THE Morning Star’s Christmas party took place on Friday December 13 — less than 24 hours after the exit poll that dashed hopes built over four-and-a-half years of dogged campaigning. 

If the mood in the office that day had been glum, our paper’s ambassador Maxine Peake struck a chord when she reminded us of the words of Tony Benn: “Toughen up, bloody toughen up.” On the British left we are more used to defeat than victory.

Champions of the social and economic status quo known (increasingly inaccurately) as “centrism” were quick to insist that the result was a foregone conclusion, that radical socialist politics was never going to wash in Britain.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan had said that very day that “we knew in our heart of hearts that Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership was deeply unpopular with the British people and that we were extremely unlikely to form a Labour government.”

Defenders of the Corbyn project pointed to the contrast with Labour's performance in 2017, with an almost equally radical programme and the same leader.

Though writers such as Lee Jones on the Full Brexit website have pointed to warning signs from the 2017 result, it did mark the biggest vote share increase Labour had achieved since 1945 and the largest absolute vote since 1997.

Any assessment of how to rebuild certainly needs to look at the contrast between the 2017 and 2019 votes and try to explain it.

The simplest answer is Brexit and the principle that the simplest solution is usually the correct one cannot be dismissed.

Labour was committed to uphold the referendum result in 2017 and it was committed to rerunning the referendum in 2019; Labour lost 54 seats to the Conservatives in 2019 and 52 of them were Leave-voting.

The Morning Star has argued that Brexit is central to understanding Labour’s defeat, not just as a standalone issue but as one which struck at the heart of trust in Labour’s overall message and came to stand for a whole range of justified grievances on the part of millions who felt ignored and patronised by Westminster politics.

It’s not enough though to say that Labour ought not to have pledged a second referendum and should have listened to voices (which of course included this paper) that warned against one. Labour policy was not decided in isolation. It was shaped by various forces acting on the party leadership. 

The increasing number of caveats placed on any Brexit deal the party was prepared to consider supporting; the exultation at short-term tactical defeats for Boris Johnson in Parliament and the courts that in fact played straight into his hands in the wider contest for strategic victory; the shift from Corbyn’s initial willingness to argue that Brexit could be an opportunity to reshape the political settlement in the interests of the working class towards a dispirited pursuit of single market and customs union arrangements that sought to preserve as many conditions of EU membership as possible, can be best understood as the gradual co-option of the Labour Party in the service of a cause that at best had nothing to do with (and at worst was actively hostile to) the election of a socialist government — “continuity” Remain.

That isn’t a reflection on all individual supporters of staying in the EU, many of whom were committed to the Corbyn project.

But Continuity Remain was never led by the left. Campaigns such as the People’s Vote, with its plush Millbank offices, its slick PR, its constellation of political grandees from Alastair Campbell to Michael Heseltine and Tony Blair to John Major, were very obviously creatures of the British Establishment.

They certainly attracted support among sections of the working class (while the Leave vote was proportionately higher among the poorest socio-economic categories, by any Marxist reckoning both Leave and Remain won millions of working-class votes).

And many socialists viewed leaving the EU much as Daniel Hannan or Nigel Farage did, as a bid to further deregulate and privatise the economy, and aligned themselves with the People’s Vote for that reason. 

But the attitude of the leaders of Continuity Remain to Labour’s socialist vision was summed up by Tory defector Anna Soubry when she objected to Richard Burgon taking her to task for her support for austerity: “Nonsense, we’re talking about Brexit, man.”

The attempt to elevate the Leave versus Remain question above all other political considerations put social justice on the back burner, and in effect meant that those socialists who supported Continuity Remain accepted liberal leadership.

Some on the left deny that Labour would have performed better had it continued to accept the referendum result, arguing that it would simply have lost Remain seats in place of the Leave ones it did lose.

Such hypothetical questions cannot be answered with certainty. But if the logic of such a position is that Labour could never do well in a Brexit-dominated election, then those who helped make it a Brexit-dominated election in the first place have a lot to answer for: and the growth of Continuity Remain from a marginal political force in 2017 to a significant one in 2019 set the scene for Labour’s defeat.

Before 2017 the Establishment made no attempts to co-opt the Corbyn project, concentrating instead on trying to topple his leadership and assuming that it would crash and burn when exposed to the electorate.

As Nick Wright has argued in our pages, after its unexpected success at the polls, “the main instruments of state, political and ideological coercion were devoted to a twin project: firstly of reconstituting the Tory Party as a reliable instrument of class power, and secondly disaggregating Labour as such.”

The drive to co-opt Labour on behalf of Remain forced the radical and insurgent socialist movement into an alliance with many of its natural enemies — from the Confederation of British Industry to the Supreme Court. Like lining up with Scotland’s Tories in the Better Together campaign, it tarnished the Labour brand for millions. 

