Communist Party of Britain and Morning Star

Find out why trade unions should stop backing the Morning Star. Read our pamphlet Why trade unions should not support the Morning Star

Corbyn is reactionary on Europe

Labour’s victory in the Peterborough by-election on 6 June was of course good news. It was also bad news. It seemed to vindicate the Labour leadership’s political cloak-work and shilly-shallying on the EU. In the 2016 referendum Labour fought Brexit. Now, behind the attempt to avoid alienating either the Remainers or the Brexiters, by fudging and mudging, the Labour leadership are committed Brexiters. They want Brexit, a soft Brexit, yes, but Brexit is Labour’s policy, no less than that of the May government — Brexit, and refusal to commit to a “people’s vote” that would include a Remain...

Brexit: a “workers’ cause”?

Communist Party of Britain (CPB) general secretary Robert Griffiths had a piece in the Morning Star of 31 May entitled “Time for Labour to stand unequivocally by the working class”. He claims that the way to do that is for Labour to back Brexit. Brexit is a working-class cause. Griffiths sets great store by the Ashcroft survey of UK voters which, he reports, “confirmed that support for leaving the EU remains highest amongst the working class, whether defined narrowly (social categories C2, D and E) or more broadly (plus C1).” Interesting, isn’t it, that a supposed Marxist defines class using...

As we were saying: when the Morning Star nearly went under

Our comment in 1990 when the Morning Star lost its bulk sales in the USSR and Eastern Europe, nearly went under, and appealed frantically for funding from the trade unions in order to survive. Some of the best people I have ever encountered in the labour movement - or anywhere else, for that matter - were CPers, that is, Stalinists, in one degree or another. These were people who had dedicated themselves mind and limb to a cause which in its broad points of reference and ultimate goals is our own cause, the cause of socialism, and who had given everything they had to it. They were not...

Sack the 3 Ms

It wasn’t just Alistair Campbell types, Blairites, who defected from Labour to the Lib Dems or the Greens in the 23 May Euro-elections. Many left-wing Labour supporters defected too, or didn’t vote, disgusted by Labour’s equivocation on Brexit. In July we will get a new Tory leader and prime minister, almost certainly a hard-Brexiter. How they will negotiate the difficulty, which destroyed May, of getting a parliamentary majority for any Brexit formula at all, we don’t know. They will be under pressure to steer a course capable of drawing back millions of Tory voters who on 23 May went for...

Maelstrom of mendacious messaging?

Sometimes the Morning Star comes up with an editorial comment so bizarre, so devoid of evidence, that you wonder whether editor Ben Chacko (or whoever it is writes this stuff) re-reads their own words, or thinks about them, before dashing them off to print. The print edition on Friday 24 May, the day after the Euro-election, carried an extraordinary example. Under the heading “Democracy demands a general election now” the editorial began: “In yesterday’s maelstrom of mendacious messaging, the most dishonest emerged from the Liberal Democrats confirming their reputation for hypocrisy. “No-one...

“Pro-EU fanatics” blamed for Tory-Labour rift

In the 18 May Morning Star, CPB (Communist Party of Britain) secretary Rob Griffiths indicts those he calls “Labour’s pro-EU fanatics”: “They have succeeded in scuppering the talks with the Tory government by demanding that a permanent customs union and a second referendum form part of any new Brexit package”. Leave aside that a permanent customs union is agreed Labour policy, endorsed personally by Jeremy Corbyn time and time again, and a second public vote is conference policy. What I’m struck by is that phrase: “They have succeeded in scuppering the talks with the Tory government.” Does...

From St George to Xi Jinping

The Times (18 May) has splashed our denunciation of the wearing of the old Russian imperial emblem, the St George Ribbon, by some members of Lewisham Momentum. The incident is only a specially gaudy display of the general political trend of the section of the Labour supposed-left which gravitates around the Morning Star. The Morning Star is the continuation of the Daily Worker, which for decades from 1930 was a mouthpiece for the regimes of Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev. It saw the old USSR as “socialist”. It based that claim largely on the fact that all sizeable industry in that regime was...

Hard border: all the fault of the EU?

A bizarre episode occurred on 1 May in Cork, Ireland. Taoiseach [prime minister] Leo Varadkar was due to speak at a meeting organised by the ruling Fine Gael party as part of its campaign for directly elected mayors. The meeting had to be adjourned for a period when members of the Connolly Youth Movement (CYM) – the youth wing of the Communist Party of Ireland - disputed proceedings. Initially, the CYM’s intervention seemed fair enough. A woman stood up and called for a minute’s silence for two homeless men who had recently died on Cork streets. That was agreed by the chair. Then other CYM...

Morning Star says “Don’t vote Labour”

One of the mysteries (albeit a minor one) of contemporary British politics, is how the Morning Star manages to maintain its image as a pretty much uncritical Corbyn fanzine whilst opposing Corbyn’s one and only clear policy on Europe – to avoid a no-deal Brexit at all costs. Perhaps the paper (and its political masters at the Communist Party of Britain) gets away with it because its advocacy of no-deal on WTO terms is tucked away in editorials, often posed as a just a suggestion and then spelt out in statements from the CPB published in the Morning Star but not officially the paper’s “line”...

True, but never mind that...

"These things really happened, that is the thing to keep one's eye on. They happened even though Lord Halifax said they happened ... and they did not happen any the less because the Daily Telegraph has suddenly found out about them when it is five years too late" - George Orwell, Looking Back on the Spanish War (1942) On April 7, the Sunday Times carried a front page lead story claiming that the Labour party has failed to take action against hundreds of members accused of antisemitism. The story was apparently based upon leaked emails and a database from Labour’s HQ. The details were shocking...

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