The Morning Star
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The Morning Star is a left-wing British daily tabloid with a focus on social and trade union issues.[1] Articles and comment columns are contributed by writers from socialist and social democratic as well as from "Welsh and Scottish Nationalists, the Greens and regular contributions from church people."[1] However, the paper currently chooses to underline its editorial stance via Britain's Road to Socialism,
the programme of the Communist Party of Britain,[2] not to be confused with the Communist Party of Great Britain or Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), and certainly not with the Judean People's Front.
Salad days[edit]
In its salad days as The Daily Worker, the paper functioned as the mainstream political organ (so to speak) of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain.[3] Part of its illustrious history includes celebrating the assassination of Leon Trotsky by Josef Stalin, describing Trotsky as a "Counter-Revolutionary Gangster" for not being far-left enough for their liking[4] in that he wanted the people to have greater say in the political process and was against Russian isolationism. In 1930 there was a fierce debate over whether the paper should carry sports news, with leading ideologue Rajani Palme Dutt writing:
Capitalist sport is subordinate to bourgeois politics, run under bourgeois patronage and breathing the spirit of patriotism and class unity; and often of militarism, fascism and strike breaking. Sport is a hotbed of propaganda and recruiting for the enemy. Spectator sports (horse racing and football) are profit run professional spectacles thick with corruption. They are dope; to distract the workers from the bad conditions of their lives, to stop thinking, to make passive wage slaves. You cannot reconcile revolutionary politics with capitalist sport![5]
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 John Ross 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.[6] 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.[7] The paper accused the British government's polices as being "not to rescue Europe from fascism, but to impose British imperialist peace on Germany" before attacking the true Motherland.[7]
Post-war[edit]
Still going by the name, The Daily Worker, it supported the show trials in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland in the late 1940s as well as the split between Stalin's Soviet Union and Josip Broz Tito's Yugoslavia in 1948.[8] To put the whole, ahem, supporting the Nazis thing behind them, in 1966 they changed their name to The Morning Star; the last edition of the Daily Worker was published on Saturday 23 April 1966.[9]
Proving that old habits die hard, they supported the suppression of the Polish Solidarity trade union movement and the Polish government's declaration of martial law, denouncing the Executive Committee of the British Communist Party for denouncing the government's actions and fogetting their "class destiny".[10] This was the beginning of The Morning Star's schism with the British Communist Party.[citation needed] This was exacerbated by the CPGB's support of Eurocommunism, a movement to create greater independence from the Soviet Union for communist states in Europe.[10] The Morning Star also supported the Kim dynasty in North Korea and has defended Kim Jong-un's political purges against repudiation by the CPGB.[citation needed]
Editorial stances[edit]
The paper claims to support a "Two-State Solution" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and they support the Nationalist movement in Ireland. They showed support for Slobadan Milosevic, opposed NATO's military intervention in Yugoslavia and also opposed the Iraq War.[citation needed] They are Eurosceptic and have called for "a federal Britain, outside the EU and NATO, in which we can fight for parliaments and governments free to enact progressive domestic and foreign policies".[11]
Notable contributors[edit]
- Uri Avnery
- John Pilger
- Derek Wall
- Jeremy Corbyn (Former Leader of the Labour Party)
- John McDonnell (Former Shadow Chancellor for crying out loud)
- Caroline Lucas
- George Galloway (surprise, surprise)
- Alan Simpson
- Martin Rowson
- Michael Rosen, pro-Corbyn children's poet and YouTube poop God.
See also[edit]
- Pravda.ru
- The Huffington Post
- Propaganda
- Lucifer — The fallen angel who prior to becoming the Devil was also known as the Morning Star, coincidentally.
References[edit]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Sean Coughlan "Pressing on". BBC News. 21 March 2005. Retrieved 13 May 2010.
- ↑ "(The Morning Star is) in line with Britain's Road to Socialism, the Communist Party of Britain programme that underlies our paper's editorial stance." People's Press Printing Society Annual Report 2009.
- ↑ "The Papers of the Communist Party of Great Britain", The Archive hub, University of Manchester
- ↑ "The death of Trotsky". Archived from the original on 7 June 2011. Retrieved 19 September 2015.
- ↑ The Communist Party of Great Britain, Spartacus Educational, accessed 15 September 2021
- ↑ James Eaton and David Renton The Communist Party of Great Britain since 1920, Basingstoke: Pallgrave, 2002, pp.69–70
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 Bill Jones The Russia complex: the British Labour Party and the Soviet Union. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977, p.38 ISBN 0719006961.
- ↑ Keith Laybourn Marxism in Britain: Dissent, Decline and Re-emergence 1945-c.2000, Abingdon: Routledge, 2006, p.43
- ↑ "Morning Star (UK Newspaper) - The Daily Worker (1930–1966)". Retrieved 19 September 2015.; via Wikipedia
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 Laybourn Marxism in Britain, p.116
- ↑ Left Reasons To Ditch EU, Morning Star (June 2015)