PERIODICALLY I have to be the bearer of bad news. That bad news is that the price of the printed Morning Star will rise at the end of this month.

From Monday September 30 your weekday paper will cost £1.50, while from Saturday October 5 the larger weekend edition will cost £2.

Price rises would be a poor response to falling sales, entrenching the cycle of decline we have seen in print sales across the newspaper industry in the last decade. 

But the Morning Star’s print sales haven’t fallen, except during the Covid pandemic, when this was mostly made up for by a large rise in online subscriptions. In fact, as reported to our AGM this summer, income rose over the last 12 months across our main income streams (sales, advertising and Fighting Fund).

But unfortunately costs have risen more. This is not just over the last 12 months: what has really hit us is the cumulative impact of the inflationary crisis of 2022-23.

The Morning Star survived the pandemic because of tremendous support from our readers, who raised £180,000 in two back-to-back appeals. 

Through the ensuing cost-of-living crisis, which despite lower inflation rates is still with us in the form of permanently higher prices, we benefited from the dedication readers show even on their deathbeds, receiving generous legacies two years running which masked the impact of our rising costs.

Through all that we prioritised the paper’s quality. Unlike other national dailies the Morning Star did not cut staff during Covid, knowing we keep the “daily miracle” coming out with the bare minimum of resources. We did our best to protect staff from the inflationary crisis by negotiating pay awards designed to bring everyone up to at least a £15-an-hour rate with the NUJ and Unite chapels over the past two years.

That’s resulted in a significantly higher wage bill, but as anyone paying utilities bills knows, that’s not the end of it. The cost of all the services the Morning Star requires to keep running has risen sharply since 2022: printing, distribution, wire subscriptions, you name it.

For a long time we held the price of online subscriptions at their original 2017 rate (when our present website, currently being revamped, was introduced) but earlier this year we had to follow in the footsteps of other online subscription services and raise that by 10 per cent, to £5.50 a month for a basic and £22 for a premium subscription (analogous daily, weekly and annual rates apply). We’re not raising that again right now as we wish to assess the impact of that price rise.

But we do have to raise the cost of the printed paper again, as an assessment of our finances in the first half of this year showed beyond doubt that things were simply unsustainable otherwise.

The Morning Star is an essential read, a paper at the heart of the labour movement and the left’s campaigns, something demonstrated in our regular wraparounds and supplements from unions and organisations of the broad left, from this year’s miners’ strike anniversary specials produced with the NUM to the recent Stand Up to Racism and Tambo’s London Recruits wraps distributed at the Trades Union Congress.

We know we ask a great deal from our readers, who contribute above and beyond the cover price by raising well over £200,000 a year for the Fighting Fund, and who regularly volunteer to distribute the paper on picket lines, marches and festival stalls.

We hope you all understand that the People’s Press Printing Society management committee only determined to raise the price following detailed discussion of the paper’s situation. 

We are also campaigning to increase bulk e-subscriptions by union branches and other organisations, which are available at a heavy discount, to restore direct sales to union offices (which fell off heavily during the pandemic and are now beginning to rise again), and through a number of supplementary initiatives such as the PressReader service which provides digital editions to libraries and public institutions. 

We know that the only reader-owned national daily in Britain, which turns 95 years old this winter, has a crucial role to play as a lonely voice for peace in a world descending into war, and for socialism as we face a renewed war on working-class living standards that only a united trade union movement can overcome.