Morning Star (British newspaper)
This included whistleblowers who provided evidence that the British military were allowing their forces to collect severed heads during the Malayan Emergency,[6] and exposing the mass graves of civilians killed by the South Korean government.Contributors include Jeremy Corbyn, Virginia Woolf,[8] Angela Davis,[9] Billy Strachan,[10] Len Johnson,[11]: 102 Wilfred Burchett,[12] Claudia Jones, Jean Ross, and Harry Pollitt.[15] The first edition was produced on 1 January 1930[16] from the offices of the newspaper in Tabernacle Street, London, after a meeting the day before by nine British communists, including Willie Gallacher, Kay Beauchamp, Tom Wintringham, Walter Holmes, and Robert Page Arnot.The Daily Worker's first issue contained a children's cartoon titled "Micky Mongrel the Class Conscious Cur", drawn by artist Gladys Keable, which would become a staple of the early paper.On 3 September 1939, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain spoke to the nation on the BBC, at which time he announced the formal declaration of war between Britain and Nazi Germany.Daily Worker editor J. R. Campbell, backed by his political ally, Party General Secretary Harry Pollitt, sought to portray the conflict against Hitler as a continuation of the anti-fascist fight.[17] This contradicted the position of the Comintern in the aftermath of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (which became CPGB policy on 3 October) that the war was a struggle between rival imperialist powers, and Campbell was removed as editor as a result, being replaced by William Rust.[18] The newspaper responded to the assassination of Leon Trotsky by a Soviet agent with an article on 23 August 1940, entitled "A Counter Revolutionary Gangster Passes", written by former editor Campbell.[14] It had repeatedly ignored a July 1940 warning that its pacifist line contravened Defence Regulation 2D, which made it an offence to 'systematically to publish matter calculated to foment opposition to the prosecution of the war'.The paper moved temporarily in 1942 to the former Caledonian Press offices in Swinton Street (whence the old Communist Party Sunday Worker, edited by William Paul and Tom Wintringham, had been published from 15 March 1925 until 1929).The Daily Worker welcomed the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, editorialising "The employment of the new weapon on a substantial scale should expedite the surrender of Japan".[35] In April 1952, the Daily Worker published photographs of a Royal Marine commando in the middle of a British military base posing with the severed human head believed to have belonged to a member of the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA).[46] An editorial in The Guardian, however, reported in 1977 that the paper was giving coverage to dissidents in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere in the Soviet bloc to the consternation of about a third of CPGB members who wanted a reversal to a strictly pro-Kremlin line.[48] Also in 1977, editor Tony Chater persuaded the Labour government to begin running advertisements in the newspaper, previously absent because of a lack of audited circulation figures.[53] Meanwhile, in March 1984, the CPGB Executive Committee (EC) issued a seven-page document which was heavily critical of editor Tony Chater, in particular because he had refused to print an article which commemorated the sixtieth anniversary of the death of Lenin.On the day before the Berlin Wall began to be demolished in 1989, under a headline reading "GDR unveils reforms package", the newspaper commented that "The German Democratic Republic is awakening", and quoting material supplied by East Germany's ruling Socialist Unity Party: "A revolutionary people's movement has set in motion a process of serious upheaval ...[61] Other Labour MPs joining in the criticism were Stephen Doughty, Angela Smith, Ian Austin, Mike Gapes, Jess Phillips,[61] Toby Perkins and Wes Streeting.[62] However, the paper rejected the criticism,[63][64][65] stating that "from a purely technical point of view, when a sovereign government reclaims territory previously held by enemy forces, that's called "liberation" whether we like the outcome or not".[66] Stop the War Coalition convener Lindsey German,[62] and political commentator Peter Oborne[67] defended the Star's reporting of the issue, and questioned the dominant media narrative, respectively."[68] During the late 2010s the Morning Star played a key role in helping historians uncover facts about pioneering black civil rights activist Billy Strachan.[72] A profile of the paper which was published in the centre-left New Statesman magazine in 2015 commented on its contents that:[30] it covers industrial disputes, anti-austerity protests and international affairs in a brisk, populist tabloid style.[30] Its attitude to the wider world has been criticised by others on the British left with Paul Anderson former editor of the democratic socialist Tribune magazine commenting that "It runs articles extolling the virtues of single-party 'socialist' states on a regular basis – North Korea, Cuba, China, Vietnam.Its default position on just about everything happening in the world is that anything any western power supports – but particularly the United States – must be opposed, which has led to it cheering on Putin, Hamas, Assad and a lot of other real nasties.The paper was also supportive of Britain's vote in 2016 to leave the EU,[76] saying that "Anybody who supports the election of a Corbyn government with a mandate to end austerity, extend public ownership, redistribute wealth and restructure our economy in the interests of working people needs to explain how this agenda can be implemented in the framework of an EU that bans so much of it" but criticised the referendum campaign as being headed by "reactionary zealots" such as Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove.[3] In the first years of the twenty-first century, the paper has carried contributions from Uri Avnery, John Pilger, Green activist Derek Wall, ex-Mayor of London Ken Livingstone, Labour Members of Parliament (MPs) Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, Green MP Caroline Lucas, former MP George Galloway (Respect), the cartoonist Martin Rowson, and many trade union general secretaries.A similar incident occurred on 20 October 2014 when a fire broke out near the offices and a small number of staff had to relocate to the sports editor's house in order to finish the paper.In November 2011, the Morning Star launched an urgent appeal to raise £75,000 in order to address a number of funding issues which meant the paper might have gone under by the end of the year.A report by the Information Research Department stated: "While watertight evidence is no doubt lacking, it might be possible for a skilled propagandist to present a convincing case which the CPGB [Communist Party of Great Britain] would find extremely difficult to refute.
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