10.07.1997

Summer Offensive ’97

The pledge total for this year’s Summer Offensive has crept up to just under £17.000 - not bad, but still some way short of our £25,000 target for the months of May and June. Comrades must hurry to ensure that Party centre receives the full amount of pledges by the formal end of the SO on July 12.

Perhaps the best feature of what has been a fairly quiet campaign this year has been the role the Party periphery and readership of the paper have played. The perennial complaint of previous campaigns has been the low response rate of non-members and Party sympathisers. Of course, the bulk of the money is still raised by the core of the organisation. This year however, a relatively high percentage of the total will have come from more distant comrades.

This clearly reflects a change not simply in quantity (the readership of our press is certainly far wider than it has ever been before and continues to edge upwards) but also in quality. The readership of the party newspaper and our sympathisers are now of a different calibre. They tend to be politically far more serious, experienced and capable of putting their hands in their pockets for a political project they support. While this has not yet translated into cascades of new members, it is an encouraging development.

The celebration meal to end this year’s Offensive is on Saturday, July 12 in a south London venue. Places are limited, so please contact Centre as soon as possible.

Mark Fischer