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

Accepting the prestigious award on the last day of congress, the annual gathering of trade unionists, she paid tribute to her husband, Kevin, who she described as “a thorn in the side of the bosses”.

Anita, re-elected today as the PR and information rep on the NUJ NEC, listed the advances made in the 20 years since she was a first-time congress delegate and highlighted the work that still needs to be done.

While overall there is now a greater diversity in delegations, she said it is “still far short of being truly representative”.

“More women delegates but still only just over one in three and, at least this year I thought, an increasing number of women speakers.

“The LGBT and disability conferences have become motions-based – as, hopefully, will the young members’ forum – providing lay activists with a greater democratic voice.

“And the voice of the lay members is heard more at our congress now the equality conferences bring a motion to this floor.

“This year, the trades councils finally came home with their conference’s first motion. Again hopefully, the young members will join our debates next year.”

She said there was now more of an international flavour to TUC debates. In a reference to an earlier address by Salvador Valdes Mesa, general secretary of the Cuba Workers’ Group of Affiliated Trade Unions, Anita added: “Comrades, who would have thought 20 years ago that congress would give a standing ovation to a Cuban trade union leader in the 50th anniversary of the glorious Cuban revolution.”

She thanked Kevin, her “husband and comrade of 35 years” for his support, saying: “Kevin was a child of the depression; his grandmother died in the workhouse. He left school at 13, and led his first strike at 15.

“Since then he has been a thorn in the side of the bosses. Sometimes he even took on the TUC. Indeed, the first time I was at Congress House was outside lobbying the general council to call for the repeal of all anti-trade union laws.”

She added that she was proud of the NUJ for its role in making this repeal TUC policy.

“My union now has a young leadership with Jeremy Dear and our new deputy general secretary, Michelle Stanistreet, a sister of whom I am immensely proud,” Anita said.

She closed with a rallying call to continue the fight against the far right, saying: “I learned my politics from my parents – both anti-fascist refugees from Nazi Germany.

“I know they would have been extremely heartened by the way our trade union movement has taken up the struggle against the re-emergence of the far right.

“Sisters and brothers, I wish you well in this and all the fights we still face.”

Referring to the silent vigil delegates and visitors held earlier in the week to remember the victims of racism and fascism, she said: “At the beginning of the week we said, ‘not in my name’.”

Clenching her fist in the air, she added: “At the end of the week I say, ‘no pasaran’.”

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.

But a report published recently by the right of centre think tank provides a forensic analysis of the online activities of BNP members and supporters that not only pulls back the BNP’s mask of ‘respectability’, it shatters it into millions of pieces.

Its examination of the BNP on blogs, internet forums and YouTube – carried out over three weeks in June – reveals an accepted culture of extreme racism, Holocaust denial, anti-semitism, homophobia, sexism, incitement to race hatred and violence, and an undimmed admiration for the Third Reich.

In the introduction, researcher Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens says one of their major findings is that “many members of the online BNP network share, to some extent, a neo-nazi ideology, based on the notion that European nations should be ‘purged’ of their non-white populations”.

Those highlighted in the report, ‘The BNP and the online fascist network’ (pdf), are at best tolerated by the BNP leadership. In some cases they are promoted through official BNP channels and, in the case of blogger Lee Barnes, a part of the party hierarchy itself. This is the true face of far right politics in the UK.

This research is important. Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons were elected to the European parliament in May on the back of a conscious campaign by the BNP to shield from public view its links to violence and neo-nazism, and to promote itself as a more or less benign party of ‘civic nationalism’ based on ‘identity’, ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’.

The authors analyse in detail the close links between the official BNP YouTube channel, and official YouTube accounts of the Thurrock and Burnley BNP branches, and “ideologically driven racial supremacist” activists and organisations.

They also highlight Covert Tactics, a group of British neo-nazis who operate a YouTube channel, a blog, an internet TV programme, and an online discussion forum, and whose allegiance to the BNP is unquestionable.

Its members discuss their attendance at the BNP’s annual Red, White and Blue festival, and any BNP members who oppose Griffin’s leadership soon become the targets of sustained hate campaigns from the Covert team.

One member, Tommy Williams, appears on the recently leaked BNP membership list and another, Peter “Sid” Williamson, was effectively forced out of the openly nazi British People’s Party last year for what the BPP described as a “long term slavish devotion to the sacrosanct policy of never criticising Nick Griffin and his notorious gang”.

The argument that the BNP has no control over who supports it holds no water when the party makes no attempt to distance itself from such violent extremists.

A chapter in the report about Lee Barnes is particularly telling. Barnes is head of the BNP’s legal team, a party spokesman, a speaker at BNP meetings, a writer for the BNP website, and a researcher for the party.

His blog, 21st Century British Nationalism, is enough to dispel any myth about the BNP as mainstream and respectable. His writings exude racial hatred, sexism and homophobia, and he analyses the BNP’s relationship with the National Front.

It is important to remember that Barnes is a senior figure in a party that has successfully persuaded sections of the white working class that it has their interests at heart. Yet he displays a misanthropy that borders on the sociopathic.

He accuses those who protest against the BNP of being child molesters, and he claims that lesbians who oppose him “are in fear of their own repressed sexual feelings” for his “rampant virility”.

