| Product: |
The Morning Star |
| Date: |
15/04/01 (163 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: a genuinely different world perspective; well-written articles by a wide range of people; a willingness to question the ‘accepted’ status quo.
Disadvantages: low page count; low visibility in sales outlets means you may have to be prepared to order it.
The ‘Morning Star’ is a political newspaper which has been in existence in Britain for decades. Launching and maintaining a national newspaper in this country is a process so costly and fraught with difficulty that even those with massive budgets have not always managed it. ‘Today’ is an example of a newspaper which had all the might of a press empire behind it and which still failed. ‘Look’ was a daily tabloid which the Conservative Party attempted to launch shortly before the 1997 general election after ‘The Sun’ had abandoned them — it is doubtful whether many have even heard of this, since it never even got off the ground.
The Morning Star, then, is a miracle, maintained for more than 70 years by a small group of socialists and without any massive financial backing. Here I will attempt to give a potted history of how the newspaper was formed, how it developed and the difficulties it encountered, the state of the newspaper today and, finally, why I believe that this newspaper still has relevance and a vital place in the press in the 21st Century.
THE PAST
The Morning Star was originally entitled ‘Daily Worker’ and was owned by the Communist Part of Great Britain (CPGB), an organisation which no longer exists. The first edition of the newspaper appeared on January 1, 1930, and was produced by a small number of staff who were poorly trained and prone to mistakes. Shortly before the Daily Worker’s formation the ‘Daily Herald’, which had previously been a voice for left thought in the UK, had been sold by the TUC to Odham’s Press and had ceased to be genuinely sympathetic to the aims of the left. At that time it was predicted that the Worker would fold quite quickly, since it had an extremely poor level of financial backing — the sentiment was that, if the well-known Herald could not survive as a financially independent political newspaper, what
chance did the Worker have.
It soon became apparent, however, that the Worker had managed to find a readership, albeit a rather limited one, and so those in the British establishment who were firmly opposed to such a newspaper being published decided to take action. Over the next few years the newspaper faced many problems: several of its journalists and publishers were given prison sentences for their work on the paper, including some sentenced to hard labour; there were several instances of wholesalers ‘spontaneously’ deciding not to supply the newspaper within their distribution areas, leading the readers themselves to take over distribution for several years; perhaps most harmful to the newspaper directly were the incidences of censorship which occurred throughout the 1930s, with the police maintaining a constant presence outside the newspaper’s offices during several periods of time and requiring that every article the paper intended to publish be vetted first by a senior police officer, its coverage of elections being particularly tampered with. The Daily Worker was also utterly banned for a time on reporting anything to do with the British armed forces.
Despite these hardships, the Worker survived, although today it is presented in a rather different form. In 1966 the newspaper was renamed ‘Morning Star’, the other main change since the 1930s being that the Communist Party ceded ownership of the paper to an independent trust (the Morning Star Co-operative Society, now the People’s Press Printing Society), who are now solely responsible for the paper’s production.
Perhaps the most challenging time for the Morning Star in recent times, however, were those following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. I am led to believe that, at that time, the paper was close to folding altogether, and the Morning Star certainly took a long time to recover — when I started reading the paper in 1997
it was 8 pages long per day, with poor picture quality, scrambled headlines (in which the characters were transposed over each other due to poor typesetting) and a Sports section which appeared on something like a weekly basis. Thankfully, however, the situation since that time has improved considerably.
THE PRESENT
At present the Morning Star is 12 pages Monday–Friday and 16 pages on Saturday, priced 50p. Okay, so this is by no means the best value in terms of pence per page on the market, but then again if that’s how you choose your newspaper then you are probably not going to be too sympathetic to the aims of this newspaper in any case.
The Morning Star now displays the slogan “daily paper of the left”, and this is a reasonably accurate assessment of what you will find inside: the newspaper is now a representative of vast swathes of the labour, trade unionist, green, British republican, socialist and communist movements (and probably others the I have omitted), although it does not represent all of these groups (Blairites and Trotskyists are generally hostile to this paper, despite the general policy similarity between the Morning Star and most of the latter, and the Star is also often at odds with the TUC leadership, even if greater tact is used on these occasions).
