09.04.1998

Haylett reinstated

Morning Star strike ends - CPB factional struggle continues

After five weeks on strike Morning Star journalists returned to work victorious on the morning of Monday April 6, with sacked editor John Haylett reinstated. The Committee to Save the Morning Star, initiated by the strikers, is continuing its campaign for a special general meeting of shareholders of the Peoples Press Printing Society, the cooperative which owns the Morning Star, to remove “unhealthy elements” from the management committee.

Sixty supporters marched the half mile from the Kingsland Road strike office back to the Ardleigh Road, Hackney, Morning Star building, fronted by a Scottish bagpiper and the National Union of Journalists’ banner, complete with new poles for the occasion. John Haylett thanked everyone for their solidarity, and spoke of “the vital role of the Star in giving guidance to the labour movement”. In the absence of “the usual preparatory work”, he rallied the journalists to use the enthusiasm of victory to “get the paper out tomorrow.” With the bagpipes playing, he was carried into the building on the shoulders of Gary Davis and Stan Keable.

Suspended on January 24 on “trumped up charges” as part of the longstanding factional struggle within the leadership of the so-called Communist Party of Britain, Haylett was formally sacked the day after the official NUJ strike began on February 25. This Murdoch-style decision was taken by Mary Rosser and her pitiful dupe Bob Newland, overplaying their hand as the remaining two members of the disciplinary subcommittee appointed for the case, after Institute of Employment Rights director and management committee member Carolyne Jones resigned in disgust. Newland is not a management committee member, merely a Star employee. Rosser is appointed by the management committee as PPPS chief executive and secretary.

On February 28 the management committee majority around Rosser retreated in disarray, conceding their own incompetence to hear Haylett’s appeal by agreeing to pass the job to an “independent appellate body” of three to be agreed by both sides. At the same time, they delegated responsibility for handling the dispute to their officers - Mary Rosser, chairman George Wake and vicechair Pat Hicks. Subsequently, management’s chosen representative on the appeal tribunal “could not be contacted”. Acas supplied a replacement, a Mr N Cowan, who regularly appears for the employers’ side in such tribunals.

After only a single sitting on April 1, the tribunal unanimously “ruled against the procedure that led to the dismissal and the charges themselves” (The Workers’ Morning Star No5, April 4). Haylett had no case to answer - but since the tribunal decision was not binding, his reinstatement was not guaranteed. Mike Ambrose reported that “tight-lipped management representatives heard the decision in silence and made no immediate moves to end the injustice” (ibid).

The NUJ Morning Star chapel, “unanimously welcomed the decision,” which “raised questions over management’s competence.” They called for “Mary Rosser and her sidekick Bob Newland to resign for having created a situation which had silenced the paper for five weeks and threatened its very existence”. Deputy father of chapel Chris Kasrils urged management to “end its vendetta and allow a return to work under the proper editor” (ibid).

Management’s acceptance of defeat, however, only became evident at the Acas talks on April 2, during which the terms of victory were negotiated. The strike could only be declared over when the return to work terms were endorsed by the NUJ Morning Star chapel on the morning of Friday April 3.

Management agreed to pay the difference between the strike pay and normal wage of each striker, so there was no loss of earnings. The journalists agreed to cease publication of The Workers’ Morning Star, but insisted on their right to campaign. So they are free to pursue, for example, the removal of unwanted management committee members through a special PPPS shareholders meeting - or any other campaigning they wish to take part in. Management also agreed to drop its threat of legal action against the printers of The Workers’ Morning Star.

Before the return to work march, as supporters gathered in Kingsland Road, a gift box together with the following letter to each striker from the CPGB Provisional Central Committee was gracefully received.

Dear comrades,

Congratulations on fighting a successful struggle and achieving the reinstatement of sacked editor John Haylett through militant means - indefinite strike action combined with the mobilisation of readers, supporters and cooperative shareholders through The Workers’ Morning Star.

As an industrial dispute, right was always on your side. The charges against John were spurious. The real reason for his sacking was the faction fight within the CPB leadership.

After at least four years of factional strife on the CPB executive and political committees, with general secretary Mike Hicks in a minority on the political committee but hanging on by the skin of his political teeth on the larger executive committee, this secret struggle came into public view only when Hicks was defeated on the executive committee in January. Your strike, and the mobilisations in support of it, brought the leadership struggle to the rank and file.

