Reprieve from Martyrdom

For the past year the British working classes have grown increasingly aware that they were getting two negatives where they wanted two affirmatives. Last week they had good reason to exult. To one demand (the other is a second front) the British Home Secretary, Laborite Herbert Morrison, finally said "Yes," permitting the resurrection of the British Communist newspaper, the Daily Worker. The decision was proof that labor could still control its leaders by agitation.

Until 1941 the Daily Worker had been a noisy ragamuffin of British journalism. In a country where newspaper circulations run to millions, only "about 100,000" workers bought it. When war came the Worker followed the Communist Party into guerrilla warfare against His Majesty's Government, and in January 1941 Herbert Morrison's Home Office banned it. Solemn Scotland Yarders moved into the printing offices, solemnly played rummy while the Worker staff got out appeals against the ban. The public, with blitz problems at hand, reacted only dimly.

When the Germans invaded Russia, Britain's Communist Party joined the home front. But the buried Daily Worker could report its change of heart only by clamorous broadsheets. The broadsheets appeared in factory canteens, at churchhall meetings of workers, at Friends-of-Russia rallies. Herbert Morrison appeared not to notice them.

But as a Labor Party leader, the Home Secretary could not fail to note other phenomena. The Communist Party's paying membership jumped from 20,000 in January to 53,000 in June. Londoners, with vehement regularity, jammed Trafalgar Square, 30,000 strong, to approve demands for a second front and revival of the Worker. The Labor Party voted a resolution against the ban. One after another, unions of miners, railwaymen, textile workers, locomotive drivers and journalists cried for the Worker.

By last week the Communist Party's ragamuffin had grown in public sentiment to a full-sized martyr, and Herbert Morrison, whose minority party exists by trade-union support, had no kidney for a test of strength.

Reprieved from martyrdom, the Daily Worker, admittedly controlled and owned by the British section of the Third International, went to work, arranged a public stock issue to pay for replacements of its blitzed presses, planned, as promised, to help Britain win the war. First issue, it announced, would appear at the national trade-union meeting.

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