MORNING STAR editor Richard Bagley fired the starting pistol yesterday on one of the most ambitious fundraising drives in the paper’s 84-year history.

The only socialist English-language daily in the world — known affectionately as the Daily Miracle — declared the next four months the “summer of heroes” as it revealed plans for the huge publicity and funding project.

A rolling plan of events from now to September will see a mass campaign for investment from people across Britain to be ploughed into technology, marketing and awareness-raising initiatives to encourage new waves of people to get behind the paper.

Bagley said the goal was to mobilise every reader and supporter, every trade unionist and campaign group with a political stake in the paper, and those people who are readers “but just don’t know it yet” behind a sweeping future vision as the Morning Star heads into its 85th birthday year.

At the heart of the plan will be a push to underline the crucial need for a daily voice online and in print to promote ideas that face a virtual blackout in the rest of the press.

“The mainstream media has oligarchs and sugar daddies — and they are all men, by the way — to fund them,” said Bagley. “The Morning Star only has the ordinary women and men who make up our movement.”

“We know that individual determination and collective spirit are the big resources we have that every other paper can only envy — the everyday Morning Star heroes who together with the hard-working people at William Rust House say to the Establishment each day: ‘We will not die’.”

But he added that it was a constant source of frustration that the Morning Star’s growth — and even its continued survival — is hampered by its inability to convert goodwill into sales and broader support.

“The paper should be being read by everyone who is part of our movement. We need to seek out those people and win them to our future — our goal is to secure the resources we need to grow and take the fight against austerity to the gates of the Establishment.”

Among the goals to be presented in a special edition of the paper tomorrow will be: 

A drive to retool the newsroom with the next generation of computers required to keep the presses rolling

A push to get monthly sponsorship for vital new software that is now sold on a subscription basis

A massive reinvigoration of the paper’s support base aimed at summer fundraising.

Bagley revealed that the results of the drive will be announced by the team of crack cyclists powering from London to Paris in September to raise cash for the Morning Star.

“We have seen the price of underfunding at our sister papers in Europe — fewer pages, less publication days and a relentless struggle for survival,” he said.

“Our responsibility to society, to all those generations who have gone before us and all those to come mean that we cannot travel this path.

“But in this era of never-ending austerity we need people to stand up and be counted to make sure the paper of our movement has the tools it needs to do its job.

“The only answer is investment.”