The first half of the paper is generally taken up with News pages, these being distinctly separate from Features and Comment which are clearly indicated. News articles are always reported in a very factual way with opinion kept to an absolute minimum (the contrast becomes clearly apparent if one, after reading the Morning Star for a while, goes and picks up the Daily Mail or some other ‘mainstream’ newspaper; one never finds emotive or leading adjectives like “evil” or “cowardly” in a Star news article, although they may occasionally be used in Comment or Features). Personally, I believe this to be a valu
able distinction — when given the true facts of the matter, one can then turn over to the Features section armed with enough information to agree or disagree with what is printed there from an informed standpoint.
The newspaper’s Features, on the other hand, constitute carefully-justified opinion by a wide range of writers on a wide range of topics. The paper also has a number of regular columns, including weekly columns by well-known Labour MP Tony Benn (‘Benn on Friday’) and London Mayor Ken Livingstone (‘The London Line’, which appears on Saturdays) — although Livingstone’s inclusion as a columnist does not mean he does not get his fair share of criticism as mayor in other sections of the newspaper! These features, for the most part, are well-written and interesting, although Jerry Jones’ ‘Economics’ column can occasionally be a tad dry (although this is, of course, in its very nature).
Other people who have contributed articles to the newspaper recently include: Labour MPs Alice Mahon and George Galloway, prominent journalist John Pilger, UNISON general secretary Dave Prentis, John Hendy QC, War on Want campaigns director Rob Cartridge, Campaign Against Euro-federalism secretary John Boyd, Britain-Vietnam Friendship Society secretary Len Aldis, RMT assistant general secretary Vernon Hince, UCATT general secretary George Brumwell, ISTC general secretary Mick Leahy, FBU vice-president Ruth Winters, National Assembly Against Racism secretary Lee Jasper, a representative of the Palestinian People’s Party, CPB general secretary Robert Griffiths, and Cuban President Fidel Castro. This list, it must be said, is by no means exhaustive (I got it by looking at the front covers of a few recent copies of the paper I had near me when writing this review).
A definite attempt has also been made to represent the views of younger people in the paper with the introduction of the
216;Campus Comment’ column, which is usually written by a prominent member of the NUS, including union president Owain James and vice-president Anneliese Dodds.
The newspaper is rounded off by an Arts page, constituting theatre, film, book and other reviews and articles, and Sports pages, which although I applaud since they widen the appeal of the paper to the public as a whole, I do not personally read.
Despite this rather wide appeal, the newspaper is still most certainly seen as something ‘dangerous’ by the British establishment. On New Year’s Day, 2001, the Morning Star obtained MI5 papers under the Thirty Year Rule and published their findings on the front page in an article entitled ‘Their ears to our keyhole’. As the article states: “Britain’s spy service MI5 bugged the Morning Star to learn details of industrial disputes, government papers suppressed for 30 years revealed yesterday. Documents revealed under the 30-year-rule revealed that government spies used tapping, bugging and agents to intercept discussions at the paper.” In thirty years time, what will we find out about the activities of the secret service in relation to the paper today? I suspect there will have been little change in the intervening period; in some ways, the UK of 2001 is little different to the British Empire of old, the Establishment, when you get down to it, still retaining much power within the nation.
To me, this revelation acts as something of a compliment to the paper’s activities, since it effectively says that Britain’s secret service, an organisation which relies for much of its operational capacity on reliable, accurate and up-to-date information, obtains that information from the Morning Star. What further commendation would you need!
THE FUTURE
Given the apparent collapse of socialism in much of the world and its demise as a mainstream component of British polit
ics, it is perhaps surprising that there are substantial reasons for looking towards the future of the Morning Star with some optimism.
