EVEN before the furlough scheme comes to an end, a jobs massacre is gathering pace across Britain.

In manufacturing, retail, transport, utilities — point to a sector and we can point to a household name, from Rolls Royce to Boots to British Airways to British Gas, that is axing jobs, firing workers and rehiring them on worse conditions or both.

The media is no exception. In the last few weeks, job losses and pay cuts have been announced at Reach, which owns the Mirror and Express (and prints the Morning Star). The Guardian is cutting 180 jobs. 

The BBC has announced cuts, which are expected to especially affect political reporting. News UK, which owns The Sun and The Times, has warned staff to expect impending job losses: its chief executive Rebekah Brooks regrets having to say “goodbye to some valued and talented colleagues,” whom she’ll no doubt miss as much as she did the entire staff at the News of the World when that title closed down amid a phone-hacking scandal dating to her own time as editor — not something, evidently, that has had much of an impact on her own career.

Some on the left will be tempted to shrug and say “so what?” The mainstream media’s treatment of the Labour Party over most of the last five years has left many socialists feeling extremely bitter. Every outlet named above, with the partial exception of the Mirror, and more besides took part in a concerted and often downright dishonest campaign to sabotage Jeremy Corbyn’s chances of entering Downing Street. This week’s decision by Keir Starmer to settle with former employees who contributed to the disgracefully partisan BBC Panorama documentary Is Labour Anti-semitic? will have intensified that feeling.

It’s true that there are enormous problems with the British media. Many derive from the private ownership of indecently wealthy tycoons; but even platforms which are not owned by individual billionaires act as mouthpieces for Establishment opinion, steered by corporate media culture, direct commercial interest and in the case of the BBC its role as the official broadcaster of the capitalist British state (the contradictions at the heart of the corporation are well explored in Jonathan White’s article What Should Socialists Make of the BBC?). 

Yet more job losses in the media is unquestionably bad news. It’s bad for the media workers concerned: we might loathe certain high-profile “commentators” who draw generous salaries for badmouthing immigrants, bashing trade unions or cheering on imperialist wars, but those on the sharp end of recent job cuts will overwhelmingly be ordinary workers who are not responsible for and in many cases will disagree with an editorial policy decided elsewhere. 

It’s bad news for the industry, which in many ways is interdependent. Falling newspaper sales drive the costs of printing and distribution up generally. 

During lockdown there was a period when the Racing Post was mothballed, as there were no races to cover: that might seem a matter of minor importance to the Morning Star, but the title shared a van with us up to Scotland’s Cardonald distribution hub each night. The Racing Post is now back in action, but in the meantime our circulation manager had to scramble to make an arrangement which entailed our paying extra to ensure we continued to get to Scotland every morning. (A shout out here to the valiant offers we received from comrades in Scotland to arrange for someone to drive down to Oldham and collect papers – the logistics were daunting and it was a relief it didn’t come to that, but it was a demonstration of commitment to the paper that I doubt any other title in Britain would have received).

It’s bad news for local democracy, as the collapse of local papers and journalism accelerates, entrenching corporate capture of what “news” does reach the page and undermining our ability to hold employers and politicians to account at neighbourhood, town and county level.

The same negative trend is likely to follow cuts to political journalism at the BBC: however unhappy we are with its political coverage, this will make it still easier for ministers to evade scrutiny and strengthen the tendency to treat government statements or unsubstantiated allegations from high-up “sources” close to Whitehall, “Western intelligence” or No 10 as factual, when they are, as journalist John Pilger noted this week, more akin to propaganda.

And the whole sorry state of affairs is now accompanied — by the leader of the opposition — with demands for state action against “alternative” media. In this case the outlet is RT, on the grounds that it is owned by the Russian state.

He has even called on Scotland’s first minister to denounce her predecessor for having a show on it. (While he’s in guilt-by-association mood, I’d like to clarify that I’m always delighted when the BBC invites me or a colleague to appear on one of its shows but would not like this to be seen as any endorsement of the platform, let alone the aggressive imperialist state behind it).

The attack on RT is based on the notion that the Russian state, through a broadcaster it owns, is interfering in British politics. But how? The insinuation is that it influences people’s voting behaviour by giving airtime to dubious causes or opinions. In particular, Starmer seems keen to discredit the EU referendum on these grounds. 

Voting behaviour is no doubt influenced by propaganda, though RT seems an odd target given the many more prominent media platforms that pushed for both Remain and Leave in 2016, and the vastly greater evidence of US interference in our politics (Starmer might remember Secretary of State Mike Pompeo promising to “do our level best” to stop his predecessor Corbyn being elected). 

But if the answer is more state censorship over what are and are not legitimate opinions or causes, Britain’s already sorry excuse for a “free media” will become that much less free, and other platforms that present an alternative view to the Establishment’s will be targeted sooner or later.

That might seem a very long preamble to a piece I was asked to write on the Morning Star’s Covid-19 appeal — but the troubled state of the media in general is, I think, an additional reason to view the survival of Britain’s only daily paper that is socialist and co-operatively owned as vital.

Unlike other titles we have not cut jobs, though we froze some vacancies including the key role of industrial reporter when lockdown began and we saw print sales and advertising revenues plummet.

Producing a daily paper is a struggle and our staff is small anyway – we know we cannot cut jobs without directly affecting quality, and we’re determined to avoid it. Over recent years we have, for one reason or another, been forced to live with numerous vacancies — we don’t currently have a production editor or political editor, and for nearly a year we even lacked a chief subeditor despite repeated efforts to recruit one. Short-staffing put us in a number of hairy situations and led to more than a few mistakes.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be adapting and one success story of lockdown has been a very significant increase in sales of our online edition. As that brings in more revenue the case for deploying more resources to our online presence, which lags behind many of our rivals, is getting stronger.

But all these decisions are being made against a backdrop of tight budgets and the upward trend in online sales has not yet filled the hole left by lower paper and advertising sales as a result of lockdown.

The Morning Star has only survived thanks to your generosity and the amazing contributions you’ve been making to ensure we hit our Fighting Fund target and towards our Covid appeal, which our campaigns manager Calvin Tucker regularly updates you on.

I’d encourage everyone who can to donate to the appeal. The future of the daily paper of the left depends on it – and Britain’s media is skewed enough against the left as it is.

Please make cheques payable to: The People’s Press Printing Society and post to: The Morning Star appeal, William Rust House, 52 Beachy Road, London, E3 2NS.

Bank transfer to Payee: The People’s Press Printing Society Account, Bank: The Co-operative Bank PLC Bank Branch: Islington Sort Code: 089033 Account Number: 50505115, Reference: Appeal.

Or to donate online please visit morningstaronline.co.uk/page/your-paper-needs-you.