Corbyn was constantly rebuked whenever seeking to prioritise the class struggle over the Remain-Leave divide: mocked when he raised attacks on the disabled at PMQs rather than concentrating his fire on Brexit, dismissed with chants of “where’s Jeremy Corbyn” last autumn when he attended an anti-austerity rally in northern England rather than the People’s Vote march addressed by several of his shadow cabinet.

The crucial factor is not that Labour plumped for Remain when it should have plumped for Leave but that liberal misdirection ended with it elevating ruling-class concerns over its own project.

This shift wasn’t total or constant — the party maintained a radical challenge to market economics and the extraordinarily vicious attacks on Corbyn personally, maintained right up to the election, illustrate what a real threat the Establishment continued to see in him.

But it did a lot of damage. As we warned in March, “Labour support for a second referendum may not deliver a second referendum, but it could well deliver a Tory election victory.”

Aside from electoral calculation, ambivalence or enthusiasm for the EU pointed to a deeper problem of liberalism infusing much of the labour movement.

Labour remained overwhelmingly an electoral vehicle focused on Westminster, with only a handful of isolated attempts (in places such as Haringey or Preston) to reshape local political landscapes and confront capitalist power at community level. 

The belief that a radical economic programme could be enacted without interference from the EU was part of a tendency to underestimate the seriousness of Establishment resistance to the whole project, which resulted in an unwillingness to directly confront the many die-hard opponents of Corbyn in the parliamentary party or to break decisively with allegiance to US imperialism signified by membership of Nato. 

Following electoral defeat the journalist Paul Mason took aim at “the economic nationalist” left, by which he appeared to mean the Unite trade union and the Morning Star, as if objecting to a global framework of treaties designed to empower corporations over governments was somehow reactionary.

By this reckoning any use of government powers to intervene in the movement of capital, goods, labour or services — the market, effectively — is seen as narrowly nationalistic, which in practice leaves “free market” economics untouchable.

These were not weaknesses imposed on Labour by obviously ruling-class bodies, but reflected the attitudes of many members of the party and many affiliated trade unions.

As Marx once said, “the ruling ideology of any society is the ideology of its ruling class.” We should not be surprised at the enduring influence of liberal ideology within the labour movement — but we do need to look at how to challenge it.

As we enter our 90th year, the role of the Morning Star in that process is crucial. Much of the left can agree that the role of the media in election defeat was enormous: not just in the massive pro-Tory bias of most print newspapers and the big broadcasters during the election, but in shaping attitudes to Labour and its leader over the last four years (a process in which the liberal press was arguably as damaging as the right). 

The importance of the Morning Star as a daily socialist voice has only been confirmed by this experience. On all major controversies on the left, from the EU to Scottish independence, the paper has published a wide range of socialist opinion, and can act as a forum for serious debate — but debate on our terms as socialists and trade unionists.

Its ability not to waver in support of the socialist project rests above all on the commitment of its readers, who uniquely for a national daily paper actually own it and elect the management committee; and as a reader-owned co-op with a direct role for the 11 national trade unions and one trade union region that hold management committee seats, the Morning Star is literally our press, not the bosses’: the paper of the labour movement.

It also rests on the paper’s editorial commitment to Britain’s Road to Socialism, the Communist Party’s programme, which ensures the paper remains what the late Tony Benn (for years one of our weekly columnists, as after him was Jeremy Corbyn) called a “signpost” as opposed to a “weathercock” — the Morning Star doesn’t bend with the winds of fashion but maintains a focus on the need for a revolutionary transformation of society through the collective ownership and control of the means of production.

And it is rooted in the paper’s history, its role as a repository of the labour movement’s experience and memory, one we can play as we are often the only paper to cover struggles and disputes from workers’ point of view.

In today’s edition we showcase some elements of that history; in next weekend’s we’ll take a look back at highlights of our content and reporting over nine decades, and over the course of the year editions and events will take that further — keep your eyes peeled for more details soon.

The Morning Star does not enter its tenth decade in bad shape: the “daily miracle” is still coming out, the number of readers’ and supporters’ groups has grown over the last year and your fundraising efforts have meant for the first time in our memory — certainly for the first time in my 10 years working for the paper — we’ve exceeded our annual Fighting Fund target. 

But it remains very small, financially precarious and most importantly not nearly influential enough in the labour movement it exists to serve.

We need to use our 90th year to celebrate and promote the Morning Star, win new readers and improve our product, especially online.

We need to build communities of support for the paper as well, to ensure it is defended as politics becomes ever more authoritarian and corporate giants extend their manipulation and control of the flow of information.

As Harry Pollitt said 90 years ago, “the paper is born and must never be allowed to die.” Huge thanks from me and all the staff to the amazing efforts so many of you make to keep us shining.