Communist Party of Britain and Morning Star

The race is on to replace Len McCluskey as general secretary of the Unite union. This is the second most powerful position within the British labour movement, after leader of the Labour Party, and the outcome will have massive repercussions not just for the Unite, but for the movement as a whole and the Labour Party. The four declared candidates, Steve Turner, Howard Beckett, Sharon Graham and Gerard Coyne, will be seeking sufficient branch nominations between now and 7 June. The election runs from 5 July to 23 August. You would expect the Morning Star — a publication largely aimed at, and...

Even by the standards of the Morning Star — a publication whose coverage of anything to do with China is now little more than Beijing propaganda — Kate Woolford’s article on 13 April was an extraordinary exercise in dissembling whataboutery. Woolford is, apparently, a member of the Southampton Young Communist League and social media editor of Challenge , the Young Communist League magazine. Her article is entitled “Xinjiang: staying afloat in a wave of disinformation” and claims to be an examination of “what is really going on in north-east China.” In fact, the article contains no new...

I am grateful to Jim Denham for his response ( Solidarity 587 ) to my letter ( Solidarity 586 ). I thought I had made it clear — certainly Britain’s Road to Socialism (BRS) does — that the “popular, democratic, anti-monopoly alliance” is primarily about transforming and uniting the broadly defined working class into a force for overthrowing capitalism and replacing it with the political rule of the working class i.e. socialism. The references to smaller capitalist and intermediate strata (not the same thing) are fairly few and frankly marginal and I would agree with most of what Jim says in...

Back in the early days of the pandemic (24 March 2020, to be precise), the Morning Star carried two articles, side by side: “Instead of chauvinism towards China, we must learn from China. All anti-racists have a duty to campaign for the government to drop any racist inhibitions and adopt the Chinese approach that saves the maximum number of lives”, began an article by Sabby Dhalu. Alongside, another writer had a piece about the emergency powers being enacted in the UK: “Concern as state control tightens — As the government races emergency powers through parliament to tackle the Covid-19...

Andrew Northall (Letters, 24 March ) takes exception to my Antidoto column ( 10 February ) on the Communist Party of Britain’s concept of the “anti-monopoly alliance”. One thing Andrew says is undoubtedly correct: “The ‘anti-monopoly alliance’ is very much written into the DNA of the CPB and its programme, Britain’s Road to Socialism”. Where we disagree is on whether or not this represents (in Andrew’s words) “a cross-class alliance that cannot by definition be anti-capitalist since it includes small capitalists.” Andrew claims that the term monopoly capitalism “simply describes the nature of...

On 16 March the government set out its plan for a post-Brexit “global Britain” in the so-called “Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy”. One aspect of the review caused consternation even in the Tory press: “Shock plans to increase the country’s nuclear warheads by 40 per cent were met with fury last night... the remarkable move comes more than 50 years after the signing of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty” noted the Daily Mail . Even the Sun asked “And why do we need 80 more nukes... aren’t 180 city-destroying bombs enough?” The Mail also noted that “In...

I am struggling to understand what points Jim Denham was trying to make in his article 'Return of the Anti Monopoly Alliance' ( Solidarity 581 ). I am not a spokesperson for the Communist Party of Britain but I am in favour of left and socialist unity and believe this can only happen if we are open and honest with each others’ respective political positions and not construct straw windmills. Jim claims the concept of the Anti Monopoly Alliance is making “more frequent reappearances” in his favourite daily newspaper, the Morning Star . Actually, it never went away. The “anti monopoly” nature of...

In the run-up to the EU referendum and throughout the Brexit negotiations that followed, the Morning Star vied with the Telegraph and the Mail to be Britain’s most anti-EU newspaper. Not only did it use many of the same arguments as the right wing press (most shamefully, calling for greater curbs on immigration), it also used the same rhetoric: “Brussels bureaucrats” (of course), and denouncing pro-EU forces as “a ‘fifth column’ in British political, media and business circles”, who would run up the “white flag” in negotiations with the EU (these are all genuine quotes). Happily, this rank...

The Daily Worker had a shameful record of justifying or denying the Stalinist show trials of the 1930s and the systematic denial of basic human rights in the USSR and Eastern Europe after the war. It had nothing to say against Stalin’s mass deportation of the Crimean Tatars and other peoples during World War 2, or against China’s treatment of the people of Tibet. You could argue, however, that it never sunk so low as to attempt to justify or deny genocide. Its successor, the Morning Star , is doing just that. On Friday 26 February, the Morning Star carried three articles about China...

The 1971 postal workers’ strike ( Solidarity 583 ) was one of several key strikes in that stormy period. Leeds United! , directed by Roy Battersby, which was broadcast by the BBC in 1974 in their Play for Today series, concerns an unofficial strike by female clothing workers in Leeds and is based on real events in 1970. The militancy of the women, led by the indefatigable Mollie (Lynne Perrie), and their desire to improve their miserable wages, come into conflict with an entrenched, all-male, trade union bureaucracy who eventually negotiate a sell-out deal. A Communist Party member Harry...