LONDON, WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 25, 1911. NO.1 To "ONE AND ALL." and Mat intorced ov ine imoact or tne mussian Revolution, and it was decided to com bine a mass solidarity meeting at the Albert Hall on 31 March 1918 with the resumotion or daly publication.
Such a prospect made the capitalists most unhappy, and the Albert Hall management were persuaded to cancel the booking. The meeting only went ahead -with twelve thousand inside and another five thousand outside - when members of the Electrical Trades Union threatened to plunge the whole of sensincton into darkness This incident was just one sign of the capitalists' hostility to any attempt to create a real "free press". The papermakers, for instance, refused to supply the Herald with newsprint, and only had a change of heart when the Transport Workers threatened a strike that woulo put them out of business. And then, of course there was a credictable sovcor of the paper by advertisers.
even so, the papers circulation grev to more than 329,000. But its fortunes were bound to reflect developments inside the workers movement as a whole The betrayals of the TUC and Labour deaders comoinee with ine weakness oi the organised revolutionary movement te • REPORT OF CONFERENCE -oroduce intoleraoe pressures on tne independence of the Herald; and in September 1922 its owner, George Lansbury, was torced to hand the paper over to thi TUC. For another 40 years it continued to appear - but as an organ of collaboration with capitalism, not a weapon of struggle against it.
Tradition Why are the lessons of the early Daily Herald important? One need look no further than the Scottish Daily News for an answer. Here too were workers facing the same problem as hundreds of thousands of their brothers and sisters - the scourge of unemployment - bu with the means at hand to inspire a mass struggle against it. Instead they went tiptoing after the nearest fly-by-night capitalist - and found themselves back in the dole queue six monens later Republica may have been closed down now, but it nas revived d traction whose burning importance is increasingly clear in the face of the anti-communist, anti-union witch-hunts now being conduc ted by the capitalist press.
Martin Meteyard