BANS on left media seems to be all the rage in eastern Europe. But there was a time when the main left newspaper in Britain faced a similar challenge. 

The Daily Worker, forerunner of today’s Morning Star, played cat and mouse with censors, libel suits, grizzly judges — one was described in the paper as a “bewigged puppet” — and eventually, an outright ban, from its first day of publication, January 1 1930. 

Indeed the appointment as “business manager” or editor of the paper, was once guaranteed a surefire spell in prison, usually Pentonville and considered part of the job description.

On January 21 1941, as cities such as Bristol, London and Coventry faced intense Nazi bombing, the Daily Worker was banned. 

This was the most serious attack on press freedom of the century. At one point the government considered banning all newspapers, publishing instead a Government War Gazette. 

The appetite in ruling circles to control critical voices and manipulate the news was strong.  

The owners and editorial staff of the paper had seen it coming and made meticulous plans, which included legal and illegal printing, the establishment of powerful support leagues made up of factory workers and readers and even a High Court challenge. They weren’t going down without a scrap.

By the late 1930s, the Daily Worker had made quite a name for itself. It had championed the people of Abyssinia and the legitimate government of Spain, both facing fascist incursion. 

In 1937, it denounced the Japanese militarist murder of hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens in Nanjing. It editorialised against the annexation of Austria and the break-up and sell-off of Czechoslovakia, six months later. 

On August 23 1938 the Daily Worker led with a bold headline: “SOVIETS DRAMATIC PEACE MOVE TO HALT AGGRESSORS.” It stood against a repeat of the slaughter of WWI, the bullying of small states and the encirclement of the first socialist state, the USSR. 

The “Worker” didn’t just attract the attention of its loyal readership. The secret services, civil servants and Tory MPs all read it. 

Indeed, its supplement, The Week, inserted into weekend editions, was read by Joachim von Ribbentrop, who flew a copy regularly to Berlin for expert analysis. 

Its greatest enemy though was Herbert Morrison, who became Labour home secretary in the war cabinet in October 1940.

Opponents could just about stomach a paper that was their sternest critic as long as the Communist Party did not pose a threat. 

However, CP opposition to the prosecution of the war was increasingly popular, even in Labour circles. 

The government failed to construct deep shelters to protect the people. There was a sense that the British ruling class was lukewarm to opposing Hitler anyway. People were tired of “phoney war” and “sits-krieg.”

The paper could have been temporarily suspended or prosecuted for what it published. The attacks on Morrison were scathing, and well-earned. 

Instead it was banned outright in order to disrupt the left in the labour movement, in effect to take out the opposition within the workers’ movement. Although the British Union of Fascists was dissolved, its newspaper, Action, was never suppressed.

Insiders alerted the party that the ban was being discussed in Cabinet, and by July 1940, the CP was preparing for a position of revolutionary defence as France fell and invasion threatened. 

Uppermost in their minds was that in France their sister publication L’Humanite had been banned the day after the signing of the Soviet-German non-aggression pact. 

The mighty French Communist Party was banned a short while after and France succumbed to Hitler, her democracy already hollowed out and betrayed by a weak and cowardly ruling class. 

Similar plans existed in government circles for Britain, including large-scale internment and exile for various leaders. Willie Gallacher and Manny Shinwell had been the last people in Britain sent into internal exile, towards the end of World War I, so the threat was historical and real. 

If the ban had just been about the war, then the paper would have reappeared soon after the Soviet Union was invaded and the CP came all-out in favour of the war effort. 

But it did not reappear for 86 weeks, and for 61 weeks after the dastardly Nazi attack. By then the ban was widely viewed as undermining the war effort and making constant appearances in discussions recorded by “Mass Observation.” 

The Communist Party produced dozens of other journals but only the Daily Worker was banned outright. Bulk copies of leaflets were constantly seized in police raids. Members were encouraged to hide literature, anticipating a wider ban. 

Richard Kisch’s book on the communists in the armed forces shows that the underground “illegal” Daily Worker was being regularly and efficiently shipped to regiments as far away as Burma, Egypt and India, in a well-oiled distribution network, run through the Royal Air Force.

The run-up to the ban began when the TUC met in Southport in 1940 and its vindictive general secretary Walter Citrine, denied the Worker press credentials. 

He had sued the Daily Worker successfully in April that year, although he never received the damages awarded. Actions such as this ban encouraged the government to act against the only voice in the press that was critical of is role. No doubt Citrine and Morrison would have exchanged views.

Sir John Anderson, 1st Viscount Waverley, then home secretary and minister of home security, had sent numerous stiffly worded warnings to the editorial board of the Daily Worker seeking to intimidate them into changing their editorial position. 

Anderson was constantly trying to provoke the communists who berated him for the failures to protect citizens from bombing.  

Correspondence between Rajani Palme Dutt and Bill Rust shows that the party was adept at keeping onside of a ban, finding new ways of saying the same thing, to enable it to stay a step ahead of the authorities. 

Cabinet minutes show that the security services proposed the outlawing of the Communist Party itself, with limited internment for the party leadership, and the party had already taken a series of measures to protect itself in such circumstances. 

Communist Frances Moore recalls spending “a whole evening with Bill Rust burning documents.” Elsewhere, many party organisations stopped minuting their meetings and hid membership lists. 

But the party leadership and editorial board were very clear about the lines that would not be crossed and encouraged a revolutionary perspective on the question of legality. 

It was to be enjoyed and used for as long as it lasted. The communists spotted the significance of the removal of Anderson and his replacement by Herbert Morrison. 

They knew the reactionary Morrison from countless skirmishes through the ’30s when he had been witch-hunter general against the communists and their left allies. 

