EIGHTY years ago, on August 26 1942, the longest government ban on a newspaper in British history, which had begun on January 21 1941, was lifted.

The suppression of the Daily Worker was ordered by a Labour home secretary — Herbert Morrison — using emergency wartime powers. 

As I wrote 18 months ago when marking the anniversary of the ban beginning, it was an arbitrary act of censorship. 

Wartime restrictions on reporting existed and as rail union leader J Marchbank pointed out, ministers could have prosecuted the Daily Worker if they thought they had a case against it. The suppression by ministerial fiat “smacks of the Gestapo,” he warned.

That comparison to Britain’s wartime enemy is worth remembering. Not that the Morning Star, as the Daily Worker has been known since 1966, faces a government ban. 

Other media outlets have been banned, though. The Russian-owned channel RT was denied its right to broadcast following the invasion of Ukraine, with online platforms like Google and YouTube quickly acting to block access to its shows. 

Ofcom denied the Chinese CGTN broadcaster a licence last year, citing its control by the Chinese state.

These crackdowns on “enemy” broadcasters are accompanied by US and British government drives to combat “misinformation.” 

As Solomon Hughes has explained in our pages, these counter-misinformation campaigns invariably involve promoting our own side’s propaganda — while any criticism of government policy or that of allied governments can be shouted down on grounds of disloyalty. 

Witness the incensed reaction of Britain’s Tory broadsheets, the Times and Telegraph, to a report by the impeccably liberal and anti-Putin Amnesty International documenting Ukrainian violations of the laws of war.

In the name of defending democracy from authoritarian states, our own states are becoming ever more authoritarian. 

This does not just apply to the media of course: the Conservatives have drastically curtailed protest rights, given sweeping powers to a scandal-ridden police force and placed state agents above the law. 

They have legislated to seriously undermine the right to strike and are signalling even more ferocious assaults on basic trade union rights as a summer of industrial militancy frightens the ruling class.

But it does apply to the media, and free speech, and the right to access diverse news sources, need to become much more prominent demands across the left.

That applies whether or not you approve of the sources in question. The official broadcasters of major powers like Russia and China are clearly not “alternative” media in the sense that an independent co-operative newspaper like the Morning Star is: and they will promote narratives in line with the perspectives of the Russian or Chinese governments respectively. 

But suppression has a poisonous effect. As Noam Chomsky, who has unequivocally condemned the Russian attack on Ukraine, puts it: “Censorship has reached such a level beyond anything in my lifetime. You are not permitted to read the Russian position.

“Literally. Americans are not allowed to know what the Russians are saying, except selected things. So, if Putin makes a speech to Russians with all kinds of outlandish claims about Peter the Great and so on, then, you see it on the front pages. If the Russians make an offer for a negotiation, you can’t find it. That’s suppressed.”

This makes it easy to hide inconvenient facts. Our own mass media are past masters at this. The brutal state persecution of Julian Assange, whose threatened 175-year prison sentence in the United States is openly a punishment for having published details of US war crimes. 

Few reports on last year’s fall of Kabul bothered to reference the US-led alliance’s murderous record in Afghanistan during its 20-year occupation, from the innumerable civilian victims of our bombers to the cold-blooded murder of prisoners of war. There is mountainous evidence, even acknowledgement in official government reports. But that’s not the story.

That approach — self-censorship, message discipline or what you will — completely dominates the mainstream media. 

Former BBC journalist Emily Maitlis has clashed this week with her former employer, accurately calling out the role “active agents of the Tory Party” are playing in framing the BBC’s coverage of events. 

But Maitlis herself played an active part in the most co-ordinated propaganda war waged by the British Establishment in living memory, the systematic misrepresentation and slander of Jeremy Corbyn and the movement he led while Labour leader from 2015-20.

She presented the infamous Newsnight episode after the Salisbury poisonings that interviewed guests before a mock-up of Corbyn in Russian headgear next to St Basil’s Cathedral.

We saw, in the wall-to-wall assault on Corbynism, just how little separates supposedly progressive media like the Guardian, officially “impartial” media like the BBC and the openly right-wing papers like the Mail or Telegraph. 

