IF YOU’RE reading this bumper edition of the Morning Star for the first time, welcome to Britain’s only national daily socialist, co-operatively owned newspaper!

After over two years of lockdowns, Covid waves and a shift to online only events, we’re very pleased to have worked with one of our 11 national shareholder unions, the CWU, to ensure a mammoth distribution today at the TUC’s We Deserve Better demo and elsewhere around Britain.

It’s all to get the message across — that however timid the parliamentary opposition to a government whose policies are deliberately driving down pay and allowing inflation to let rip, there is real opposition to this government in the trade union movement and it’s our job to build it into a force capable of forcing change.

Today, marching ahead of a summer of industrial action to protect jobs and incomes, the trade union movement has a simple message: we’re back.

Of course it never went away: through the worst days of the pandemic it was union reps who fought to maintain safe workplaces and stop management cutting corners on health measures, just as it was the unions who negotiated the essential lifeline that was furlough.

The same message is true of the Morning Star. We never went away: day-in day-out we covered working-class struggles and documented the crimes of this government and the way it exploited a health crisis to enrich its friends.

But you might not have seen us lately. The pandemic put a stop to all the meetings, conferences and marches at which the Morning Star was a regular presence.

That hit our income hard, both through lost sales and lost advertising. So did lockdowns and remote working, resulting in union offices closing and cancelling regular paper orders. As people shielded and restricted shopping to occasional essential trips, shop sales plummeted too. 

We managed to significantly raise e-subscriptions but not by enough to make up the losses. We only survived thanks to the extraordinary dedication of our readers who raised £180,000 in two back-to-back appeals.

Now public activity has resumed we need to rebuild sales — that was the theme of our first AGM tour since 2019, which took place last weekend.

As a co-op owned by its readers, the Morning Star is the only democratic national daily. Shareholders, each with one vote no matter how large their shareholding to prevent it ever being bought out, elect its management committee which appoints the editor.

The annual tour, with meetings taking place in London, northern England (it was Leeds this year), Glasgow and Cardiff had to be cancelled in 2020 and last year we held a single-venue AGM in Birmingham, but it was brilliant to be back on the road meeting the readers.

There was extensive discussion on how to rebuild sales, including through local readers’ groups linking up with union branches to fund distributions at university freshers’ fairs and try to place papers in libraries, staff and common rooms.

It’s easier than ever to get a daily paper, with availability not only in any newsagent you ask for it but by taking out an e-subscription or a home delivery service through our partner NewsTeam. It’s time for those planned personal conversations with people you know like to read the paper from time to time — could they take it in some form daily or even weekly? 

There was extensive political discussion too, with readers exchanging views on the government’s attack on our democratic rights, the need for a powerful federalist movement to counter Westminster’s contempt for the rights of nations and regions and — a few fireworks here — the war in Ukraine. 

At each leg of the AGM the Morning Star’s principled position in opposition to the war was endorsed following debate, with readers backing our view that recognising the longer-term causes of the war, including Nato’s eastward expansion and the US-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014, must go alongside condemnation of Russia’s brutal invasion of its neighbour. The priority is peace, which can only be achieved through negotiations not escalation.

There was recognition too that the role of the Morning Star is especially crucial in the current crisis.

Working-class households face soaring bills and falling pay, threatening millions more with poverty. The economic model is clearly not working for the majority, but the mass movement that promised serious change through the Labour Party between 2015 and 2020 has been routed. The promotion of a socialist alternative to the status quo is urgent.

Yet anti-Establishment narratives are everywhere being shut down, as the Ukraine war provides an excuse for a crackdown on “disinformation” by giant unaccountable corporations such as YouTube and Facebook.

The individual cases are less important than the pattern: a growing ability by a handful of gigantic US-based companies to control who can access what information anywhere in the world. 

More than ever we need our own platforms, and the Morning Star is just that, a newspaper owned and controlled by its readers. 

Unlike social media as a source of news, which through algorithms tends to feed users content similar to what they see already, the Morning Star provides varied daily coverage of the campaigns around climate change, refugee rights, anti-racism as well as industrial disputes and trade union actions, being the only national daily to retain a dedicated industrial reporter.

It also provides unique global coverage from a socialist and anti-imperialist perspective, and recently teamed up with Globetrotter, the Peace and Justice Project and Tricontinental to jointly publish a series on economic inequality, imperialism and the resistance developing to it across the global South, our Peace & Justice Report.

Reading a daily paper, whether online or in print, provides all-round reportage relating developments to each other and underlining the common cause of current crises in the imperialist, capitalist world system.

But our survival isn’t guaranteed. Inflation is forcing up our costs too.

Maybe you don’t agree with everything you read in the paper — after all our contributors are a diverse bunch, from different unions, single-issue campaigns and Labour and non-Labour politicians and political activists. Maybe you take issue with our editorial stances on some questions — but then that’s true of many regular readers.

We regularly publish criticism of our content on our daily letters page, and we’re always happy to talk to readers and debate politics, whether at a march, a conference fringe meeting, addressing a union branch or CLP or indeed as we did on our AGM tour.

If you appreciate the importance of maintaining a socialist, trade union voice in the daily media, please consider becoming a regular reader. We must rebuild sales at least to 2019 levels, and ideally much higher than that. We aren’t here to make a profit — all income is used to invest in improving the paper itself and allowing us to do more.

Take out a subscription today!