And so, on January 21 1941, just nine days after the People’s Convention, the Daily Worker was suppressed, using defence regulation 2D, which made it illegal “systematically to publish matter calculated to foment opposition to the prosecution of the war.” 

Even then the party challenged the ban in the High Court, which lifted the suppression on the movement of its machinery, but the decision came five days after the presses were destroyed in a bombing inferno. 

Only the Daily Mirror opposed the ban. The Guardian editorially welcomed it, writing: “the ‘Daily Worker’ did not believe either in the war or in democracy; its only aim was to confuse and weaken. We can well spare it.”

At a stroke, Morrison had removed all press opposition to the government. Shortages of paper were used to block the request to start a new, different paper, allied to the People’s Convention. 

Only 15 members of Parliament, led by Nye Bevan, voted against the suppression. At the defence factory Napiers, workers clocked in an hour late in protest at suppression of their paper. 

In its place up to 160 Daily Worker Leagues appeared, many of them in factories. A small journal of the Leagues, constantly testing the boundaries of the ban, carried essential news and views. 

A regular Industrial and General Information Bulletin was published by the Industrial and General Information News Agency, staffed by former employees of the Daily Worker. The aim was to campaign for the ban to be lifted and for a daily bulletin to inform shop stewards. 

Very soon after the ban, the Daily Worker suffered a real loss as a result of Nazi bombing. The paper had been printed at the offices of the Marston Printing Company in Cayton Street. 

The building was originally a tea warehouse and had timber floorboards, and only an outline steel frame. An incendiary device struck and despite local citizens supporting firefighters, they were unable to halt the blaze. 

All the plant and both rotary presses and all the linotype composing machines with their own type foundry were lost and the government would only pay compensation after the war’s end. 

The Daily Worker up to the banning often could not always print its full run, but it never missed an edition.

Fortunately the party had decided early in 1939 to reinforce its contract to print the Scottish edition at Kirkwood’s. Its sheet-fed general presses were moved out of the building to a “safe area,” contracts for emergency printing were agreed with provincial printers and steps were taken “to remove one of the rotaries to a safe area.”

A decision was taken immediately following the ban to continue the monthly Fighting Fund, to accumulate funds for any restart. This monthly sum never fell below £1,000. That continued for 19 months. 

A small staff had been kept on to write broadsheets, leaflets and brochures. Hidden presses around Britain ran off illegal editions with the Daily Worker masthead replaced with such titles as Stalin, Robert Burns Special, Allied Offensive, 1942 Production Special, Women in War Special and even just the Daily. 

The authorities never uncovered the illegal presses and were in fact led a merry dance. The first illegal copy of the Daily Worker was printed on  January 24, just 72 hours after the ban struck. 

Amazingly, in one audacious move, a “specimen copy” was printed and distributed to MPs and circulated in Parliament (while still very much outlawed) as an example of what the paper might look like if the ban were lifted.

To meet the ban the Labour Monthly, under the editorship of Palme Dutt, stepped in, calling a widely representative conference and continuing to publish articles such as “War Aims — Lessons Of 1914-18” and “The Crisis Of The British People.” 

Circulation of the monthly rose to 30,000 even though its distribution abroad was banned. In March 1941, it produced a special edition to challenge the attacks on press freedom, with contributions from Bernard Shaw, HG Wells, SO Davies, Lord Ponsonby and the Dean of Canterbury. 

In general, the organised labour movement, even where it disagreed with the stance of the paper, opposed the ban. 

By the time of the unbanning, 800 trade union bodies had submitted a motion calling for its reinstatement, including important annual conferences of some of the bigger unions. 

There were a number of parliamentary lobbies, giant rallies and “Lift the Ban” conferences.

The ban on the workers’ newspaper was lifted at the most critical moment of the war. The act and timing of the of ban had been political. So too was the unbanning. 

It was a victory for campaigning and democracy and by the time of the unbanning, few could be found to defend the original action. 

The paper’s reappearance was a sharp setback for the Munichites, who would now be on the receiving end of some searching questions. 

The Labour conference, after a fractious debate, followed the decision of the Scottish TUC,  which demanded the lifting of the ban. 

Morrison feared the all-Britain TUC would follow suit along with a vote of censure. A paper count of those for and against found that the communists would have secured a majority of over a million for the unbanning. The co-operative movement added its voice. 

The date for the reopening was September 7 1942, the opening date of the TUC Congress in Blackpool. How the wheel of fortune had turned since the reporter ban of 1940. 

The headline read: “Blackout is over.” The first edition was welcomed by anti-aircraft batteries in heroic Malta, sending a telegram to greet the first edition.

The party was unable to secure a print contract with a rotary printer or one of the big print houses. Instead, it had funds to purchase a press of its own. As important as the lifting of the ban on publication was the lifting of the wholesalers’ stifling ban on distribution. 

Restriction on the availability of newsprint limited it to four pages and a run of 100,000, “when we could sell a million.” 

The political position of the Communist Party allowed it to demand more paper for a bigger edition and a longer print run, in the interests of the war effort. So it demanded restoration of the unused paper resulting from the 19-month ban. 

It immediately faced the difficulty of restoring its editorial team with one serving in the RAF, two in the navy and another, a paratrooper. 

It did secure the addition of its talented Moscow correspondent John Gibbons. It fell to him to find the words to describe the effect of the siege of Leningrad and the massacre of Jews at Babi Yar, near Kiev, in Ukraine. Its editor was to be William Rust.

The next months saw the paper back and fully combat-ready, focusing on the campaign for the second front. If the ban — and the length of its duration — had been unprecedented, how much more so was the impact of the paper’s campaign to open a new western front in occupied Europe. 

In fact it put the government so much on the back foot that it became easy to see why they would have wanted to ban it in the first place.

Phil Katz is Communist Party director of communications.