All closed ranks against socialism. All maintain a default loyalty to US imperialism on international questions and routinely regurgitate Washington’s propaganda against “enemy” states. 

In recent decades the rise of social media has been seen as a means of democratising the news. 

It has become clear, though, that concentration of ownership on digital platforms is even narrower than in the press, and the likes of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are happy to act as political censors. 

The war in Ukraine has only accelerated the trend towards silencing opposition in the name of combating “fake news.” 

Liberals, spooked by growing alienation from the status quo but too blinkered to link it to the capitalist system’s increasing inability to meet people’s needs or expectations, have often led the charge in demanding more state and corporate censorship in the belief that phenomena they dislike such as Brexit or Donald Trump must be the result of the gullible masses being manipulated by sinister outsiders. 

The left needs to break with liberals and take a stand on principle against the right of capitalist states and for-profit corporations to decide what we should and shouldn’t be allowed to see.

Britain’s “free” media is a joke, as John Pilger states in his moving tribute to the Morning Star issued for this anniversary.

That matters a lot when workers are mobilising and striking on a scale not seen for many years.

How many reports on inflation or industrial disputes bring in the question of profiteering? Yet again, mainstream media have the facts at their fingertips: Unite published in June its landmark report Corporate Profiteering and the Cost of Living Crisis. Big companies are raking it in.

That doesn’t just apply to the oil and gas extractors posting record profits. Unite Investigates revealed this week that Ofgem’s massive energy price hike is driven too by corporate profiteering.

It’s essential to the success of the current strike wave that people realise we are not being impoverished by unstoppable global trends. We are being impoverished by the rich, who are accumulating wealth at a dizzying rate. This is a direct class struggle, us against them.

The big broadcasters have largely ignored Unite’s research. They continue to give airtime to corporate executives spouting easily disproved claims, like John Lewis chair Sharon White’s that a rise in wages is fuelling inflation when real-terms pay is falling at the fastest rate since records began.

Establishment propaganda is not all-powerful. It won’t wash when it comes up against people’s actual experience: which is why a mass activist campaign succeeded in winning millions of extra votes for Labour in 2017.

Similarly, the attempt to erase the ideas that proved so popular in 2017, such as a return to public ownership of energy, utilities and transport, is failing. Nationalisation is once again a fringe position in Parliament, rejected by the government and opposition, but huge public support nonetheless. 

The crude attempts to attack striking rail workers last month backfired spectacularly, not just because RMT leaders cut through the crap to explain the causes of the dispute, but because pay falling behind prices is something nearly everyone in the country is experiencing too.

But scepticism about what we see and hear isn’t enough — the labour movement needs its own voices.

That’s partly to fight the narrative war over issues like inflation and partly to ensure we are kept informed of the multiple struggles erupting across the country.

But it’s also about making the case for socialism. Ultimately, the cost-of-living crisis is a crisis of capitalist profiteering.

The failure to address climate change is down to the ongoing vice-like grip of fossil fuel giants on our political systems — as well as the subversion of services like transport to be run for profit rather than maximum access and efficiency.

The drive to war is fuelled by the outsized voice of arms companies and, at root, the US-led bloc’s determination not to surrender its current dominance of global trade arrangements that keep most of the world poor, threatened by the rise of developing countries, especially China.

Unions are proving they can win serious raises for their members, but the overall pay picture remains grim and the government is clearly preparing for savage retaliation to protect company profits — because it is a government that serves the capitalist class, and not the people.

Capitalism is the problem, and it’s a global one. 

When the Daily Worker was relegalised in 1942, it set about campaigning to turn Britain’s war against Germany from one between rival empires into a people’s war against fascism, ending colonialism worldwide and ushering in a socialist era.

That is what the second world war became, and in its wake the empires of the victors as well as the vanquished came undone.

While Britain did not become socialist, it did elect its most left-wing government ever, establish the National Health Service and the welfare state.

Today we need a similarly transformative vision as we face a world again in flames. A vision of a peaceful, socialist world that the Morning Star is as committed to today as it was eight decades ago.