AS WE approach 2023, the Morning Star is still alive and kicking – just as well given the surge in industrial action of 2022 and the increasingly hysterical propaganda being deployed by ministers and mainstream media pundits against nurses, ambulance workers, posties, railway workers and many more.

But as assistant business manager Bernadette Keaveney warned at the beginning of the month, from next week (Tuesday January 3, to be precise) we will be putting up the price of your daily paper to £1.30 and of the weekend paper to £1.70.

This is not a decision we have taken lightly.

We’re well aware that inflation is causing very serious hardship. After all, we cover the problem day-in, day-out in this paper, including the role of price-gouging by businesses whose profit margins have soared since the pandemic and of a government which is using inflation to force real wages down while inflating the asset values of the super-rich.

We hear about the problems readers face in correspondence often accompanying the donations many of you regularly make to the Fighting Fund; staff are subject to those pressures too. We have put off raising the cover price for as long as we possibly could.

That was tied, too, to the unusual situation we faced coming out of the pandemic. Print sales plummeted during 2020 because of the lockdowns. Digital sales rose significantly, but not by enough to close the income gap, which in 2020 was exacerbated by the loss of conferences, marches and other events at which bulk sales might be made through trade unions, significant advertising revenue might be brought in or stall and street sales might be possible.

Ever since, we’ve been trying to rebuild sales and of course, raising the cover price isn’t ideal in that context. We have raised both print and digital sales in 2022, which is a fact worth celebrating: most daily newspapers saw the long-term decline in sales continue this year.

But not by enough. In very rough terms, print sales have dropped by £220,000 a year since 2019 and online sales have increased by £170,000, leaving a £50,000 “sales gap” we need to fill to get back to where we were pre-pandemic.

Some of that is down to a decline in regular orders for trade union offices: lots of these were cancelled during lockdowns, and where we have secured renewals since, often unions are having fewer staff permanently office-based and take smaller orders as a result.

We continue to work to rebuild office sales: we believe the Morning Star is an essential read for trade unionists and it’s very handy to be able to pick up a copy if you are working or holding a meeting on a union premises.

But as the strike wave grows and new activists are entering the movement, there is also a huge opportunity to win more individual readers.

That, alongside our determination to show maximum support and solidarity for all workers out on strike, is why we’ve agreed to provide papers for free when they’re ordered for distribution on picket lines – though this costs us, so we ask those organising such distributions to consider donating the cost of the drop or something towards the papers where they can.

Some people argue that rebuilding print sales is impossible given the context of a declining newspaper industry, but that isn’t our experience. The Morning Star is the only daily paper to have managed a serious increase in print sales in the fairly recent past (2015-16, when sales rose by around 15 per cent).

That was tied to the surge in interest in left-wing politics that saw Jeremy Corbyn become Labour leader. But there is a growing clamour today for a political alternative, one being articulated on picket lines and at work rather than at Westminster.

The movement still needs a paper: not only is social media increasingly politically censored by giant corporations, but it tends to a tunnel vision by showing you content similar to what you’ve seen before.

In our view, the crises affecting people today – the wages crisis and collapsing public services here, the wars abroad, the warming climate – are all interconnected, symptoms of a capitalist system that is ever more dysfunctional and anti-human.

It does still matter to approach them as a whole – and a daily dose of socialism, that covers British and international politics but also crucial questions of sport and culture, is the best way to do that, whether you’re reading that on your phone or in print.

If rebuilding sales income was the only issue, it would be wrong to raise the cover price. To hike the price to cover a sales shortfall is bad business: managing decline.

But of course, as Bernadette pointed out in her December 3-4 article, that’s not why we have to do this. Inflation affects our costs too. Rising energy prices make it more expensive to produce the Morning Star.

Newsprint is more expensive than it was as paper mills convert to cardboard production for packaging and big producers like Russia are hit with sanctions because of the Ukraine war. We have been absorbing these costs and putting off the price rise – but we can’t do so any longer and 2023 will therefore see the price rise for the first time since 2019.