Morning Star

Morning Star is the newspaper of the Communist Party of Britain.

History

In 1930, a stern, working-class Londoner named William Rust was appointed as the first editor of the Daily Worker, the newspaper of the Communist Party of Great Britain. He was only 27 but he had solid credentials. Besides writing for the Workers’ Dreadnought, a newspaper produced by the suffragette campaigner Sylvia Pankhurst, Rust was an early member of the CPGB and had suffered for the cause. Five years earlier, he and 11 other activists had been charged with violation of the Incitement to Mutiny Act 1797, accused of distributing “seditious communist literature”.

Rust went to prison for a year but the experience did not weaken his beliefs, and his two spells as editor of the Daily Worker marked the paper’s golden age. When he returned to the role in 1939, after a seven-year period in which he represented the CPGB in Moscow and the Daily Worker in Barcelona during the Spanish civil war, it was selling 40,000 copies on weekdays and 80,000 at weekends. After the Second World War, he spoke of turning it into “a front-rank national newspaper with a circulation of 500,000 copies daily”, and he oversaw the move to a new office on Farringdon Road in the City of London. When in 1948 the first editions came off the press in William Rust House, a “torchlight procession of 20,000 supporters” carried him “shoulder-high to Clerkenwell Green, where he auctioned the first two copies for £45 each” – or so CPGB history says.

Rust died following a heart attack three months later, aged 45, and his successor, Johnny Campbell, called him “the greatest editor in British working-class history”. In the decades that followed, the paper declined in step with the ideology and organisations it served. In 1966 it was renamed the Morning Star, and it survived through Soviet patronage: Moscow paid it £3,000 a month in the 1960s, and in the 1970s and 1980s purchased 12,000 copies a day. By the time President Mikhail Gorbachev cancelled the order in 1992, the CPGB had ceased to exist and the Morning Star risked going the same way.

The Morning Star is proud to call itself the only English-language socialist daily newspaper in the world, and it covers industrial disputes, anti-austerity protests and international affairs in a brisk, populist tabloid style. Recently, it has earned praise for its coverage of women’s sport and corruption in sport. Jeremy Corbyn, the candidate for the Labour Party leadership and Morning Star contributor, has called it “the most precious and only voice we have in the daily media”, and Frances O’Grady, the TUC general secretary, says it is “essential reading for many union activists”.

Nonetheless, the paper remains in a state of “near-permanent” financial crisis, in Chacko’s words. Last year its circulation fell by 5 per cent: it has a print run of 13,000 copies and Chacko says it sells about 10,000 copies at £1. Advertising revenues rose by 25 per cent, though they remain modest because most of the ads are placed by trade unions, “solidarity bodies” and individual readers. The People's Press Printing Society, the co-operative that owns the paper, made a surplus of £1,137 last year – compared to a loss of £41,179 in 2013 – but only after “significant donations”, including a set of cartoons by Martin Rowson. Its “Summer of Heroes” appeal for support raised nearly £200,000, which was meant to insure the paper against “a continuing financial crisis”, but it still tries to bring in £16,000 every month through its Fighting Fund, with running totals updated on the paper’s website. “The rich don’t like us, and they don’t advertise with us, so we rely on you, our readers and friends,” the appeal says.^[1]