A public meeting in south London on the eve of the BBC and FBU strikes will be addressed by leading members of the unions involved:

• Jeremy Dear, general secretary of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ)
• Becky Branford, BBC NUJ member
• Ian Leahair, from the national executive of the Fire Brigades Union (FBU)

Salvation Army Hall, Princess Street, Elephant and Castle, SE1 6HH, at 7pm on Thursday 4 November.

The meeting has been organised by local campaign group Southwark Save Our Services.

More details on NUJ website, what you can do to help.

Background to the BBC dispute

Dear colleague,

Can you afford to simply give away £100,000, £25,000 or even ‘just’ £10,000? Of course not.

But those are the kinds of sums every journalist faces losing under the BBC’s latest pension proposal.

It’s unfair and unacceptable. For all BBC staff it means paying more, working longer or getting significantly lower pensions. In some cases, all three!
BBC journalists are not asking for higher pensions. They are not even saying they wouldn’t consider paying more or working longer for a fair pension settlement.

That means a deal based on the real deficit in the scheme, not speculative and questionable figures.

It means a pension which does not lose a significant part of its value every single year for the rest of their lives – which is what will happen under the current proposals.

And it should be a deal that means what has been promised to them – which they have already paid for – is protected.

The current offer fails those tests and it fails BBC staff.

That’s why they’ve been left with no choice but to take industrial action on 5 and 6 November and 15 and 16 November. They can’t afford not to.and they need YOUR support.

Jeremy Dear, General Secretary

How you can help:

Make a donation. Make cheques payable to NUJ (marked on back BBC Strike hardship fund) and send to General Secretary, NUJ, Headland House, 308 Gray’s Inn Road, London WC1X 8DP.

Send messages of support. Messages should be sent to campaigns@nuj.org.uk

Join the picket lines – visit your local BBC centre to join the picket on 5 and 6 November. For further details of picket times/places contact campaigns@nuj.org.uk

Invite a speaker – contact your local BBC rep or campaigns@nuj.org.uk to arrange a speaker for your next meeting

Keep up to date on developments – see www.nuj.org.uk for the latest news of meetings and action.

Reps will now meet to decide the next moves.

Update on strike days here, see leaflets below for the NO case

Latest leaflet from BBC reps against the pensions offer

Under the name, Open Channel, a coalition of NUJ and Bectu reps are campaigning for a no vote in the ballot on the BBC’s latest pension offer.

Download a copy here to read and distribute to your work colleagues. Here are highlights of the leaflet below.


“We are a cross-section of union reps at the BBC and we think you should vote “No” in the consultative ballot on the BBC’s CAB 2011 pension plans.

Mark Thompson’s campaign to destroy the final Salary Pension Scheme is based on a sham.

A new estimate suggests that the deficit on the scheme is not £2 Billion. It is not £1.5 Billion. It has now been estimated at £1 Billion – that’s the level at which the Director General promised to reconsider the BBC’s options on the future of the pension scheme.

So, all bets are off. We call on the BBC to re-start negotiations from scratch. The reps’ decision to call this consultative ballot has given staff a chance to see even more of the flaws in the BBC’s plans.

We all have the right to demand that Mark Thompson offers us a pension which will allow us a decent, secure standard of living in retirement.

That’s what we were promised. So far, none of his alternatives to scrapping the Final Salary Pension Scheme gives us that.

“Was it part of the natural order that final-salary schemes would wither and die? Were they killed by incompetence and neglect? Or were they murdered?” from “Who Runs Britain” by Robert Peston, BBC Business Editor”

Vote NO because:

• CAB 2011 means staff will be expected to pay more, to work longer and get less back for their retirement.
• The BBC has refused to consider the unions’ calls to protect our pensions against rising costs of living in the future. You risk losing more than 20% of your pension to inflation under the current plan.
• The BBC’s “final” offer was no such thing. Negotiations are still going on and management have continued to amend key elements of their proposals.
• The new estimate of the pension deficit shows that senior management have used the deficit in a politically-driven attack to close down the Final Salary Scheme.
• BBC staff are not demanding “feather-bedding” or “gold-plated” pensions. The current average pension for BBC staff is £12,500. That’s somewhere between the pension of a fire-fighter and a police officer.

The three main unions at the BBC: NUJ, Bectu and Unite are organising the action in protest against plans to cut pensions. NUJ members voted by more than 90 per cent to strike.

The top brass at the BBC are proposing to cut the link between salary and pension by putting a one percent cap on any pension increase. Managers claim that the pension fund is in debt to nearly £2 billion – this is rejected by the three unions: NUJ, Bectu and Unite.

The pension attack is part of a series of attacks on the BBC and its staff such as pay, threats to the World Service and government intentions to sell-off parts of the public body.

The NUJ Left supports the strikes and will be visiting picket lines across the county. Please download this petition, get you’re fellow workers to sign it and take it along to a picket line near you.

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.