Providing irrefutable confirmation that, far from reforming, the BNP continues to promote a racist and white nationalist ideology akin to its formation under founder John Tyndall, the report deserves to be read by everyone who identifies with our core values of solidarity, equality and anti-racism.

It also provides further proof that our reporting of the BNP must be more vigorous than it is with other political parties.

The BNP is not like other political parties; its representatives must not be given a free platform from which to speak without confrontation and challenge.

The NUJ has updated its policy on reporting the far right following the election of two BNP candidates to the European parliament.

Speaking at a conference held at the historic Mechanics Institute in Manchester, NUJ general secretary Jeremy Dear said now the BNP has two Euro MPs, the need for quality journalism and ethical reporting to expose wrongdoing by the BNP and other far right organisation was more vital than ever.

The conference was organised to give NUJ members practical advice on reporting the far right. Paul Scarrat, secretary of Yorkshire and Humberside Unite Against Fascism, said that in his view the election of BNP leader Nick Griffin in the north west and Andrew Brons in Yorkshire and Humberside was the biggest electoral breakthrough for the far right in British history.

In the 1999 Euro elections, the BNP got 100,000 votes. In 2004 it won 800,000 votes, and this year it was almost one million. This meant the BNP was now part of the democratic furniture and were now going to get far more publicity, he said.

Paul added that many voters did not know what the BNP really stood for. All too often, its policies sounded as if it had been listening to gossip down the pub.  However, the party is still committed to mass repatriation, crushing trade unions and ending democracy.

This means media workers face fresh problems covering the far right, particularly in reporting and advertising.

I pointed out that when I was a junior reporter 30 years ago there was little or no guidance on reporting the far right. Britain’s leading nazi Colin Jordan lived in Coventry and the only advice I got on reporting was to do it “by the book” and stick to the traditional four Ws – who, what, where and when.

I warned that the leaders of the far right are often plausible and charismatic people who could take in unprepared journalists.

Assistant editor of the Manchester Evening News Ian Wood talked about practical advice on dealing with editorial and advertising. He said it was MEN policy that all adverts which even looked as if they might support the far right had to be personally approved by the editor. Stories had to conform to high ethical standards.

Newspapers across the country had accepted adverts from the BNP in the run-up to the European elections and the NUJ has lodged a complaint with those editors.

Former NUJ president and chair of the union’s ethics council, professor Chris Frost reminded delegates about the guidelines on reporting race, travellers, immigration and asylum issues. And if members want someone to talk to, there is an ethics hotline and email address. The anti-fascist magazine Searchlight has also produced its own guide for journalists.

Pete Lazenby of the Yorkshire Evening Post has done a lot of research on the far right in his circulation area and this helped shift the newspaper’s stance against the BNP. Pete said he stuck to factual stories including what happened to a BNP councillor who resigned from the party when she found out what it really stood for.

In conclusion, Jeremy said he was delighted that editors were prepared to share a platform with the NUJ on questions of reporting the far right, but regretted that the Newspaper Society, which represents most of media employers, didn’t share this view.

• Chris Youett is the NUJ delegate to TUC midlands and minutes secretary of NUJ Birmingham and Coventry branch

As part of that campaign, Eileen compiled a list of 10 questions every journalist should ask themselves before reporting on the BNP or other racist and fascist parties.

“Something as simple as an NUJ style guide on noticeboards would make a huge difference,” she said.

Eileen was one of more than 50 NUJ activists at the union’s summit on Thursday 18 June about how we can support members seeking to uphold the conscience clause and the NUJ guidelines on race reporting in the face of the election of two BNP Euro MPs, and a string of local councillors in England.

The meeting agreed a five-point action plan to confront BNP racists:

• The creation of a ‘one stop shop’ information website set up by the NUJ in conjunction with sister unions
• A strong position statement of NUJ policy on racism in the media and the BNP
• Building for the Manchester day school on reporting the BNP on 27 July
• Publicising the union’s ethics hotline for advice on race reporting
• Updating an distributing the NUJ guidelines on race reporting.

Building up the confidence of members in the workplace, through information, advice and solidarity networks between chapels was the focus of much of the debate.

A member from the NUJ’s black members’ council told the meeting that “a strong, clear statement of where we stand will encourage people out there to take a stance themselves”.

One long-standing activist at The Guardian newspaper said: “It’s better to confront them through strong reporting, rather than deny them a platform and deny they exist.”

BNP thugs have also frequently tried to exclude certain journalists from press conferences – either out of racism or because the reporters have written pieces exposing BNP lies or the criminal backgrounds of their fascist officials and leaders.

A BBC worker called on union members to organise solidarity action against the exclusion of anyone from a BNP press conference , saying: “All in, or none in.”

“Don’t allow the BNP to come across as victims,” says Tim Lezard from the union’s National Executive. For many years, several campaigning journalists have been singled out on the hateful and notorious Redwatch website, which has repeatedly issued threats against anti-nazi activists.

“The way to go is to give people the confidence to use the union’s conscience clause,” he added.

The meeting also heard from Weyman Bennett, national secretary of Unite Against Fascism, former Labour MEP Glyn Ford and black members’ council co-chair Rotimi Sankore.

Three people joined the NUJ as a result of the meeting and 11 more activists signed up for the NUJ Left email list.