04.06.1998

CPB war of attrition

Morning Star AGM this weekend

The protracted factional conflict in the so-called Communist Party of Britain which burst into public view at the start of 1998 reaches a crisis point this weekend. The Hicks-Rosser ‘North Korean’ family dynasty faces antagonistic shareholders at the annual general meeting of the People’s Press Printing Society, the cooperative which owns the Morning Star. After the January CPB executive committee meeting ousted Mike Hicks as general secretary and his wife Mary Rosser as treasurer, the retaliatory sacking of Morning Star editor John Haylett on unsustainable charges sparked a five-week official strike by journalists - the first in the history of the Morning Star or its forerunner the Daily Worker. The action ended in ignominious defeat for the Star management committee and the reinstatement of comrade Haylett.

Hundreds of PPPS shareholders’ signatures were collected by the Committee to Save the Morning Star, with the strikers’ support. A special general meeting was to remove “those management committee members implicated in the original attack on John Haylett” - Joan Bellamy, Terry Herbert, Pat Hicks, Anni Marjoram, George Wake and Francis Wilcox. Rosser herself is not an elected management committee member, but holds appointed positions as secretary and chief executive. The plan for an SGM now appears to have been overtaken by the arrival of the regular AGM, where the removal of disgraced committee members is not on the agenda. However, five seats are vacant, with four retiring committee members - Ann Green, Pat Hicks, John Thompson and George Wake - eligible for re-election.

The five candidates backed by the strikers and the Committee to Save the Morning Star are Ann Green, Ken Thomas, Ken Cameron, Nicola Seyd and Avtar Sadiq. If this slate is victorious, four of the ‘unhealthy elements’ will retain their seats, but will be reduced to a minority. Despite this, they do not appear to be backing down. Rosser’s survival as PPPS chief executive is still a possibility.

This is made all the more plausible by the fact that the only proposed rule change – to increase the maximum individual shareholding in the PPPS from £10,000 to £20,000 – appears in the joint names of Rosser and Haylett.

Laughably, the annual report presented by Rosser on behalf of the management committee carries no mention of the strike. Nor is discussion of the strike, or of the conflicts about to take place in the PPPS AGM, carried in the Star itself. As usual, readers are kept in the dark about what is of most significance for the survival and effectiveness of the paper which they are asked to sustain with work and money.

The strike itself appeared incomprehensible to most readers. Now the factional battle will be continued at the AGM in veiled form. There is no motion from the winning side of the strike - the side which confidently expects to come out on top at the AGM - the CPB executive committee majority around new general secretary Robert Griffiths and Haylett. Consequently we have no declaration of what it is they are for. The unity gathered around the strikers is only unity against the Hicks-Rosser clique, and can only last so long as that clique retains its power.

Karl Dallas has entered the only motion about the strike – a moralising piece which blames both sides equally and points out that many issues remain unresolved. It quite rightly calls for the Star to “attempt to be a forum for the many blossoms which flower in the course of struggle”.

Frustration at being ill informed is expressed in two of the five AGM motions posted up inside the Morning Star building (I was told they could not be sent out, even to shareholders). Renate Simpson wants “shareholders informed of management committee decisions and of news of Morning Star Readers and Supporters Groups by providing a newsletter on payment of individual subscriptions”. Why not use the obvious medium, the Star itself? John Bowden and George Anthony (of the Islip Unity Group) propose that “election voting figures at PPPS AGMs be published in the Morning Star within seven days of the end of voting”. The fact that such a common-sense democratic measure requires AGM time says everything about the gross inadequacy of the Star’s level of openness.

Rosser loyalists and CPB executive committee members Joan Bellamy and Francis Wilcox have submitted a turgid legalistic motion whose real significance is transparently clear. The PPPS “has a responsibility as a trading organisation”, it reads, and management committee members must act in its interests and not those of “any other body” – echoes of former editor Tony Chater calling the CPGB an “outside body”. The next bit should be taken as a warning:

“The directors of a subsidiary society [and who exactly are the directors of the Morning Star Cooperative Society Ltd? - IF] must serve not only the group [ie, the PPPS - IF] interests in the subsidiary board but must actively consider the interests of the subsidiary as a separate entity.”

Ominously, the auditor’s report on the PPPS subsidiary, the Morning Star Cooperative Society - which holds most of the PPPS assets - carries a paragraph headed “Fundamental uncertainty”, which refers to “the disclosure made in the financial statements concerning the possible outcome of the society being unable to continue trading due to the fact that the society’s liabilities exceed current assets by £1,335,336” as at May 6.

In plain English, the directors of the Morning Star Cooperative Society, whoever they are, may be in a position to pull the plug on the PPPS and the Star itself. The war of attrition is not yet over.

Ian Farrell