Morning Star

The Daily Worker (1930–1966)

Early years

The Morning Star was founded in 1930 as the Daily Worker, the paper representing the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), and was immediately preceded by and grew out of the Weekly Worker (10 Feb 1923 – 21 January 1927) and Workers Life (28 Jan 1927 – 20 December 1929) newspapers. The first edition was produced on 1 January 1930 from the offices of the newspaper in Tabernacle Street, London, after a meeting the day before by nine British communists, including Willie Gallacher, Kay Beauchamp, Tom Wintringham, Walter Holmes, and Robert Page Arnot.

In the first few decades of its existence, the Daily Worker contained cartoons for children. The Daily Worker's first issue contained a children's cartoon titled "Micky Mongrel the Class Conscious Cur", drawn by artist Gladys Keable, which would become a staple of the early paper. The paper's first editor was journalist William Rust, while the paper's assistant editor and manager was Tom Wintringham, and was printed at Wintringham's Unity Press. In January 1934, the Daily Worker's offices moved to Cayton Street, off City Road. The first eight-page Daily Worker was produced on 1 October 1935.

Second World War

On 3 September 1939, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain spoke to the nation on the BBC, at which time he announced the formal declaration of war between Britain and Nazi Germany. Daily Worker editor J. R. Campbell, backed by his political ally, Party General Secretary Harry Pollitt, sought to portray the conflict against Hitler as a continuation of the anti-fascist fight. This contradicted the position of the Comintern in the aftermath of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (which became CPGB policy on 3 October) that the war was a struggle between rival imperialist powers, and Campbell was removed as editor as a result, being replaced by William Rust.

The paper accused the British government's policies of being "not to rescue Europe from fascism, but to impose British imperialist peace on Germany" before attacking the Soviet Union. The newspaper responded to the assassination of Leon Trotsky by a Soviet agent with an article on 23 August 1940, entitled "A Counter Revolutionary Gangster Passes", written by former editor Campbell.

The paper criticised Sir Walter Citrine after his meeting in Paris with French Labour Minister Charles Pomaret in December 1939. Time said of the events following the meeting, "Minister Pomaret clamped down on French labour with a set of drastic wage-&-hour decrees and Sir Walter Citrine agreed to a proposal by Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir John Simon that pay rises in Britain be stopped". Citrine sued the Daily Worker for libel after it accused him and his associates of "plotting with the French Citrines to bring millions of Anglo-French Trade Unionists behind the Anglo-French imperialist war machine"; the publisher pleaded the British press equivalent of "fair comment". Citrine alleged, in response to his lawyer's questioning, that the Daily Worker received £2,000 per month from "Moscow", and that Moscow directed the paper to print anti-war stories.

During this period, when the Soviet Union had a non-aggression pact with Germany, the Daily Worker ceased to attack Nazi Germany. On 21 January 1941, publication of the newspaper was suppressed by the Home Secretary in the wartime coalition, Herbert Morrison (a Labour Party MP). It had repeatedly ignored a July 1940 warning that its pacifist line contravened Defence Regulation 2D, which made it an offence to 'systematically to publish matter calculated to foment opposition to the prosecution of the war'. A Scottish edition of the Daily Worker was produced from its plant in Glasgow from 11 November 1940. On 16 April 1941, the Daily Worker offices at Cayton Street were totally destroyed by fire during the Blitz. The paper moved temporarily in 1942 to the former Caledonian Press offices in Swinton Street (whence the old Communist Party Sunday Worker, edited by William Paul and Tom Wintringham, had been published from 15 March 1925 until 1929). New offices were acquired in 1945, at a former brush-makers' warehouse at 75 Farringdon Road, for the sum of £48,000.

Postwar

The Daily Worker reached its peak circulation after the war, although precise circulation figures are disputed – from 100,000 to 122,000 to 140,000 and even 500,000.

The Daily Worker's campaigns against the colour bar in Britain inspired British middleweight champion boxer Len Johnson to join the Communist Party of Great Britain, and write a boxing column for the Daily Worker.

The Daily Worker was fully supportive of the show trials in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria in the late 1940s, as well as the split with Tito and Yugoslavia in 1948.

In 1950 Daily Worker foreign correspondent Alan Winnington published the pamphlet, I Saw the Truth in Korea, which provided evidence of mass graves containing thousands of corpses belonging to civilians executed by the South Korean government during the Korean War. The paper published alleged evidence of America's use of biological weapons during the Korean War. In response to Winnington's Korea reporting, Clement Attlee's cabinet discussed having Winnington executed by charging him with treason. However, it was instead decided to make him stateless by refusing to renew his passport. Phillip Knightley described Winnington as one of the most trustworthy voices of the war.

