Link the struggle, North and South Dear Red Mole, My friend and comrade Tariq Ali knows perfectly well what my position is on Private Eye. I am not editor, deputy-editor, assistant editor or any other kind of editor. I write the Footnotes at the back of the magazine, and I contribute to the Colour Section at the beg. inning. I have never written or edited a word in the middle pages, which contained the offen sive article about the IRA, attakced by The Red Mole of December 12.
Gery Lawless, a prominent contributor to The Red Mole, who has contributed more good material on Ireland to Private Eye than anyone else, including myself, also knows all this. He and Tariq know that my views on Ireland and the IRA, expressed many times in writing and in speeches, have nothing in common with the Eye article.
I realise that it is getting increasingly difficult for The Red Mole to fill the necessary page per issue with attacks on other revolutionaires, but to attack me for an article I did not write and could not have written and over which I had no control is ridiculous.
Yours fraternally, The Red Mole replies:
We are pleased that Comrade Foot has written this letter. All we asked for in our comments on the Private Eve attack on the Provisional IRA was that he dissociate himself from the lies con tained in it. That he has now done this is perfectly satisfactory, but it does raise the whole question of the role which Private Eye plays in general. Comrade Foot knows perfectly well that he is responsible for the continuing high circulation of the journal thanks to his excellent journalistic abilities which are displayed fairly regularly in Footnotes. Therefore, even though he may not hold any official post, his function and his old friendship with the Editor, make it fairly easy for him to exercise control when he wishes to do so. Thus when Private Eye was planning to have a cover 'satirising" Bernadette Devlin's pregnancy. Paul Foot, correctly, prevented them from doing so. Surely it would not be difficult to exercise restrain on issues which are more explicitly political. However, since comrade Foot wrote his letter, the situation has taken an even more sinister turn.
Gerry Lawless, who, as Comrade Foot says, contributed the bulk of the Irish articles in the Footnotes section of Private Eye, has been fired because of the article which appeared in The Red Mole.
As a matter of accuracy, Comrade Lawless was not the author of the article in The Red Mole. but that aside, what position does Comrade Foot now take when a subordinate colleague, a fellow socialist, is discharged for having the audacity to disagree with the vicious anti-IRA campaign being carried out by Richard Ingrams. egged on by the Jesus freaks in Private Eye. Which side are you on Comrade Foot? What will your relations be with anyone who scabs on Comrade Lawless?
The reason we criticised Paul Foot was precisely because his role in Private Eye provides that mag zine with a left cover and aids to build and boost its circulation, which is slightly different from a member of a socialist group working on an ordinary bourgeois newspaper or journal, where no control is possible. We will, therefore, continue to criticise lapses of this sort whenever they occur as long as Comrade Foot remains on the staff of the magazine, and as long as he does not publicly dissociate himself from the more blatan lies to which his employers often resort.
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