Tribune (magazine)
Tribune is a democratic socialist political magazine founded in 1937 and published in London, initially as a newspaper, then converting to a magazine in 2001. While it is independent, it has usually supported the Labour Party from the left. Previous editors at the magazine have included Aneurin Bevan, the minister of health who spearheaded the establishment of the National Health Service, former Labour leader Michael Foot, and writer George Orwell, who served as literary editor.
From 2008 it faced serious financial difficulties until it was purchased by Jacobin in late 2018, shifting to a quarterly publication model. Since its relaunch the number of paying subscribers has passed 15,000, with columns from high-profile socialist politicians such as former leader of the Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn, former Second Deputy Prime Minister of Spain Pablo Iglesias and former Bolivian President Evo Morales. In January 2020, it was used as the platform on which Rebecca Long-Bailey chose to launch her Labour leadership campaign.
History
Origins
Tribune was founded in early 1937 by two wealthy left-wing Labour Party Members of Parliament, Sir Stafford Cripps and George Strauss, to back the Unity Campaign, an attempt to secure an anti-fascist and anti-appeasement united front between the Labour Party and socialist parties to the left. The latter included Cripps's Socialist League, the Independent Labour Party and the Communist Party of Great Britain.The paper's first editor was William Mellor. Among its journalists were Michael Foot and Barbara Betts, while the board included the Labour MPs Aneurin Bevan and Ellen Wilkinson, Harold Laski of the Left Book Club, and the veteran left-wing journalist and former ILP member H. N. Brailsford.
Mellor was fired in 1938 for refusing to adopt a new CPGB policy – supported by Cripps – of backing a popular front, including non-socialist parties, against fascism and appeasement; Foot resigned in solidarity. Mellor was succeeded by H. J. Hartshorn, a secret member of the CPGB. Meanwhile, Victor Gollancz, the Left Book Club's publisher, joined the board of directors. For the next year, the paper was little more than an appendage of the Left Book Club, taking an uncritical line on the Popular Front and the Soviet Union.
1940s
With the Nazi-Soviet pact and the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, Tribune initially adopted the CPGB's position of denouncing the British and French declarations of war on Germany as imperialist. After the Soviet invasion of Finland, with Cripps off on a world tour, Strauss and Bevan became increasingly impatient with Hartshorn's unrelenting Stalinism. Strauss fired Hartshorn in February 1940, replacing him as editor with Raymond Postgate. Under Postgate's editorship, the Soviet fellow travellers at Tribune were either dismissed, or in Postgate's words, "left soon after in dislike of me". From then on, the paper became the voice of the pro-war democratic left in the Labour Party, taking a position similar to that adopted by Gollancz in the volume Betrayal of the Left he edited attacking the communists for backing the Nazi-Soviet pact.Image:Tribune flier 1941.jpg|thumb|150px|right|Early 1941 Tribune flier
Bevan ousted Postgate after a series of personality clashes in 1941, assuming the role of editor himself, although the day-to-day running of the paper was done by Jon Kimche. The Tribune campaigned vigorously for the opening of a second front against Adolf Hitler's Germany, was consistently critical of the Winston Churchill government's failings, and argued that only a democratic socialist post-war settlement in Britain and Europe as a whole was viable.
George Orwell was hired in 1943 as literary editor. In this role, as well as commissioning and writing reviews, he wrote a series of columns, most of them under the title "As I Please", that have become touchstones of the opinion journalist's craft. Orwell left the Tribune staff in early 1945 to become a war correspondent for The Observer, to be replaced as literary editor by his friend Tosco Fyvel, but he remained a regular contributor until March 1947.
Orwell's most famous contributions to Tribune as a columnist include "You and the Atom Bomb", "The sporting spirit", "Books v cigarettes", "Decline of the English Murder", and "Some Thoughts on the Common Toad", all of which have since appeared in dozens of anthologies.
Other writers who contributed to Tribune in the 1940s include Naomi Mitchison, Stevie Smith, Alex Comfort, Arthur Calder-Marshall, Julian Symons, Elizabeth Taylor, Rhys Davies, Daniel George, Inez Holden, and Phyllis Shand Allfrey.