In April 1952, the Daily Worker published photographs of a Royal Marine commando in the middle of a British military base posing with the severed human head believed to have belonged to a member of the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA). The article also included eyewitness testimonies from British personnel in Malaya alleging that it was common for British troops to behead people. An Admiralty spokesman accused the photographs of being forgeries and a "communist trick", though Colonial Secretary Oliver Lyttelton later confirmed to Parliament that the images were genuine. Lyttleton noted the decapitations were conducted by Iban headhunters by the British. The Daily Worker then published several more photographs of MNLA guerrillas decapitated by Ibans, including photographs of an Iban wearing a Royal Marine beret while preparing a scalp above a basket of human limbs.

In 1956, the Daily Worker suppressed correspondent Peter Fryer's reports from the Hungarian revolution, which were favourable to the uprising. The paper denounced the attempted revolution as a "white terror", invoking the Horthy regime and earlier 1919–1921 period.

Morning Star (1966–present)

History

The first edition of the Morning Star appeared on Monday, 25 April 1966. South African exile Sarah Carneson worked for the newspaper in the late 1960s.

Until 1974, the paper was subsidised by the Soviet government with direct cash contributions, and from 1974 onwards was indirectly supported by daily bulk orders from Moscow. Its chief executive from 1975 was Mary Rosser.

By the late 1970s, the paper and the CPGB were beginning to come into conflict with one another, as the Eurocommunist trend in the CPGB grew, while the Morning Star at the time retained a pro-Soviet stance and opposed Eurocommunism. An editorial in The Guardian, however, reported in 1977 that the paper was giving coverage to dissidents in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere in the Soviet bloc to the consternation of about a third of CPGB members who wanted a reversal to a strictly pro-Kremlin line. "The Morning Star is open for genuine debate about the future of the Left", it asserted. A demonstration outside the East German embassy against the imprisonment of reformist Communist Rudolf Bahro was organised by the Morning Star that year. Also in 1977, editor Tony Chater persuaded the Labour government to begin running advertisements in the newspaper, previously absent because of a lack of audited circulation figures.

In December 1981, when the Polish Solidarity trade union movement was suppressed and martial law declared, the paper criticised the executive committee of the party for condemning the acts of the (then-Communist) Polish government. In 1982, the Morning Star attacked the attitudes of Marxism Today, the party's monthly journal, which was controlled by the Eurocommunists.

The newspaper attracted some wider media attention in September 1981 when the BBC paid to place six advertisements for its Russian-language service in the Morning Star, which was one of the few English language newspapers that the USSR government allowed to be circulated in the country. Four of these advertisements were printed as agreed, but the last two of the six were not printed. A spokesman for the newspaper said that the advertising department had not properly consulted with other teams before making the agreement, and that the BBC's broadcasts were part of Cold War propaganda. The paper supported the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) during the miners' strike of 1984–1985, but the party had become critical of NUM leader Arthur Scargill's strategy towards the end of the strike.

Editorial line and contents

The newspaper describes itself as "a reader-owned co-operative and unique as a lone socialist voice in a sea of corporate media". The paper attempts to speak to the working class a group its editor described in 2015 as around 80% to 90% of the British population who work for a wage rather than living off investments or assets. Successive annual general meetings of the People's Press Printing Society have agreed that the policy of the paper is founded on Britain's Road to Socialism, the programme of the Communist Party of Britain. A profile of the paper which was published in the centre-left New Statesman magazine in 2015 commented on its contents that:

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".

On international issues, the paper was historically sympathetic to the Soviet Union and its allies during the Cold War. By the 1970s it had become critical of repression in the Soviet Union, according to a contemporary Guardian editorial, but in the 1980s came into conflict with the Eurocommunist leadership of the CPB. Commentators have suggested that it maintains a fairly anti-Western worldview into the 21st century. Its attitude to the wider world has been criticised by others on the British left with Paul Anderson former editor of the democratic socialist Tribune magazine commenting that "It runs articles extolling the virtues of single-party 'socialist' states on a regular basis – North Korea, Cuba, China, Vietnam. Its default position on just about everything happening in the world is that anything any western power supports – but particularly the United States – must be opposed, which has led to it cheering on Putin, Hamas, Assad and a lot of other real nasties." The paper is sympathetic to Irish republicanism categorising reporting about Northern Ireland as foreign.

On its masthead, the paper states that it supports peace and socialism, and it is also Eurosceptic. The Morning Star and The Spectator were the only publications to campaign for an Exit vote in the 1975 referendum. Tony Benn (described as "the de facto leader of the "Out" campaign") campaigned alongside the paper. Over thirty years later the Morning Star supported the No2EU platform in the 2009 European Parliament election. The paper was also supportive of Britain's vote in 2016 to leave the EU, saying that "Anybody who supports the election of a Corbyn government with a mandate to end austerity, extend public ownership, redistribute wealth and restructure our economy in the interests of working people needs to explain how this agenda can be implemented in the framework of an EU that bans so much of it" but criticised the referendum campaign as being headed by "reactionary zealots" such as Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove.

