Support the Socialist with a May Day greeting

Hacked off by the capitalist press?

Support the Socialist with a May Day greeting

Bob Severn

On 22 January, less than two months after the Leveson Report was published, billionaire media magnate Rupert Murdoch welcomed Chancellor George (née Gideon) Osborne and London Mayor Boris Johnson into his Mayfair apartment.

The ‘Murdochgate’ phone hacking affair exposed the power and corruption – including bribery of police officers and others – exercised by top staff at News International titles and other capitalist papers.

Embarrassed by the Tories’ close links to the Murdoch press, the government launched the Leveson Inquiry.

But now the two top Tories have Murdoch back in their dinner party circuit. Is anyone really that surprised?

These old Etonians and Murdoch share the same aims – of increasing the profits of big business, of making the working and middle classes pay for the banksters’ crisis, and attacking any workers who fight back against that agenda.

The right-wing press complain of ‘union barons’ when it is their owners that are the real barons that support the attacks on our living standards through the destruction of public services, cuts in jobs and wages and the ripping up of workers’ terms and conditions.

That’s why we need a paper that fights for the majority. Our ‘reporters’ are working class people actively involved in the struggles they report, from workplaces, communities, universities, schools and colleges.

We report the victories that show that if you fight back you can win – from construction workers’ disputes in Britain, to Lonmin miners in South Africa.

And the Socialist doesn’t just report workers’ strikes and the anti-cuts movement, but puts forward a strategy to defeat the cuts and to fight for a socialist alternative.

Back the alternative

We appeal to all readers to help back the Socialist with a May Day greeting this year. Unlike the pro-capitalist press, the Socialist is not backed by big business money, but relies on funding from its readers and supporters.

May Day greetings mark International Workers Day, 1 May, the day when the first US-wide general strike took place in 1886, in demand of a maximum eight-hour working day.

Can you send in a May Day greeting from, for example, your trade union branch, shop-stewards group, anti-cuts campaign, Youth Fight for Jobs group, Socialist Students society, or Socialist Party branch?

Email [email protected] or phone 020 8988 8781 for more information or to give your greeting.
You can also give your greeting online at www.socialistparty.org.uk/mayday. The deadline for greeting messages is 10 April – pay by this date for a 25% discount.

Greeting prices include: £500 for a whole page (£375 before 10 April); £300 for a half-page (£225); £170 quarter-page (£127.50); £90 one-eighth (£67.50); £50 one-sixteenth (£37.50); £30 1/32 (£22.50); £20 small box (£15).