Weyman Bennett, joint secretary of Unite Against Fascism, will lead the debate on the subject brought again into focus following the BBC’s decision to invite BNP leader Nick Griffin onto Question Time.

The NUJ Left conference will debate our response to the far right and our industrial tactics

Lindsey German, convenor of the Stop the War Coalition, will also speak at the event in central London on Saturday 17 October, leading a session on media coverage of the war in Afghanistan.

The debates will be timely given Griffin is booked to appear just five days after we meet and StW is due to hold a national demonstration over Afghanistan the following Saturday.

The morning session of the conference will be devoted to a debate over industrial strategy and tactics, led by a panel of NUJ activists involved in recent disputes.

This will lead into a discussion on building NUJ Left through solidarity networks across workplaces and branches.

We will also be debating issues around the NUJ national executive council’s proposals about the frequency of delegates’ meetings.

NUJ Left convenor Alan Gibson said: “The NUJ faces massive challenges in which the left in the union can play an enormous role – but only if we not only gather our forces, but go all out to widen and strengthen them.”

The conference will be at St Aloysius social club, 20 Phoenix Road, London (five minutes from Euston Station), between 11am and 4.30pm.

For information email nuj.left@googlemail.com

Unite Against Fascism was quick to condemn the move and has launched a campaign, which it is hoping will gain traction among the unions, calling on BBC management to reverse their decision.

And coming just days after the NUJ launched a resolute defence of the licence fee – a campaign it will be seeking to build among trade unionists, particularly at the TUC annual conference next week – the timing is potentially disastrous.

The editorial independence of the BBC is crucial. But in citing impartiality rules that only apply during election times, BBC bosses are seeking to absolve themselves of their ability and responsibility to make robust editorial judgements.

Of course the BBC could, quite legally, refuse to include the BNP on Question Time and not have to answer for it, regardless of the party’s recent electoral success in Europe.

This decision has more to do with an obsession in some sections of the media to treat Nick Griffin as a freak celebrity whose presence inflames opinion and therefore attracts viewers, listeners or readers.

But this merely serves to provide a legitimacy to a party that operates a racist membership policy and has a history of, and close involvement with, violent neo-nazi politics.

No media organisation should be putting vulnerable communities at risk and cynically manipulating its audience in this way, and it is certainly not what the BBC is for.

The NUJ’s reporting guidelines are clear: the hateful, divisive and discriminatory policies of the BNP must be tackled and opposed. And no journalist should allow the fascists to spout their lies without exposing them as liars.

But the problem with Question Time – as Sunny Hundal points out in a well-argued rebuttal of some of the myths surrounding allowing the BNP airtime - is that it doesn’t offer this opportunity.

Aired just hours after recording, there is no real time to rigorously check the veracity of claims and counter-claims and inaccurate statements can go unedited and unchallenged.

With a format that fosters the trading of soundbites – exactly the kind of platform the BNP craves and has built its relative success on – it can not provide the analysis and debate that is required to defeat the BNP’s arguments.

We need the BBC to be truthful, rigourous and challenging in its dealings with the BNP. We need to see the party’s machinery and supporters lacerated by quality, in depth investigative journalism based on solid public service principles.

We will always defend the independence of the BBC and the licence fee, but as trade unionists and journalists we can not defend this decision.

The Indie’s media columnist complains the BBC suffocates newspaper publishers’ ability to charge for online content.

He says: “I find it difficult to see how most titles can successfully apply even a modest charge as long as the BBC offers so much content online free of charge. In effect, the publicly-funded broadcaster is pointing a dagger at the heart of the free Press.”

But I would hope that, like the rest of us, Glover pays £142.50 a year to watch, read and listen to the BBC. Doesn’t he?

Often criticisms of the corporation – as fashionable now as ever in the wake of recent ‘scandals‘ and with the impending general election – take as their target its most valuable asset, the public subsidy.

Which is why it jars to hear, as I have more than once, otherwise passionate and articulate speeches by BBC workers begin with: “No one likes paying the licence fee, but…”

Thankfully they always go on to explain that for less than the price of a serious daily newspaper we get BBCs One to Four, the BBC News channel, two children’s channels, BBC Parliament, and interactive services, 10 national or digital radio channels, radio stations for Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and 39 English regions, and the BBC website and iPlayer.

Bloody good value the BBC may be; free it isn’t. So Glover is perhaps conveniently mistaken, but his line of attack is no less bogus and illogical.

His criticisms – a kind of second string to the anti-licence fee brigade – are not against the fee itself, but boil down to the fact that the BBC is too good, too professional, too well staffed, provides content of a quality that no one can possibly compete with, and so on.

At the very least, we should be demanding that the BBC operates to these standards. When it does, we should celebrate it; when it doesn’t, we should hold it to account.

He cites Financial Times editor Lionel Barber’s prediction that “almost all” news organisations will be charging for online content within a year.

Of course the FT is something of a special case. But Barber knows readers will seek out expert analysis and information, and this is the important point.

Whatever the timescale, newspaper publishers will be charging for certain online content in the future and people will pay for it. Given previous failed attempts, however, it will clearly require some thought.

They won’t need to run sites on a buy all of it or none of it basis like they do with their print versions.

It might mean they have to up their game in some areas – investigations for example. It might also mean putting more resources behind newsgathering and production, as well as making more effective use of the symbiotic roles of online and print.

None of these would be such a bad thing. Recent cuts in the industry have undermined the ability of providers – local, regional and national – to deliver quality, diverse news, analysis and opinion.

