26.08.1999

Politics and money

No3 Ardleigh Road, N1, the Morning Star building - which also houses the offices of the CPB - is up for sale, if you are interested. A genuine bargain too, by all accounts, although you’ll have to be sharp as it is already under offer after being available for just four weeks.

According to the estate agents handling the deal, Copping Joyce, the asking price is just £650,000. This compares very favourably with its balance sheet valuation at December 31 1998 of £992,000, especially given the current buoyant state of the London property market. This underlines that the sale is being forced on the Peoples Press Printing Society - the cooperative that owns the Morning Star - by a major creditor who is demanding money. This creditor was in the position to put the PPPS into liquidation, so something pretty drastic had to be done.

This is a challenge for the new secretary of the PPPS, Richard Maybin, chairperson of the CPB. Clearly, Maybin’s appointment was part of the ongoing factional crisis, a crisis that saw the editor suspended, a five-week strike by Star journalists last year, the reinstatement of the editor and disciplinary action against the losing side. Undaunted, the CPB still assures itself that there were “no political differences”, that it was purely a “trade union dispute”.

Whether this will be the end of the Star, only time will tell. The PPPS management committee is faced with the cost of finding new premises and moving. The problems of the Star are obviously dire. Instructively, one comrade has commented ironically “perhaps Bill Morris will rally round”.

This comment has a history to it. During the 1980s, during the vicious faction fight between the Eurocommunists and the PPPS management committee, the financial fortunes of the Star continued to decline. Then, on the eve of the 38th Congress on October 29 1983, Mary Rosser - the functionary who was then PPPS secretary - was given a full page to announce a “survival plan”. She informed readers that a new printing press was needed, a piece of equipment valued at £800,000 to £1 million. Incredibly, for that amount of money we were getting a “miracle”, she told us. It was a Goss machine, and “these have an important advantage. They do not depreciate in value”.

Machinery that could not depreciate in value - a “miracle” indeed. Not only would such a machine defy the iron laws of the capitalist economy: it would thumb its nose at the physical laws of the universe.

Rosser’s imbecility and the fact that the Goss machine and the old Morning Star building in Farringdon Road was sold at a knock-down price to porn merchant David Sullivan is not the important point to note here. The Star was to be saved by “printing our way out of trouble”. In other words, a fundamentally technical solution to what was essentially a political problem.