Contributors and staff

In the first years of the twenty-first century, the paper has carried contributions from Uri Avnery, John Pilger, Green activist Derek Wall, ex-Mayor of London Ken Livingstone, Labour Members of Parliament (MPs) Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, Green MP Caroline Lucas, former MP George Galloway (Respect), the cartoonist Martin Rowson, and many trade union general secretaries. Features are contributed by writers from a range of socialist, social democratic, green and religious perspectives. Despite this, according to then editor John Haylett in 2005: "things that happened in the Soviet Union 70 years ago are still being used as a stick to beat the Morning Star."

On 1 January 2009, Bill Benfield took over as editor of the Morning Star. John Haylett, who had been editor since 1995, took up the post of political editor. Benfield had previously been deputy editor and head of production, but experienced ill health.

In May 2012, Richard Bagley became editor of the Morning Star, having already worked at the paper in various positions since 2001. In July 2014, he stepped down as editor, with Ben Chacko becoming acting editor, a position in which Chacko was confirmed in May 2015. The newspaper "is the most precious and only voice we have in the daily media", said (then backbencher Labour MP) Jeremy Corbyn at the time of Chacko's formal appointment in May 2015. "I look forward to working with Ben in promoting socialism and progress".

Finances and circulation

The Morning Star carries little commercial advertising, with low advertising rates, and the cover price does not pay for print and distribution. Consequently, the paper has always been dependent on donations from activists, readers, and trade unions. The paper relies on its "Fighting Fund" appeal (yearly target £200,000). In its past, the paper received financial support from the Soviet Union: a monthly subsidy of £3,000 during the 1960s (worth about £60,000 in 2025) and purchasing 12,000 copies daily through the 1970s and 1980s. In 1981, its circulation was about 36,000, down from the Daily Worker's post-war peak.

In March 2005, BBC News Magazine reported the Morning Star's circulation as between 13,000 and 14,000, quoting Haylett's comment "perhaps only one in 10 of these readers would label themselves as Communists". The circulation was thought to be around 10,000 when Ben Chacko took over as editor in mid-2015.

The Morning Star has also taken a much higher profile at trade union gatherings and within the UK trade union movement, particularly with unions such as Unite, GMB, UCATT, FBU, Community, CWU, NUM, Durham Miners, Prison Officers and RMT. Since 2008, the Morning Star has hired exhibition space at the Trades Union Congress, with sponsored copies being handed out to delegates at the TUC, Labour Party Conference, at union conferences and high-profile events such as the Tolpuddle Martyrs' Festival and the Durham Miners Gala. The newspaper is also available at independent newsagents and shops such as RS McColl, in local supermarkets such as Budgens, at railway stations and on motorway service areas. In addition, it is stocked by the Co-op Food chain of stores.

During the early morning of 28 July 2008, the offices of the newspaper were damaged by fire, and the edition of 29 July took a reduced form. A similar incident occurred on 20 October 2014 when a fire broke out near the offices and a small number of staff had to relocate to the sports editor's house in order to finish the paper.

On 1 June 2009, the Morning Star was re-launched. The re-launch included a 16-page edition during the week, and a 24-page weekend edition priced at £1.20 after a rise in its prices in September 2014. This rose to £1.50 in 2020. There is no Sunday edition of the newspaper. There was also an expanded use of colour pictures and graphics, plus a redesign and a modern layout of the pages. The Morning Star also redesigned its website. In addition, a number of new and experienced journalists were engaged and the positions of full-time Industrial Correspondent and Lobby Correspondent in the House of Commons were reintroduced.

Online version

An online version of the paper was launched on 1 April 2004. Initially only some parts of the site were free, including a PDF of the paper's front page, the editorial "Star Comment" and all the articles from the culture and sports pages, while features and the current affairs were subscription-only. On 1 January 2009 this policy was changed, and all content was made freely available online. In April 2012, the paper launched a daily e-edition of the full newspaper, which readers can subscribe to for a charge. As of 2020, the number of articles non-subscribers can read for free is limited.

Editors

As the Daily Worker:

1930: William Rust

1933: Jimmy Shields

1935: Idris Cox

1936: Rajani Palme Dutt

1938: Dave Springhall

1939: John Ross Campbell

1939: William Rust

1949: John Ross Campbell

1959: George Matthews

Chairs of the editorial board have included Hewlett Johnson (clergyman known as 'the Red Dean' of Canterbury), although he was not a member of the CPGB.

As the Morning Star:

1966: George Matthews

1974: Tony Chater

1995: John Haylett

2009: Bill Benfield

2012: Richard Bagley

2014: Ben Chacko