Why single out the Morning Star for a label?
Congratulations on recognising the sometimes forgotten reality that the last strike action on a London-based national daily was the five week-strike in 1998 that won my reinstatement as Morning Star editor.
Incidentally, has “communist Morning Star” been built into a single key stroke on your computer? I only ask since my paper seems to be the only one that requires a “buyer beware” warning of its politics, unlike others whose political sympathies are no less apparent.
That my sacking on trumped-up charges followed a change in the leadership of the Communist Party is true, but the Journalist’s assertion that the new leaders wanted to “impose a new editor on the paper” is not.
The Communist Party could not sack me as editor because it does not own or control the Morning Star. The paper is owned by a readers’ co-operative, the People’s Press Printing Society Ltd, which is run by a committee of management elected annually by the society’s shareholders.
At that time, the company secretary’s husband was the Communist Party general secretary, who was replaced by the Communist Party executive committee in January 1998, at my proposal.
By coincidence, some say, my suspension and then sacking followed shortly afterwards.
The upshot was that the Morning Star NUJ chapel went on strike, supported by our union, MPs, other trade unions and the Communist Party.
In a striking victory for editorial independence, I was reinstated and the company secretary resigned.
At the subsequent shareholders’ meeting, those who had supported her were voted off the management committee and replaced by a broad spread of labour movement personalities, including then Fire Brigades Union general secretary Ken Cameron who became management committee chair.
John Haylett
Editor, Morning Star
London E3
You insist that the Morning Star is not a “commercial daily,” when of course we have been since 1930. And the “communist” label only undermines the work of journalists at the paper. We are all NUJ members and only a minority of us are in the Communist Party.
Charley Allan
London E3