16.06.2004

Fighting Fund

Reality CP

At last! Comrades are starting to get the idea with the PayPal button on the CPGB website. Yes, that's right - the one that lets you make a donation.

Last week, over 1,500 e-letters were sent from party centre looking for support for this year's Summer Offensive, the annual fundraising drive of our organisation. A good percentage of comrades receiving these requests have responded online, providing a welcome boost to our total (incidentally, we had 8,064 e-readers over the last seven days).

Particular thanks go this week to longstanding supporter RW for his sturdy £50; to our young comrades RG and AS for their £3 and £5 respectively and to RW for his £10. And despite not being in a position to donate to the Offensive (parental complications, we understand), many thanks to MR for her letter of support to all participants in this year's campaign - "my heart is with you, comrades", she writes.

All other donations this week - big and small - are much appreciated. That includes one from comrade MM, who sent us a magnificent £150 (by snail mail) - even though the last issue of the Weekly Worker we sent him had two blank pages! Obviously the other 10 were worth every penny. Altogether these gifts have taken our running total to £2,650. With a busy week of political activity coming up, we now look set in the next seven days to pass the £5k staging post on our way to our £30,000 target. But at the moment we have less than 10% of our total, as we enter the third week of our two-month campaign.

While we encourage comrades to be inventive in their quest for funds, one potential money-spinner that we will not be chasing up came our way this week in the form of a letter from one Chloe Solomon, a producer at Channel 4. Ms Solomon writes to tell us that she is looking for people "with strong values who live their lives according to them". "Dynamic" people, she stipulates, "with strong opinions on social issues and views on how we live in the community as well as our own family lives".

'Hell, yes - that's us,' we thought. Now where's the gig and what's the fee? A hard-headed documentary on the state of contemporary revolutionary politics, perhaps? A profile of the CPGB from formation to the present day, with political commentary and analysis from participants in the major factional battles of the recent years? Bugger that, we wouldn't even consider a role as a paper-selling extra in Hollyoaks beneath us - the SO demands sacrifices, as we never tire of telling comrades (in the past, we have on request provided CPGB posters to decorate the corrugated iron hoardings in the Eastenders market - so we have a certain record as far as soaps are concerned).

But Chloe's letter turned out to be a let-down, frankly. In fact, she is a producer for the new series of Wife swap. The one where the alpha-females of grotesquely mismatched families go on an exchange which seems to consist of a 10-day group tantrum. Our hopeful Channel 4 producer tells us that, in fact, this represents an "an amazing opportunity to teach another family about the values you believe in and it offers a broader platform to express your views (at its peak the last series reached a viewing audience of seven million". Odd, that - we tend to think of the programme as a fly-on-the-wall Jerry Springer. But with less dignity.

We have written to Ms Solomon telling her in forthright terms that no revolutionary organisation with a modicum of respect for its members, let alone the political vision it propagates, would lower itself to take part in her tawdry 'reality TV' circus.

We've suggested she gives Class War a ring ...