THE response to the new-look paper we launched in February was, shall we say, mixed.

There was praise for a cleaner and more sober, professional look to the Morning Star, but many of you expressed regret at the switch from a red star to a white star on a red background.

Others felt the new masthead was too small and didn’t stand out in the shops. 

Well, we’re a co-op — so unlike other dailies we didn’t want to exclude our readers from the decision-making process. On March 3 we published a range of alternative mastheads and asked you to vote for your favourite.

We were deluged with responses – and clearly there are a huge range of views out there on what your paper should look like. But there was one overwhelming winner, with around eight in every 10 responses opting for the option shown, enlarging the size of the masthead and restoring the jaunty red star that many feel is instantly identifiable with our product.

As disciplined comrades we know how to take our orders, so your favoured option will be replacing the current masthead starting on Saturday May 5.

Reader engagement is crucial to us, and that’s why we’re also launching a new Campaign of the Week column next weekend which will focus on the local struggles our readers, activists and trade unionists are engaged in up and down the country — go to morningstaronline.co.uk/page/campaign-week if there’s a local campaign you want to tell us about.

We hope sharing the huge collective experience of the most politically and industrially active newspaper readership in Britain will help the Morning Star to do the job it was founded to do — to educate, agitate and organise the working class and labour movement.

There’s a lot on for the movement at the moment and your paper will be stepping up, with bumper editions planned for May Day, Marx’s 200^th birthday on May 5, the march for a new deal on May 12 and beyond that the TUC’s 150^th anniversary the following month.

The left has made huge strides in Britain in the last few years and there’s a real prospect of a socialist government, but we’re also suffering an Establishment bombardment of misinformation and smears designed to stop that from happening at any cost. There’s only one daily paper that fights for the radical transformation of our society we need.

No other paper can claim readers who do so much to promote us, win new readers for us and increase our influence — so thank you for everything you do to keep the Morning Star shining and let’s organise that revolution.