Communist Party of Britain and Morning Star

Find out why trade unions should stop backing the Morning Star. Read our pamphlet Why trade unions should not support the Morning Star

Morning Star silent on Irish impasse

The tragi-comedy that is the Democratic Unionist Party’s inability to deal with the consequences of Brexit continues. Last week they attempted to pull the plug on the Irish sea border checks that are required under the protocol negotiated by Johnson and Lord Frost (even though both of those now talk as though they had nothing to do with it). Then the DUP first minister Paul Givan resigned, leaving the province without a functioning government. This is the culmination of a series of disastrous misjudgements going back to the DUP’s original decision to jump on the Leave bandwagon in the...

The Morning Star on splintering

There always was an element within the Corbyn movement that was an apolitical fan club. They had little record of left-wing activity beyond personal adulation of Jeremy, and focused on a determination to downplay evidence of antisemitism and, very often, support for Brexit. Now they threaten to tear up their membership cards and relish electoral defeats for Labour. They are well represented on websites like Skwawkbox and The Canary and on both the features pages and letters page of the Morning Star . One of the most outspoken of these people is Chelley Ryan, a blogger and tweeter who has...

Campism runs up against reality

The Morning Star divides the world into two camps, labelled “progressive” and “imperialist”. From that all else flows. In any international dispute or crisis, the paper’s stance is determined by which camp the participants fall into. Usually, this is easy: China, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua are all “progressive” and in the case of the first two, “socialist”. Despite the tremendous anti-imperialist opportunities opened up by Brexit (so the MS thinks), the UK has yet to break free and establish an independent foreign policy. Until recently, Russia was a bit of a problem, especially as the Russian...

Whatever Putin does in Ukraine, the Morning Star will support him

None of us knows whether Putin is going to invade Ukraine. His demands upon NATO and the west prior to the talks with the US and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe were almost certainly drafted to be rejected, creating a pretext for a further invasion (following the 2014 “annexation” of Crimea). Or it may be that Putin will stop short of a full-scale invasion and seize enclaves or establish a land-bridge to Crimea. What can be predicted with certainty is that the Morning Star will support Putin. We know this because ever since a mass uprising ousted the pro-Russian...

Revanchism, irredentism... and the Chinese state

Revanchism, from the French revanche or “revenge”, is the will to reverse territorial losses following war or social upheaval. The term originated in the 1870s, after the Franco Prussian War, for nationalists who wanted to revenge the defeat and the reparations extracted by Germany, and to reclaim the lost territories of Alsace-Lorraine. Revanchism is also linked to irredentism — the drive to expand nation-state territory to claim fragments of the cultural and ethnic nation outside the borders of the core. When Mao Zedong took power in 1949, he set an immediate goal of re-establishing the...

RMT: We need rank-and-file organisation

With the election of Alex Gordon, a member of the Communist Party of Britain's Executive Committee, as National President, the Broad Left faction – an alliance between supporters of the Communist Party/Morning Star and other Stalinists, and a traditional 'Old Labour' element – has further...

Too shameful to be reported?

On Saturday 27 November, there was a rally in London’s Chinatown, supposedly against anti-Asian racism and, more specifically, anti-Chinese racism. There is, indeed, strong evidence of an increase in racism against Chinese people and those of “Chinese” appearance in the UK. It’s been fuelled at least in part by the Covid-19 pandemic and Trump’s description of it as the “China virus”. All socialists would, as a matter of course, support a genuine campaign against anti-Chinese racism, but there can be no doubt that this rally was, in reality, a propaganda front for the Chinese Communist Party...

Squaring anti-racist instinct with pro-Brexit policy

To be fair to the Morning Star , the fact that it had no coverage of the Wednesday 24 November tragedy in the Channel until its Friday edition (26 November), a day later than the rest of the media, was probably due to its limited resources and inability to extend deadlines. When it did come, the Morning Star ’s coverage was mainly pretty good: a front page headline “Give Safe Routes To Refugees” and a lead story quoting refugee rights groups blaming racist border fortification policies by both the British and French governments. The editorial on Friday 26 November was headed “Britain’s...

Morning Star’s Nick Wright praises Wagenknecht

In the Morning Star of 18 November, former Straight Left ultra-Stalinist Nick Wright, now rehabilitated into the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) and a regular contributor to the paper, had a lengthy article headed “The truth about immigration waits at the Polish border” While rightly condemning Poland and the EU over the plight of the people at the border, Wright glosses over Lukashenko’s cynical manipulation of desperate migrants in his efforts to destabilise the EU (while his master Putin gloats from the sidelines), and reports of Belarusian troops forcibly turning back migrants attempting...

The CPB said Red London members would be expelled. Does Red London now run their young wing?

The Young Communist League (YCL), youth wing of the Communist Party of Britain (CPB), has grown quite a bit in the last few years. It has attracted some attention on the left because of that, but also because of its increasingly disturbing political character. At the end of August a young woman who had resigned from the YCL posted this video on YouTube. In it she reports that the organisation has come to be dominated by a grouping called Redtek, with unpleasant consequences for the democracy of the organisation and for women members specifically. Redtek is a new mutation of the group Red...

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