Communist Party of Britain and Morning Star

The Morning Star , concerned about the rise of authoritarianism in Britain, has identified a major source of it: “Starmer’s Labour is playing a key role in that process and its successes accelerate the drive towards a more authoritarian and repressive British state (editorial, 12 October). The editorial cites, as examples, the expulsion of members “for rule breaches invented retrospectively”, the suspension of a conference delegate “for arguing against one of the motions on the agenda” and the deselection of Sam Tarry. The editorial goes on to warn: “Some MPs fear the Labour leader is prepared...

Nick Wright is a frequent contributor to the Morning Star and prominent member of the Communist Party of Britain. Back in the 1980’s, he was one of the unreconstructed Stalinists grouped around the Straight Left newspaper in opposition to the then leadership of the Communist Party. The Straight Left people reckoned the CP had gone soft (“revisionist”), distanced itself from the Soviet Union and other “socialist” countries, while at home it was paying insufficient attention to workplace and union organisation. Things would get even worse, as the openly reformist Eurocommunists gained control of...

Since the 2019 general election, the Morning Star and its political masters at the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) have been all over the place on the Labour Party. While their chum Jeremy Corbyn was in the leadership, they were happy to call for a Labour vote. Since then it’s changed — not in any coherent direction. During the Batley and Spen by-election (June-July 2021), the paper’s coverage was clearly sympathetic to George Galloway’s thoroughly reactionary campaign. In the local elections of May 2020, the paper failed to call even for a critical Labour vote (except, unaccountably, in...

Two unelected heads of state: Charles Windsor and Cuban president Miguel Díaz-Canel In an extraordinary editorial (“Funerals, bank holidays and collectivism: for a socialist approach”) that appeared online dated 18 September, the Morning Star warned against “confus[ing] public displays of affection for Elizabeth II with intrinsically reactionary political outlooks”, advising that we “should recognise the instinct for community and belonging which can be channelled along these lines.” The editorial then went to describe objections to shops being closed on the day of the funeral (were there many...

The Morning Star of 5 September finally came out openly with an argument that they and others have been hinting at and skirting round for months: that the war in Ukraine is a major cause of the cost of living crisis, so support for Ukraine must stop. The paper cited the 70,000 strong “Czech Republic First” rally in Prague on 3 September as the model for the kind of movement it wants to see in Britain. The rally was organised by the far right with the support of the rump Czech Communist Party and aimed as much against the 400,000 Ukrainian refugees the Czech Republic has taken and Czech foreign...

The death of Mikhail Gorbachev has caused some difficulty at the Morning Star . That’s because any serious assessment of the man inevitably involves an assessment of the Soviet Union and the Stalinist empire across Eastern Europe whose collapse he inadvertently brought about. And the Morning Star (together with the organisation that controls it, the Communist Party of Britain) isn’t quite sure of what to say regarding the Soviet Union – at least, as it was by the time Gorbachev became leader in 1985. So best to fall back on banality, summed up by the headline of the paper’s editorial (1...

The executive of the Bakers Food and Allied Workers’ Union (BFAWU) has decided to take shares in the Morning Star and join the board of the Peoples’ Press Printing Society (PPS), the co-op that publishes the paper. The BFAWU thus becomes the twelfth national trade union to join the PPS, alongside Aslef, Community, CWU, FBU, GMB, NUM, POA, RMT, TSSA, Unite and Usdaw. The NUM North East Region also has a shareholding and a seat on the board. The truth is that the PPS is little more than a facade: the paper is controlled by the Communist Party of Britain and although it does carry articles by...

On 23 July, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán spoke to to ethnic Hungarians in Romania. He argued that his supporters “do not want to become peoples of mixed race”. He went on to claim that migration had divided Europe into two. In one part, Europeans and non-Europeans were living together. The countries where this was happening were no longer "nations", merely conglomerates of peoples. The clear message was that "racial purity" must be maintained at all costs. A longtime friend and adviser to Orbán, Zsuzsa Hegedus, resigned after the speech, calling it a “pure Nazi text… worthy of...

Eric Lee ( Solidarity 642 ) is right to say that it is a scandal that unions fund the Morning Star , the paper run by the Communist Party of Britain. He overdoes it, though, when he writes that the CPB is “no less of a threat than the neo-fascists on the right”. Trotsky was right in 1940 that “the present ‘Communist’ bureaucrats... ideal is to attain in their own country the same position that the Kremlin oligarchy gained in the USSR. They are not the revolutionary leaders of the proletariat but aspirants to totalitarian rule. They dream of gaining success with the aid of this same Soviet...

Right to the end, the Morning Star couldn’t hide its admiration for Boris Johnson: “[His] genius was –despite the division among our rulers over the membership of the EU – to capitalise on the disillusion in working-class areas to get a Tory Brexit rather than the version which could be discerned in Jeremy Corbyn’s 2017 election manifesto” (editorial, 11 July 2022). The truth is that when it came to Brexit, the Morning Star and its masters, the Communist Party of Britain, essentially agreed with Boris Johnson and wished him well. They even (incredibly) harboured hopes that he might introduce...