The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
Week commencing 28th April 2017
The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
Week commencing 28th April 2017
The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
Week commencing 28th April 2017
KEN LOACH, the veteran director and social campaigner who recently won widespread acclaim for his award-winning film I, Daniel Blake, is throwing his weight behind Labour’s drive to win the next general election. Loach left Labour in the 1990s during the Blair era to support a number of failed leftist movements before returning to the fold in recent years as a staunch supporter of Jeremy Corbyn.
The award-winning film director made a one-hour documentary called In Conversation with Jeremy Corbyn during the run-up to last year’s Labour leadership election. Now he’s going to use his undoubted talents to help Corbyn lead Labour to victory in June.
It’s going to be an uphill struggle given the overwhelming bias towards the Tories in the commercial media and the supposedly ‘impartial’ BBC that is less than covertly supported by the Blairite fifth column within the Parliamentary Labour Party.
Last September Ken Loach dismissed the BBC as an “arm of the state” that peddled “propaganda” and urged Corbyn supporters to flood the Corporation with “bias” complaints.
“The BBC is an arm of the state. The BBC is not some objective chronicler of our time — it is an arm of the state...they have this pretence of objectivity where in fact it is propaganda on behalf of the broad interests of the state,” Loach said. When has that not been the case?
The British Broadcasting Corporation, one of our so-called ‘national treasures’, was founded in the 1920s to educate, inform and entertain the public that funds it through the licence fee. Under the motto “Nation shall speak peace unto Nation” the Corporation claimed, and still claims, to be a pillar of impartiality and a reliable source of independent news at home and abroad.
In fact it was a very sophisticated propaganda machine that won international repute for its reporting during the Second World War and maintained its war-time prestige during the height of the Cold War. Then Third World diplomats would joke that whilst Radio Moscow and the Voice of America broadcasts were “95 per cent truth and five per cent lies,” the BBC was “97 per cent truth and only three per cent lies.”
The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War allowed the BBC to throw caution and subtlety to the wind. Imperialist and Zionist propaganda is now relayed at face value, any old rubbish from anti-communist defectors is paraded as unvarnished truth, and the most blatant lies and disinformation about Jeremy Corbyn are passed off as informed comment.
Last year researchers from the Media Reform Coalition and Birkbeck, University of London concluded that media coverage of Jeremy Corbyn was characterised by a “marked and persistent imbalance” in favour of sources critical to him. On TV news programmes double the airtime was given to sources critical of the Labour leader than to those supportive of him, the report found.
At the end of the day there is nothing we can do about the BBC and the rest of the mainstream media. They exist, after all, only to serve the ruling class. Labour cannot win this election by relying on the bourgeois media to let the people know what its policies are.
This is a golden opportunity to kick the Tories out. We must use every resource the labour movement possesses to win the biggest possible vote for Labour in June, But victory will come only by mobilising the mass support that swept Corbyn to the helm of the party in the first place, and reaching out to everyone on the street and in the factories, offices, colleges and estates across the land.