On February 19, 2001, Morning Star editor John Haylett penned an article, ‘Confident voice of the left’, which took stock of the paper’s current position and looked forward to a successful future. In this article it was revealed that Star circulation had risen 12 per cent in the past year, and that advertising in the Star (which has always been an area of financial weakness when you consider that most newspapers earn much of their revenue from selling display advertisement space) had risen 35 per cent over the same period. He argued that “[a]ll of these developments augur well for the future of the Morning Star — not as a beleaguered relic of the past, cutting and trimming to eke out survival, but as a thriving, self-confident voice of the left, able to provide daily information and guidance to working people and their organisations.”
The article went on to say that the Morning Star, a paper which has been run at a loss for most (if not all) of its 70 years existence in different incarnations, should reach “a trading break-even point by around the end of this year [2001] if current trends are maintained”.
In an accompanying article by Ivan Beavis, the paper’s circulation manager, the new circulation drive of the paper was explained, a process whereby areas across Britain were targeted systematically … such a process had already yielded a 60% increase in circulation in Manchester, an 80% increase in Liverpool and a 33% increase across London, and the drive was still in its very early stages.
The Morning Star, therefore, is a newspaper very much looking forward to the future. At a time when socialist politics has been successfully marginalised in this country by those on the Right, the Morning Star will be an essential tool in the inevitabl
e fightback (of which early signs are, I believe, already emerging), and thankfully the paper looks set to not only be in existence in the years to come, but to be positively healthy.
COMMENTS
Although I personally have never been a member of a political party, my own upbringing was quite staunchly Conservative, my own family being, especially on the paternal side, working-class Daily Mail-reading Tories, and with several family friends who are actually Conservative Party members (and occasional candidates).
In 1997 the general election inspired within me a curiosity in politics, and I spent hours on the Internet browsing the websites of a whole range of different parties. Having developed a distaste for the inaction of the centre, and having been repulsed by the racism and the pro-foxhunting stance of the right-wing, I was naturally drawn to the left, and this led to my first Morning Star purchase.
The Morning Star has many problems, most of which are associated with a lack of funding. Firstly, although the number of pages has increased since I first started buying the paper, it is still only a fraction of the page-count of most of the other national dailies. Secondly, the cover price is, at 50p, comparatively expensive. Thirdly, the newspaper is printed in black and white (with the use of red on the front and back covers), whilst most of the other newspapers use full-colour. If one is sufficiently curious, and sufficiently willing to entertain a genuinely different view of the world, then I do not believe that any of these three problems would stop a potential reader buying the paper.
The fourth problem, however, is far more threatening to the paper’s circulation, and that is the form of its distribution. The Morning Star is nationally distributed [strangely enough, the only outlet that has EVER refused to stock the paper on my behalf was my campus NUS shop!], and newsagents can obtain copies on the premise of sal
e-or-return (as with all other national dailies). Unfortunately, the paper is generally regarded within the trade as an “order-only” paper, which essentially means that a newsagent is perfectly willing to supply the paper should a customer wish to reserve it every day, but does not display copies on the racks next to all the other newspapers which could attract the casual buyer.
Consequently, it is quite possible that a new reader may be put off … why should he/she order the paper if the possibility exists that he/she may not like it. Of course, one can always cancel a newspaper, but this is all starting to sound like a lot of bother, isn’t it?
The circulation drive aims to combat this image of the newspaper, but in the meantime I would strongly suggest that the bother is worth it. My decision to purchase the Morning Star is probably one of the most life-changing I have ever made. In 1997 I was very much in favour of restoring capital punishment; now I would find such a move utterly abhorrent. In 1997 I was in favour of strong police action taken against public demonstrations, and in school my oft-repeated phrase whenever an act of civil disobedience was discussed was (much to my shame now) “bring the tanks in”; now, I not only understand the motives behind most demonstrations, I agree with a substantial number of them.
I was prepared to order the Morning Star out of curiosity, and I would now urge the same of you.
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NB: for more information, the Morning Star maintains a (relatively sparse) website: www.poptel.org.uk/morning-star
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