Scottish Communists

http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/content/view/full/85183

There are histories of the Daily Worker and Morning Star, both positive accounts and those that focus on the more difficult periods the paper has had in the last eight decades.

No doubt there are still criticisms that can be made, but a look back at history shows how unique it is that an English-language paper of the left has lasted 80 years.

Left-wing and socialist papers in general have had very limited longevity since they first appeared in the 1830s with titles such as the Poor Man's Guardian.

The world's first great working-class paper the Leeds and then London-based Northern Star ran from 1838 to 1851. In its heyday it outsold the Times - some achievement given that many of its readers could not actually read but had the paper read to them.

The Northern Star was succeeded by The People's Paper edited by Ernest Jones (1852-8). Another great Chartist paper, it failed through lack of funds and readers.

The Beehive from 1860 was a trade union paper that reported on the affairs of the First International but - and here the pattern differs - while it lasted, its ownership and character changed. Another paper from the same era, The National Reformer, was the organ of British free thought and had strands of Owenite socialism and Chartism in it.

With the publication of Justice and the Commonweal in the 1880s the first avowedly Marxist journals in Britain had appeared, but they were not in any sense newspapers even if they were determinedly propagandist in nature.

The growth of independent labour politics and the left from the 1880s also saw a huge rise in the range of left-wing publications, not all of which were widely circulated or read.

By the period before World War I there certainly were influential left papers such as Blatchford's Clarion and the Daily Herald.

The communist press came in part from this tradition of working-class journalism and partly from an understanding, taken directly from Lenin, about the need for revolutionary socialists to organise politically around a paper.

The first edition of the Daily Worker on January 1 1930 came after a decade of weekly communist papers the Communist, the Workers Weekly and the Sunday Worker. It was launched, in the tradition of left-wing papers, in less than auspicious circumstances. There was little money and few trained journalists.

Looking at the various histories of the paper - two by the first editor William Rust and one produced on the 50th anniversary in 1980 - the well-known details of the distributors' boycott, the attempts at repression around the Invergordon Mutiny, the ban after 1939 and the campaign to get limited government advertising in the 1970s are all covered.

The boycott followed a tactic used by the news trade since the days of the Chartists when it was known as "burking" a paper. This meant making sure a publication was hard to get or unavailable and trying to kill it while not overtly censoring or banning it.

It is the incidental details that strike the historian. The early workers on the paper, based on photos, appeared to consist very largely of middle-aged men in collar and tie, their visual respectability rather belying their revolutionary intent.

Indeed Rust noted that the Daily Worker offices were often under state surveillance and that "sometimes the spying was done by roughly dressed coppers of unshaven appearance." Fortunately beards are no longer seen as a sign of counter-revolution at the Star.

But the big point is that through the efforts of staff and supporters the Star has lasted for 80 years.

That makes it unique in the history of the British labour movement so far, although of course the debate will go on about its position on this or that issue. So it should when it comes to something that has a history but is also of the moment rather than just a monument.

Don't miss our special 80th anniversary edition this Saturday!