MAY 7’s election was a disaster for our class. The Conservatives may only have scraped a quarter of the electorate’s votes, but they are now entrenched in power with a parliamentary majority.

The first few hours of Tory power saw the announcement of plans to cap access-to-work funding that helps deaf and blind people secure jobs.

Since then the blows have come thick and fast.

Britain is to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights and axe the Human Rights Act.

Arbitrary turnout thresholds are to be introduced on industrial action in “essential” industries. Shameless ministers couldn’t care less that if such thresholds were applied to Parliament they wouldn’t be sitting there in the first place.

The government has gone to war with the BBC. Public-sector broadcasting holds no appeal for a party obsessed with private profit.

Those £12 billion in welfare cuts David Cameron was so shy of specifying before May 7 are headed our way. The Conservatives will seek to accelerate the privatisation of the NHS as well as extend privatisation to all remaining areas of the public sector.

The heaviest and most brutal attacks are going to come quickly.

They want to push as much of their agenda through as possible before disagreements over the EU or anything else start to cause problems for No 10.

In Parliament little can be done to stop them.

The real fight will be on the ground. Industrial action, community resistance, strikes, sit-ins, occupations — anything and everything necessary to derail the neoliberal assault, whether that’s by keeping an A&E or a library open, helping a school avoid academisation or scaring a private company away from a public-sector contract.

Trade unions, solidarity organisations, campaign groups and broad alliances such as the People’s Assembly will all need to come together to make this resistance as effective as possible.

And the role of the Morning Star will be crucial.

We all saw how brazenly a mass media owned by a handful of billionaire tax exiles manipulated the last election, using all their clout to demonise Ed Miliband, the Labour Party, the Greens and, south of the border, the SNP.

Any departure from the neoliberal savagery that caused the bankers’ crash in 2008 and has — thanks to the Tories — continued to enrich the richest since then, prompted howls of outrage from Britain’s “free” press.

So powerful was the pro-Tory consensus that even papers sometimes critical of the Conservatives, such as the “Independent” — an odd name for a title owned by a Russian billionaire — swung behind Cameron when it mattered.

Media backing does not ultimately determine election outcomes, however much Rupert Murdoch and Lord Rothermere flatter themselves that it does. But the media does matter.

Resistance under the Con-Dem coalition was continuous. There were the huge marches against student fees, the founding of the People’s Assembly, the teaching unions’ routing of Michael Gove, the People’s March for the NHS, the Focus E15 mums’ occupations and more.

But where could you read about all this? Only in the Star. Even liberal titles like the Guardian have a horror of direct action and a distaste for covering trade union initiatives.

In the eyes of most of the press, it’s not “proper” politics unless it takes place in Westminster. The Guardian backed Labour this month, and it might back Labour in 2020, but you can bet it will not help campaign against this government in the meantime.

If we play the parliamentary game and wait five years, the Tories will have created a “new normal” — a Britain poorer, weaker, more divided and more unequal.

The liberal press will play its part in this. Shortly before the election, the Independent’s editor reflected on how Blairite reforms — academies and free schools — were accelerated by the coalition government.

“Nobody is seriously proposing we reverse them,” he opined.

Well, nobody except almost the entire teaching profession and a growing alliance of parents and community activists.

Later in his letter we learn that while tuition fees were initially unpopular they now enjoy “widespread support.” Among MPs, certainly.

The Morning Star is different because it is owned by its readers. Anyone who buys a share — current price £1 — can come along to our annual general meetings, take part in discussions around the way forward for our paper and vote for the management committee.

We are also the paper of the labour movement, telling the stories of working-class struggle the other papers ignore.

Alongside elected members, nine trade unions and one trade union region are represented on that committee — currently Community, the Communication Workers Union, the Fire Brigades Union, GMB, the National Union of Mineworkers, NUM North-East, the Prison Officers Association, transport union RMT, construction workers’ union Ucatt and Unite.

No other newspaper carries anything approaching the range of left voices we do — trade unionists, activists, left-wing politicians from Labour, the Communist Party, the Greens, the SNP, Scottish Socialist Party and more.

As the only English-language socialist daily on the planet, the Morning Star is uniquely placed to play an organising and agitating role for the whole movement.

But our voice isn’t reaching nearly enough people yet. Only a broad, inclusive but militant resistance to this government will stop it crippling our movement — possibly for good — and empower a real progressive alternative.

Our AGMs take place at the end of this month, starting on Thursday May 28 in Birmingham and then proceeding through Glasgow on the Friday, Liverpool on the Saturday, Cardiff on the Sunday and ending up in London on Monday June 1.

In this, our 85th year, why not get involved? It’d be great to see you there.

• Ben Chacko is acting editor of the Morning Star. If you would like to buy a share in the People’s Press Printing Society, which publishes the Morning Star, please visit morningstaronline.co.uk/support.