TODAY, more than 15 months since the first lockdown began, the Morning Star is back on the streets.

It isn’t strictly the first time — we organised a distribution at the national Palestine solidarity demonstration on May 22, and street sales of the paper have resumed in parts of the country. 

And we’re still taking precautions of course. When the decision was taken not to fully relax Covid-19 restrictions on June 21, we consulted an expert before proceeding with plans to distribute the Morning Star at today’s People’s Assembly demo.

We were assured that doing so would be safe, given the demo is outdoors and our distributors will be masked and provided with sanitiser.

But today’s march in London is the first national labour movement demonstration in a long time and we are thrilled to have staff, volunteers and supporters back out promoting the labour movement’s national daily after so many months in which it hasn’t been possible.

We’re also making this edition free to read in PDF format online (take a look at morningstaronline.co.uk/peoplesassembly) so if you aren’t a regular reader I hope you find it a rewarding read.

Like the rest of the movement we’ve learned a lot during lockdown.

Thousands have tuned in to Morning Star online meetings and rallies and such events will definitely continue. But we’re looking forward to returning to real-world meetings and the conferences, rallies and festivals that make up the labour movement calendar.

The daily paper of the left has demonstrated its unique role throughout the pandemic.

The BBC and mainstream papers all reacted as if Dominic Cummings’s devastating testimony about the corrupt, chaotic and callous behaviour of the Prime Minister, that “thousands of people died who didn’t have to die,” was a revelation — but it was no shock to the Morning Star, which alone in the daily press regularly contrasted Britain’s staggering death toll to the far lower death rates in most other countries and with MP Diane Abbott organised the Zero-Covid Coalition to push for a complete change in strategy.

No other paper has kept a relentless focus on the structural causes of Britain’s Covid catastrophe — from the role of the privatised NHS supply chain in hobbling PPE deliveries last year, brilliantly exposed by We Own It and Health Campaigns Together, to the part a deregulated labour market where workers lack job security played in undermining self-isolation guidelines and efforts to contain the virus, to the ways racist and sexist oppression have intensified the impact of the crisis on black people and women.

As thousands march today against a return to the pre-pandemic “normal,” the Morning Star is with them as the newspaper that has always fought the “austerity” that gutted our communities and the privatisation and outsourcing that hollowed out our public services and stripped workers of vital protections.

Labour rails — rightly — against Tory sleaze, but the revolving door between public office and business boardrooms and the dependence of public services on private contractors make such corruption inevitable.

Over four decades of neoliberalism have led us to the venal and vicious politics of 2021.

We are also the only daily newspaper that threw itself into the greatest challenge to our crooked political system in decades, the Jeremy Corbyn leadership of the Labour Party between 2015 and 2020.

We backed the Corbyn movement to the hilt while warning of the devastating consequences of its gradual accommodation with ruling-class politics, especially in its suborning by the second referendum campaign, after 2017.

As the bodies piled high last year many Establishment journalists attacked our appalling Prime Minister’s record, but most were complicit in the cynical smear campaign that helped sink Britain’s best hope of a different kind of government.

I don’t mention the Corbyn movement to hark back to the past, but because the policies Labour began to flesh out in 2017 and 2019 — around public ownership, economic planning, a green industrial revolution — remain essential if we are to tackle the multiple social, economic and environmental crises afflicting Britain and the world.

Westminster has done its best to stamp out these heresies, but that puts the responsibility on the labour movement to force them onto the agenda, through industrial as well as political militancy.

Britain’s only co-operatively owned newspaper, with its 10 shareholder trade unions on our management committee, has an agitational and organisational role in this fightback.

Nor can we underestimate the importance of having an anti-imperialist voice in the daily press, a paper that campaigns consistently for peace at a time when Washington’s determination to maintain economic and military supremacy worldwide is dragging us into a dangerous new cold war against China while reckless provocation in eastern Europe saw shots fired at a British warship in Russian waters this week.

If you appreciate the need for a Morning Star, I’d ask you to help make sure we survive. The pandemic has hit our finances hard. Paper sales dropped dramatically in shops because of the repeated lockdowns.

The closure of trade union offices has also had a big impact on sales, since many took orders of the paper, and changing work patterns mean we cannot count on getting many of these sales back.

The cancellation or shift online of most labour movement events hit advertising revenues hard too.

The Morning Star has seen a big increase in sales of our online PDF edition over the past year, but it’s not enough to make up for the above losses.

There are however more ways to get your daily paper than ever. You can still ask any newsagent to get you a copy daily. You can subscribe to our daily e-edition at mstar.link/subscribe.

You can now even get the paper delivered daily to your door through our new partnership with NewsTeam — just call (01782) 959-532 to set this up.

If you’re one of those people who buys the Morning Star when you see it but don’t get it every day, please consider taking up one of these options. And tell your comrades!