COMRADES, it went right down to the wire. But we did it!

On the morning of the very last day of the appeal, our running total stood at £89,646.

The night before, I had a dream.

I was walking past Camden Town Tube station where, as a teenager, I used to sell the Morning Star on Saturday mornings.

Next to a huge hologram of Karl Marx stood a solitary gentleman in a top hat and tails with a bundle of electronic paper flopped over his arms.

“Daily Telegraph!” he shouted in cut-glass English, “Britain’s only capitalist daily!”

The Morning Star is unique because we don’t just campaign against the injustice and exploitation that is all around us. 

We work consciously and strategically to unite the working class and its allies and replace the capitalist system with a system that works for all of us.

The strapline on our front-page masthead reads: For Peace and Socialism.

We may not yet have turned our dreams into reality, but every day “this damned paper still comes out” is a shot across the bows of a failed system and, as a reader in Manchester put it, “a beacon of inspiration and hope” for ordinary people. 

But I digress.

As I sat at my desk nervously opening the post and shaking the envelopes for cheques, I was acutely aware that anything over £354 spelled victory.

I need not have worried. As I opened letter after letter (and checked our online account), it soon became apparent that in the final hours of the appeal you had sent me not hundreds, but thousands of pounds!

In total, £10,407 arrived in the last week, most on the final day.

Your support and solidarity exceeded my wildest expectations. Thanks to you, the Morning Star has survived the first phase of the Covid-19 crisis. All our staff have been retained on full pay and we continue to be published six days a week.

But we face an uncertain future with the print industry under threat and established titles shedding jobs or going to the wall.

The best way to support the Morning Star and secure its long-term survival is to become a regular reader, whether print or online, and introduce the paper to your family, friends, and workmates. 

There are too many donors to thank in the space I have left, so I’ll leave the final word to a family from Hammersmith who sent me a lovely homemade card with an inscription that explains why we smashed an appeal target that some thought impossibly ambitious.

“The Morning Star makes us feel we belong. Let’s press on… together.”

Calvin Tucker is Morning Star campaigns manager.