05.07.2006

Jumpy

Howard Roak starts to get nervous despite a decent week for our annual fundraising drive

This week saw £1,847 added to our total for the Summer Offensive, taking it to £8,657. Not a bad seven days, all things considered, but I'm starting to feel a little jumpy, comrades. We really need the rate of donations to be dramatically stepped up if we are going to get near this £30k target of ours by the end of July.

I would like to take the opportunity to mention a few comrades. RG for his £50 donation via our website. (he was one of 19,200 readers this week). Another comrade is TB, who brought in £200 via print work. Also comrade BP - a member of the Morning Star's Communist Party of Britain - for his tenner on top of his regular subscription and comrade RB for adding £20 to his annual sub.

A small trickle of new standing orders are coming in - many thanks to comrade CW for his £10 per month donation, for example - but still at a pace that is going to leave us well shy of what we need.

There are a number of political events in the offing where comrades have an opportunity to raise cash in directly political ways, as well some potentially lucrative stuff coming the way of party businesses. However, we really have to make an urgent appeal to comrades on our more distant periphery - supporters and sympathetic readers - to ease the burden on our hard pressed membership.

There is no doubt that they, again this year, will provide the backbone of the SO. In this, they stand in proud contrast to those of other organisations that have much bigger formal memberships than the CPGB, but appear not to able to inspire them to the same levels of work and self-sacrifice that the politics of our group can engender.

As we've mentioned them already, take that scruffy remnant of 'official' communism, the CPB, as an example. Here is an organisation that claims a membership of between 850 and 900. At its biennial congress that took place over the weekend of June 2-4 at its strategically-placed headquarters (Croydon), it launched a bold appeal for funds. Just £20,000 of funds to be exact. Or, put another way, about just over 20 quid per (claimed) member.

Without being too linear about this, just look at the levels our comrades are capable of now. Let alone in the future Communist Party, which will be able to deploy thousands of members in wider society. We would expect to raise many hundreds of thousands of pounds, not a mere £30,000 - and certainly not the pathetic amount called for in CPB's limp appeal for its people to throw good money after bad.

We need a better one this week, comrades!