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We’re so close – the campaign can’t end here

It’s been an amazing few months with our supporters raising £110,000 for the people’s paper. But we still need to meet our target

At long last, we have reached the Summer of Heroes appeal deadline day. And after a mammoth struggle by our readers, supporters, comrades and friends, we have raised an amazing £110,000 in just a few months. 

It’s a fantastic result. The commitment it shows to the Morning Star has been inspiring and humbling. 

Ordinary people in extraordinarily difficult financial circumstances, made much worse by a mercenary government of warmongers and millionaires, have dug very deep.

But, and there is always a but, we are around £40,000 short of our target. 

When we set out on this long march to raise £152,000 by September 12, 2014, it was clear we had a mountain to climb. 

We are nearly there, and we are not giving up now.

Lenin wrote in his famous What Is To Be Done: “We are marching in a compact group along a precipitous and difficult path, firmly holding each other by the hand. We are surrounded on all sides by enemies, and we have to advance almost constantly under their fire.”

That is often how it feels in William Rust House. But like Lenin and his comrades, we are not alone. Our readers, friends and supporters are the best comrades in the world. 

We will get there with them. And so today, the Morning Star announces an extension to the appeal. The new deadline day is October 31 2014. 

That gives us another month and a half to finish the job and climb that mountain. 

Some might say how will it be Summer of Heroes, when October is in the autumn?

I agree, but I recall standing outside the TUC conference centre this week handing out 700 Morning Stars per day compliments of Unite, GMB, Ucatt and CWU in brilliant September sunshine.

Surely some of the best summer weather we have had, and in complete contrast to perhaps the dullest, wettest August on record. 

British Summer Time officially ends on October 26 — and the Morning Star Summer of Heroes Appeal will continue to shine, irrespective of officialdom. It was ever thus. 

At the TUC Morning Star-organised fringe last week, and in the conference hall, trade union leader after trade union leader stood up to support the paper because of its unique and invaluable place in the movement. 

Ordinary members did the same. 

They all know what we know, that the Morning Star is the people’s paper, owned by its readers and run as a co-operative for peace and socialism.

It is anathema to the ruling class. Everything it is and believes in gets right up the noses of the rich. They loathe it and would love to shut it up and shut it down. 

For 85 years it has stuck two fingers up to their mock morality which feeds paranoia about terrorism while terrorising the world with war. 

It has exposed their economics of failure with bonuses for the most incompetent. It has blown apart their daily lies, injustices and hypocrisy.

Much more dangerously for these bungling capitalists, the Morning Star has given the people who create the wealth in this country the confidence to know their own strength, get off their knees and fight back.

There is a passion about this paper and a determination that it will never be silenced.

We need £40,000 in seven weeks. £40,000 in 49 days. We can do it, because we must. 

DAVID PEEL

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