AS A co-op, the Morning Star’s relationship with its readers is unique in the British press — you own us, you elect our management committee and we answer to you each year at our Annual General Meeting.

You could say of any paper that it wouldn’t survive without its readers, though for many advertising revenue is actually a bigger source of income than purchases. But the commitment shown to the Morning Star each month through our Fighting Fund, which raised around £200,000 in 2018, is not something many other titles could boast of.

And one of the greatest pleasures that comes with working with the paper is getting to know the supporters we meet at AGMs, demos or fundraisers — and of course those of you who get in touch with us.

A fighting socialist newspaper whose readers are as likely to be brandishing it at a protest or pressing it on a fellow campaigner as digesting it with their morning toast means we’re never short of remarkable stories from remarkable people.

We’re proud now to offer a belated happy birthday to Charles Hailey, who turned 100 on December 30.

His family got him a bundle of papers from the day of his birth to mark the occasion. Unfortunately the Morning Star, while a venerable 88, hadn’t been born then and as you can see Hailey prefers to read the paper he’s been loyal to since he started reading it just after the second world war.

Captured near Dunkirk as one of the soldiers in the British Expeditionary Force in 1940, Hailey was a prisoner of war in nazi-occupied Poland for almost the whole war. He was released in Czechoslovakia in 1945 after one of the longest marches in history as his captors retreated from the advancing Red Army.

A member of the Communist Party for many years, he was a branch secretary in the Barnes, Sheen area. He was also a member of the Amalgamated Engineering Union and a CND member who took part in the first Aldermaston march.

He raised money for the paper at Christmas bazaars and remembers canvassing for new readers around Barnes, Mortlake and Sheen in south-west London.

He still reads it daily — “because it’s the paper for peace and socialism, and that’s what I believe in” — and is pleased with the change in today’s Labour Party from what it was in the Blair period.

“I’d like to give Jeremy Corbyn a chance to change the current disastrous political situation.”

We know in saying that Hailey speaks for us all. Red salute, comrade.