Communist Party of Britain and Morning Star

Andrew Murray, one of Jeremy Corbyn’s key advisers, gave a “rare interview” to the Guardian on 30 October in which he warned against Labour taking the “liberal side” of the “culture war” around Brexit and “warned that the campaign to stop Brexit has increasingly become a form of identity politics”. Mr Murray, it should be noted, was until 2016 a senior member of the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) and has been one of the “four Ms” (together with fellow Stalinist Seumas Milne, plus Karie Murphy, and Len McCluskey) actively promoting pro-Brexit lines in tune with the CPB within the top...

What to call those Labour MPs who backed Johnson’s Brexit bill? I tend to the view that the word “scab” should be restricted to industrial strike-breaking. “Traitor” should probably be avoided in the present incendiary political atmosphere. So how about “invertebrate”? We surely shouldn’t expect one such invertebrate receiving an entirely uncritical interview in what claims to be Britain’s only socialist daily paper. Yet the Morning Star’s Lamiat Sabin (23 Oct) made Melanie Onn MP seem almost heroic: “But, where she differs from many of her parliamentary colleagues, Onn is prepared to put her...

I want to add something to the crucial points Becky Crocker made about Eddie Dempsey in Solidarity 519. The picture featured is Dempsey visiting Alexander Mozgovoy, an uber-nationalist, uber-misogynistic paramilitary leader in the pro-Russian militias during the war in eastern Ukraine. When Mozgovoy was killed a week after they met, Dempsey wrote a glowing obituary of his comrade, which I’ll quote below. If you want to get a grip on Mozgovoy, this is what he declared about women in the territory he controlled as a warlord, and of course by implication more generally: “If I see even just one...

As some of you may know, when I write this column, covering the antics of the Morning Star and its political masters, the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) I generally try to maintain a jocular tone. But it can be difficult: sometimes I'm just too despairing and/or angry. For some time I've been telling people that it's obvious that the Morning Star and CPB supported May's deal and now support Johnson's; if they had MPs that's how they'd be voting. I have cited, for instance, the CPB's general secretary Roger Griffiths, quoted in the Morning Star of October 5-6, thus: "Pro-EU labour MPs who...

In a letter to prime minister Boris Johnson leading figures from 13 UK unions have urged the UK government to condemn outright the Turkish aggression against the Kurds, triggered by Trump’s precipitate decision to withdraw all US troops from Syria. They describe Trump’s move as “a green-light to a Turkish military invasion of North and East Syria, which, as we have already seen in Afrin, will undoubtedly lead to ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Kurds as well as a resurgence of ISIS. “We therefore call on the UK government to immediately condemn Turkey’s threats of invasion and to work with...

Ever the Stalinist nostalgic, in his new book The Fall and Rise of the British Left , Murray laments the passing away of “a largely vanished world of working-class power” and the fact that “none of the scenarios which gripped the left I grew up with in the twentieth century appear fully plausible any more.” What is to fill the vacuum? Murray’s answer is not: Slough off the dead weight of Stalinism, re-assert the centrality of independent working-class politics, and reforge a labour movement fit for the overthrow of capitalism. Instead, and this is his explanation for Corbyn’s election as...

On Monday 7 October, the Morning Star carried another article by Zoltan Zigedy (pen-name of Greg Godels, American blogger and regular contributor to the website “Marxism-Leninism Today – The Electronic Journal of Marxist-Leninist Thought”). The article first appeared on Godels’ own blog and then on the “Marxism-Leninism Today” website before making it into the pages of the Morning Star. The headline asks the question: “TelephoneGate: Who Looks Worst?” The strapline give an indication of the answer: “Zoltan Zigedy reports (sic) how the drive to impeach Trump has masked the sinister dealings of...

The Morning Star is to Jeremy Corbyn and Seumas Milne what the picture in the attic was to Dorian Gray in the famous story. And it is disgusting in the extreme. Take the issue for Monday 7 October. You can see from the front page that, like all of us, they loathe the tinpot Mussolini Boris Johnson. Ah, but look. While everybody with sense is anxious that the sneaky Johnson may find some way to twist the will of Parliament and crash out of the EU in a hard Brexit, the doughty warriors of the MS give the front page to the scandal of Johnson giving his American friend small financial perks. Odd...

Life isn’t always easy for Steve Sweeney, International Editor of the Morning Star . Earlier this year he was detained and interrogated by Turkish police when he landed at an Istanbul airport. Thoughts of what had happened to Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate six months before in the same city flashed through his mind. The Morning Star – quite rightly – is highly critical of the Erdoğan regime in Turkey. But when it comes to regimes that the paper approves of — “anti-imperialist” Venezuela or Syria, for instance, or “socialist” China, Steve’s job is a lot easier. Most of the time he just...

Jim Denham's major piece ( Solidarity 516 ) responding to my letter in Solidarity 515 continues to peddle the outrageous accusation that the Morning Star newspaper “actively foments antisemitism”. Antisemitism is obviously a highly emotive and sensitive issue and in response we need to be really clear, factual and logical. In plainer language, the accusation “actively foments antisemitism” could read: “the paper expresses hatred to people who are Jewish (whether by religion, ethnicity or culture) or encourages other people to be hostile to Jews”. Does the Morning Star encourage hatred against...