HUNDREDS of viewers tuned in at the weekend to an online celebration of the Morning Star’s 90 years, which aired as part of the Communist Party’s centenary event.

Chaired by Institute for Employment Rights director and People’s Press Printing Society vice-chair Carolyn Jones the meeting heard from journalists past and present, trade unionists and communists on the unique importance of Britain’s only socialist, co-operatively owned daily.

Ms Jones said the paper offered “a space to those who are angry, looking for a voice and to hear about struggles similar to their own.”

Bakers, Food and Allied Workers’ Union general secretary Sarah Woolley described the struggle to recruit some of Britain’s most exploited workers to trade unions against management bullying.

After lockdown unions should not face “our members, their friends and families going back to picking up rags like the Daily Mail that are still working to undermine the work we do and have done throughout Covid,” she said.

“We need to encourage them to read the Morning Star, to amplify its message through their branches and communities.”

The Young Communist League’s Amy Field spoke of how she raised £800 for the Morning Star with her 19th birthday fundraiser because it was an “exceptional” paper that brought campaigners together from across the movement “from Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn to YCLers like me.”

Communications Workers Union leader Dave Ward sent a “big thank you to the Morning Star which is increasingly playing a vital role in standing up for working-class people.”

Star reporter Bethany Rielly described her work highlighting the plights of “people already left behind [who] suffer the most” during the pandemic, looking at the impact on the homeless and on outsourced cleaners working for government departments, while Kate Clark, who reported from Chile during the Allende years and on General Pinochet’s 1973 coup and later became our Moscow correspondent, spoke on her experiences and on the paper’s history of internationalism.

Editor Ben Chacko noted that the Establishment media war against the left had not abated since Labour’s defeat last December but was intensifying, making the need for “our movement’s answer” to ruling-class propaganda more important than ever.

And the meeting was honoured by a special guest appearance by anti-apartheid veterans Ken Keable, Sean Hosey, Pete Smith, Catherine Dolphin, Steve Marsling, Rob Newland and Will Gee.

Mr Keable described how the London Recruits, recruited to work in South Africa because their white skin meant they were less likely to fall under suspicion, tested leaflet bombs on Hampstead Heath and in Richmond Park before deploying them to “spread a message of hope” in South Africa itself. He called on Morning Star readers to watch the forthcoming London Recruits film, due to be released next year. A trailer can be seen at https://mstar.link/recruits

The full Morning Star meeting can be viewed online at https://mstar.link/morningstar90