Kimche left Tribune to join Reuters in 1945, his place being taken by Frederic Mullally. After the Labour landslide election victory of 1945, Bevan joined Clement Attlee's government and formally left the paper, leaving Mullally and Evelyn Anderson as joint editors, with Foot playing Bevan's role of political director. Over the next five years, Tribune was critically involved in every key political event in the life of the Labour government and reached its highest-ever circulation, of some 40,000. Foot persuaded Kimche to return as joint editor in 1946 and in 1948 himself became joint editor with Anderson, after Kimche was fired for disappearing from the office to travel to Istanbul to negotiate the safe passage of two Jewish refugee ships through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles.
In the first few years of the Attlee administration, Tribune became the focus for the Labour left's attempts to persuade Ernest Bevin, the Foreign Secretary, to adopt a "third force" democratic socialist foreign policy, with Europe acting independently from the United States and the Soviet Union, most coherently advanced in the pamphlet Keep Left.
Following the Soviet rejection of Marshall Aid and the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948, Tribune endorsed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and took a strongly anti-communist line, with its editor declaring in November 1948: "The major threat to democratic socialism and the major danger of war in Europe arises from Soviet policy and not from American policy. It is not the Americans who have imposed a blockade on Berlin. It is not the Americans who have used conspiratorial methods to destroy democratic socialist parties in one country after another. It is not the Americans who have blocked effective action through one United Nations agency after another".
Bevanism and Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
Foot remained in the editorial chair until 1952 when Bob Edwards took over, but he returned after losing his parliamentary seat in Plymouth in 1955. During the early 1950s, Tribune became the organ of the Bevanite left opposition to the Labour Party leadership, turning against the United States over its handling of the Korean War, then arguing strongly against West German rearmament and nuclear arms. However, Tribune remained critical of the Soviet Union as it denounced Stalin on his death in 1953 and in 1956 opposed the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution and the British government's Suez adventure. The paper and Bevan parted company after his "naked into the conference chamber" speech at the 1957 Labour Party conference. For the next five years, Tribune was at the forefront of the campaign to commit Labour to a non-nuclear defence policy, "the official weekly of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament" as the direct actionists in the peace movement put it. CND's general secretary Peggy Duff had been Tribune general manager. Among journalists on Tribune in the 1950s were Richard Clements, Ian Aitken and Mervyn Jones, who related his experience on the paper in his autobiography Chances.1960s and 1970s
After Foot was re-elected to Parliament in 1960 for Bevan's old seat of Ebbw Vale, Richard Clements became editor. During the 1960s and 1970s the paper faithfully expressed the ideas of the parliamentary Labour left and allied itself with the new generation of left-wing trade union leaders that emerged on the back of a wave of workplace militancy from the early 1960s onwards.As such, it played a massive role in the politics of the time. Although it welcomed the election of Harold Wilson's Labour government in 1964—"Tribune takes over from Eton in the cabinet", exclaimed a headline—the paper became rapidly disillusioned. It denounced the Wilson government's timidity on nationalisation and devaluation, opposed its moves to join the European Communities and attacked it for failing to take a principled position against the Vietnam War. It also backed the unions' campaigns against the government's prices-and-incomes policies and against In Place of Strife, Barbara Castle's 1969 package of trade union law reforms.
The paper continued in the same vein after Edward Heath won the 1970 general election, opposing his Tory government's trade union legislation between 1970 and 1974 and placing itself at the head of opposition to Heath's negotiations for Britain to join the EEC. After Labour regained power in 1974, Tribune played a central part in the "no" campaign in the 1975 referendum on British EEC membership.
However, Tribune in this period did not speak to, let alone represent, the concerns of the younger generation of leftists who were at the centre of the campaign against the Vietnam War and the post-1968 student revolt, who found the paper's reformism and commitment to Labour tame and old-fashioned. Circulation, around 20,000 in 1960, was said by 1980 to be around 10,000, but it was in fact much less.