war.
Of course, no-one is queuing up to give credit to communists for the fact that they’ve been pointing out the truth all along. Nevertheless, over time, as our party’s Marxist-Leninist analysis on all questions of importance is consistently shown to be in line with the facts, this is bound to bring respect (however grudging at first!) from the workers and colleagues our members talk to, and will surely help us to attract the best, most honest, most class-conscious workers into our ranks.
