Calling all the millions of summer heroes across the south-east of England. Your paper needs you!

The Morning Star Summer of Heroes appeal is still under way and it is gathering momentum for the big finish on October 31.

Today, South East Regional TUC (Sertuc) enters the fray backing our appeal.

Recently it mailed every one of its hundreds of thousands of members across the south-east urging them to support the paper.

This weekend, Sertuc gets behind the appeal by responding to our call to have their picture taken holding up our great paper.

Their endorsement, however, goes back years and through many industrial struggles across the region with its millions of workers.

As Carolyn Simpson, Sertuc treasurer and chair of the women’s rights committee puts it:

“We are all ardent supporters of the Morning Star as the only national paper that tells the truth about the current ‘state we’re in’ — and we’re all shareholders as well, helping to keep our paper afloat and printed.”

That goes for Mick Connolly, ex-regional secretary of Sertuc and Martin Gould, president of Sertuc who has stood by the paper all his working life. It goes without saying, but say it we must — without supporters like these across this country, there would be no Morning Star. 

That’s what we discovered at the Labour Party conference in Manchester last week.

Lots of people buying the paper, many left Labour MPs coming to our stall and expressing support, all underlining the important role it plays in the movement, with new readers coming on board and new subscribers to our mobile phone app. 

They know what we know. 

We know that if Ed Miliband and his Cabinet are going to change things for the better, they have to not only face down the bully boys of the Mail and the Murdoch press, they have to read the Morning Star and take a leaf out of it.  

This newspaper represents the views of many thousands of trade unionists and working-class voters whose views and experiences are ignored by the mainstream media.

The message is clear. Take back our public services from the spivs, renationalise the railways, tax the tax dodgers and support the poor and vulnerable. 

We desperately need funds to keep the Morning Star going so it can go on being a leading and influential voice in the movement.

Last week more than eight in 10 Scottish voters went to the polls showing what happens when passionate politics grips ordinary people. That’s our kind of politics. 

The very existence of the Morning Star is a challenge to the middle ground, middle-of-the-road, suffocating consensus which is destroying the political life of Britain and turning millions of people off. 

A flourishing Morning Star might be a nightmare for the Tories and Ukip who gather for their respective conferences this weekend in Birmingham and Doncaster but for the labour and trade union movement it is a sign of hope.

At both conferences there will be huge demonstrations against austerity and racism. 

The Morning Star will be outside the conference halls, with the people, calling for peace and socialism, fighting back against greed and prejudice and for a politics that can move millions again.