His claim that the BBC is now publishing a de facto newspaper online is interesting semantically, but it’s diversionary. What it does, like most media organisations, is provide content in a range of formats.

It’s not only wrong to say the BBC does what it does for nothing, it’s dangerous to criticise it when it does it well.

Undermining the BBC for doing a quality job with our money won’t raise the standard of journalism in this country – it’ll lower it.

Rose, who Jon describes as “a remarkable woman”, was a committed socialist and anti-war campaigner who wrote for the Camden New Journal and Islington Tribune until she died last year aged 101.

Jon has previously written about how Rose’s friend Hetty Bower revealed that the centenarian’s last wish was to be arrested for protesting in the restricted area around the Houses of Parliament.

The film, The Time of Their Lives, is about three elderly radical women living in a north London residential home and will be on Monday 20 July at 7.30pm. Worth a watch.

The case, reported by the Socialist Unity blog, clearly has more editorial than criminal implications as it is unlikely that anyone will be prosecuted.

Much of the mass circulation media coverage of the fascist BNP in the run-up to the local and European elections failed, in my view, to adequately challenge candidates and supporters, rebut their claims and expose the true face of the far right.

This despite the NUJ’s clear and well-publicised guidelines on reporting racist organisations.

So it is interesting to note that the Scottish Socialist Party clarifies in the comments on the SU post that its complaint to the police was against the BBC itself, not individuals who phoned in to the Morning Extra show.

NUJ Left members will be at the NUJ’s reporting the BNP meeting tomorrow evening, which we expect will outline a grassroots-led strategy for building on the guidelines and union support for reporters and council PRs faced with reporting on or working with BNP elected members.

In a comment on one of his recent posts about hyperlocalism, Roy suggests a familiar slogan: public services not private profit. Which I applaud.

As I note in the comments, in these times when even the least conscious among us can see how privatisation and deregulation have failed to deliver the benefits we were promised they would, it makes perfect sense to be talking about this.

But I wonder what Roy means by it. Public services are not services provided by members of the public for free – which is the sense I get when some people talk about hyperlocal news providers. And services paid for by advertising, or a reliance on other commercial considerations, are not public services.

Naturally, the more the private sector becomes involved, the less possible it is to maintain the ethos of public service, for obvious reasons – public services don’t discriminate; private services do because owners can’t turn a profit from providing services for people less inclined or less able to pay for them.

Public services need public servants, paid for by some form of public levy – be it taxation to pay for teachers, nurses and jobcentre staff etc, or on a more blurred distinction, the licence fee to pay for BBC reporters. The creep of commercialism in the BBC, which BBC worker and NUJ Left activist Becky Branford discussed at our media ownership public meeting in February, coincides dangerously with the constant attacks on the licence fee from other commercial media.

So, I’d like to understand more about what Roy means when he talks about journalism as a public service. Because I think he has a point, but it needs to be fleshed out.

Among the considerations are: How do we define journalism as a public service? Who is providing the service? Crucially, who is paying them to provide it? Is it free at the point of use? How is it controlled? Is it regulated? And if journalists are public servants, how do we hold them to account?

The jobs carnage across the media in the UK has now triggered a vote for strike action among one of the largest single groups of journalists in the UK.

NUJ members at the BBC have voted by 77% to take industrial action against compulsory redundancies – beginning with two strike days on the 3 and 9 April. 

At the heart of the campaign is the threat to dozens of jobs at the south Asia service at the BBC World Service, where bosses intend to “offshore” the work of researching, writing, presenting and producing live news programmes from London to offices in India, Pakistan and Nepal.

The scandalous proposal – it may even be illegal in India, according to a senior government official in New Delhi – and the sacking of NUJ members which BBC bosses want to impose embodies a repulsive “go back where you came from” attitude that sounds more akin to the nazi BNP than the BBC.

The BBC union reps who met yesterday to decide on the timing of strike action resolved firmly that such racist hounding of our members will never be tolerated.

So, defence of the World Service will be at the heart of the NUJ campaign to fight redundancies at the BBC. But it is clear other NUJ members are under threat.

There is growing concern that management are poised to impose new mergers and job cuts at the corporation’s main newsgathering centre in west London, in what could be one of the largest single culls of journalist jobs since director general Mark Thompson launched his slash-and-burn attack on the BBC at the end of 2004.

It is right that the focus of the campaign is on preserving jobs and journalism at the BBC.

But the strike vote gives BBC workers a first chance in more than four years to register their anger, whether it is over pay and pensions, the mortally dangerous plan to merge BBC and ITV news operations in Wales and the English regions, the refusal to broadcast the DEC Gaza appeal, or even management’s craven inability to come to the public defence of the disabled children’s TV presenter Cerrie Burnell.

Such a broad range of grievances gives activists a vital opportunity to link the BBC action with campaigns at regional newspapers and with other industrial battles.

So the tasks for NUJ Left members are to immediately:

• Contact NUJ reps at your nearest BBC newsroom to offer support
• Agitate for and help build public meetings in main BBC centres – for example, London, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle, Belfast, Cardiff, Glasgow – to bring together print and broadcasting journalists with other local strikers and stewards’ networks, preferably ahead of the national demonstration for jobs and justice in London on 28 March
• Stress the importance of building a community campaign around the BBC strike issues, especially among south Asian ethnic minority communities to support the campaign against off-shoring
• Where possible, encourage your own political organisations to hold either a caucus or a public/branch meeting to discuss the jobs crisis in our industry in an effort to learn from other campaigns.