This factional struggle, because it impinges on the very existence of “the paper of the left”, “the paper of the broad labour movement”, cannot be the private business of the CPB leadership, nor even of the CPB as a whole. The fact that it festered so long in secret, concealed from the mass of Star readers, supporters and CPB members, not to speak of the rest of the left and the ‘broad labour movement’, is shameful, both for the Star and for the CPB as a whole.

The bureaucratic ‘North Korean’ Hicks-Rosser clique, which treated both ‘party’ and paper as their personal property, has just been ousted from power in the CPB. Nevertheless, the victorious faction around Robert Griffiths, Richard Maybin and John Haylett is equally guilty of keeping the struggle under wraps. With that same method, they will reproduce the same crisis again later.

Revolutionary struggle for self-liberation requires that political differences be thrashed out in print, in public, because revolutionary politics must become the property of the masses in order to be put into practice. That is why we call for the Morning Star to open its columns to every shade of political opinion on the left.

As you are aware, we have argued that this crisis in the CPB and its paper, or the Morning Star and its ‘party’, is generated by the ‘revolutionary’ reformist British road to socialism programme, just as the liquidation of the ‘official’ CPGB was the result of the selfsame programme.

The struggle to reforge the CPGB is synonymous with the struggle for a communist programme, and this must begin with an exhaustive critique of the failed ‘revolutionary’ reformist BRS.

This is the purpose of Jack Conrad’s Which road?, a copy of which we ask each striker to accept in commemoration of the 1998 Morning Star strike.

In solidarity,

Ian Farrell

for the Provisional Central Committee

The Workers’ Morning Star

The fifth and final issue of TWMS, dated April 4, led with the following front page statement: “To the managers of the Morning Star: This is not your paper. It is the strike bulletin of the National Union of Journalists Morning Star chapel. We demand that you stop trying to gag our union during an official dispute and call your lawyers off our printers at once. Your actions, at first disgraceful, have now descended further - to the lowest tactics of gutter management.”

The Star management, Mike Ambrose wrote in his lead article ‘Cleared on all counts’, had “successfully threatened one printer and unsuccessfully tried to stop the present printer from producing TWMS. Despite the threats, the paper has come out, with striking journalists saying that they refuse to be gagged.”

‘Kingsland’s Diary’ - renamed from the usual ‘Ardleigh’s Diary’ in response to management’s accusation of “passing off” TWMS as the Morning Star itself, contained a couple of noteworthy items. “The Campaign for Diversity and Pluralism has been strangely silent about management attempts to gag TWMS by threatening our printers. This could be because the campaign is being organised by Anni Marjoram, a management committee member and a close political ally of Labour MP Ken Livingstone.”

Kingsland’s other point concerns the Kim Jong-ilist New Communist Party’s paper, “which once took a principled stand on major issues” (sic). The New Worker “has been critical of TWMS, with leading members alleging that it has links with Straight Left. That’s a funny excuse for not backing workers in struggle, especially as, for many years, The New Worker ran a Malcolm Airley column, written by the first person to edit Straight Left.”

Kingsland highlights the hypocrisy of The New Worker, but he should think again about its one-time “principled stand”. This is the paper you could once buy in Prague, Kabul or Addis Ababa - or any other state which would buy a few hundred copies of an English language ‘communist’ newspaper willing to act as its mouthpiece. More like principled prostitution ... but then there is the question of the Soviet order for the Morning Star, and how that affected the political line of the Morning Star and the ‘official’ CPGB. As for Straight Left, the fact that its first editor could get a column in the paper of the living dead gives us a clue to its nature. A modest prize awaits the first reader to send me an example of its constructive criticism - indeed, any criticism - of any state it regards as socialist.

Last point on TWMS. No5 carried an advertisement which the Morning Star proper cannot carry because of the management committee ban on our organisation: “CPGB Provisional Central Committee - Weekly Worker - for the politics behind the strike”. Clearly, such an advertisement is not a problem for the journalists. Can we look forward to the lifting of this ban, along with the opening of the columns of ‘the paper of the left’ to all shades of opinion on the left?

Ian Farrell