Jim Denham
When Roger McKenzie, the (then) assistant general secretary of Unison, failed in his bid to become general secretary in 2020, he fairly promptly got a job at Liberation (formerly the Movement for Colonial Freedom), resigned from the Labour Party and joined the Communist Party of Britain.
Pretty soon Roger was writing regularly in the CPB-controlled Morning Star. When the paper’s international editor, Steve Sweeney, left in mid-2022 so that he could more openly support the invasion of Ukraine and peddle Putin’s propaganda at RT (formerly Russia Today), Roger replaced him.
Roger has not promoted the kind of blatant conspiracy theories that his predecessor specialised in (e.g. false claims about the White Helmets in Syria and American “biolabs” in Ukraine), but he hasn’t changed much about the paper’s international coverage, which remains resolutely “campist”. In certain respects it has actually become worse: for instance Ortega’s brutal and reactionary regime in Nicaragua which had become too embarrassing even for Sweeney, is once again regularly glorified in the pages of the MS.
Roger’s third-worldism and enthusiasm for “multipolarity” (i.e. multiple imperialisms) has led him to enthuse over military coups in Africa’s Sahel region, welcome the failure of leaders of the “Global South” to condemn of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine at the UN, and to call for the recreation of the “Non-Aligned Movement”, originally set up in the 1950s by various Third-World heads of state (and Tito’s Yugoslavia) but by the 1970s increasingly dominated by Cuba.
Roger’s increasingly bizarre geo-political outlook reached something of an apogee with an article (19 September: “From the IMF to Brics”) arguing for “a level of military co-operation between the alliance of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – the core group and the newer Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates and, if they finally decide they are in Brics, Saudi Arabia.”
Roger is not entirely uncritical of the Brics leaders: while he has no criticisms of Putin, Modi or Xi Jinping, he does condemn Brazilian president Lula da Silva for remarks that “interfered with the sovereignty of Venezuela by arguing that there should be a fresh presidential election [which] led some critics to suggest that he had succumbed to US threats to remove him from power.”
All of this fits in very nicely with the world view promoted in the pages of the paper by Vijay Prashad, founder of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research and chief correspondent at the media outlets Globetrotter and Peoples Dispatch, all of which are funded by Neville Roy Singham, a US billionaire tech magnate now based in Shanghai who controls a network of “campaigning” groups, “news” organisations and supposed “charities” dedicated to spreading Chinese government (i.e. Chinese Communist Party) propaganda and denying reports of Chinese human rights abuses. All Singham’s vast network of organisations (the best known of which, the pro-Iranian regime supposed “peace” group Code Pink, is run by his wife, Jodie Evans) portray the US as the root cause of virtually all exploitation and oppression in the world, China as uniquely benevolent and Russia as blameless for its invasion of Ukraine.
Since Roger took over as international editor Globetrotter and Peoples Dispatch articles have been frequently republished in the paper, and he refers to Prashad as “my comrade.” Roger himself has been writing for Globetrotter since 2022 and has jointly authored with Prashad at least one article (published by Globetrotter, Peoples Dispatch and the Morning Star in April 2022), “Now Is the Time for Nonalignment and Peace.”
Just as we don’t know the details of the relationship between Singham and the Chinese government, so we don’t know the exact relationship between his various media outlets and the CPB. What is certain, however, is that their paper is now a de facto, if unpaid, part of Singham’s network.
Singham and his people invariably respond to criticism with charges of “McCarthyism” and “red baiting” – charges that are simply bizarre when the criticism frequently comes from the genuine left and is aimed at a billionaire capitalist who defends some of the most authoritarian and reactionary regimes in the world.