THE Times leader of September 2 1851, entitled “Literature for the Poor,” spoke to a bourgeois readership with the opinion that “only now and then when some startling fact is bought before us do we entertain even the suspicion that there is a society close to our own, and with which we are in the habits of daily intercourse, of which we are as completely ignorant as if it dwelt in another land, of another language in which we never conversed, which in fact we never saw.”

Learning from this, the most far-sighted of our bourgeoisie — including Winston Churchill by his own account — read the Morning Star as intently as they scour the columns of the Financial Times.

This urgent necessity for class warriors to know what the class enemy is thinking and doing is highlighted in the present storm of industrial action which is nowhere documented, analysed and described more comprehensively than in the Morning Star (although no day passes when it is not imperative for protagonists on either side of this struggle to consult the Strike Map website).