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Tribune is a democratic socialist weekly, currently a magazine though in the past more often a newspaper, published in London.
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Origins
Tribune was set up in early 1937 by two rich left-wing Labour MPs, Stafford Cripps and George Strauss, to back the Unity Campaign, an attempt to secure an anti-fascist United Front between the Labour Party and socialist parties to its left which involved Cripps's (Labour-affiliated) Socialist League, the Independent Labour Party and the Communist Party of Great Britain.
The paper's first editor was William Mellor, and its journalists included Michael Foot and Barbara Betts (later Barbara Castle). As well as Cripps and Strauss, the board comprised the Labour MPs Aneurin Bevan and Ellen Wilkinson, Harold Laski and Victor Gollancz of the Left Book Club, Harry Pollitt, general secretary of the CPGB, Fenner Brockway of the ILP and the veteran left-wing journalist and former-ILPer H. N. Brailsford.
Mellor was fired in 1938 for refusing to adopt a new CP policy of backing a Popular Front, including non-socialist parties, against fascism and appeasement; Foot resigned in solidarity. Mellor was succeeded by the reliably pro-communist H. J. Hartshorn.
Tribune in the 1940s
In 1939, after the Nazi-Soviet pact and the outbreak of the second world war, Tribune initially adopted the CP's position of denouncing the war as imperialist, but a boardroom coup in March 1940 engineered by Strauss and Bevan saw Hartshorn replaced by Raymond Postgate as editor, and 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 his famous edited volume attacking the communists for backing the Nazi-Soviet pact, Betrayal of the Left.
Bevan ousted Postgate after a series of personality clashes in 1941, assuming the role of editor himself, though the day-to-day running of the paper was done by Jon Kimche. The Bevan-Kimche Tribune is revered as one of the greatest left-wing papers in British history. It campaigned vigorously for the opening of a second front against Hitler's Germany, was consistently critical of the Churchill government's failings and argued that only a democratic socialist post-war settlement in Britain (and Europe as a whole) was viable. Just as important, in 1943 it hired George Orwell as literary editor, and for the next three years he wrote a series of columns, under the title "As I Please", that remain some of the greatest examples of their genre in the English language.
After the Labour landslide election victory of 1945, Bevan joined Clement Attlee's government and Kimche took over as editor jointly with Evelyn Anderson. Over the next five years, the paper 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 returned, eventually becoming joint editor with Anderson from 1947 after Kimche left, and 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 US and the Soviet Union, most coherently advanced in the pamphlet Keep Left (which was published by the rival New Statesman).
In 1948, however, after the Soviet rejection of Marshall Aid and the communist takeover Czechoslovakia, Tribune endorsed NATO and took a strongly anti-communist line. "The major threat to democratic socialism and the major danger of war in Europe arises from Soviet policy and not from American policy," declared the editors in November 1948. "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 CND
Foot remained in the editorial chair until 1952, when Bob Edwards took over, but 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 America over its handling of the Korean war then arguing strongly against West German rearmament and nuclear arms. Tribune remained critical of the Soviet Union, however: almost alone on the British left, it denounced Stalin on his death in 1953 and in 1956 opposed the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution as well as 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.
The 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 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 EEC and attacked it for failing to take a principled position against the Vietnam war. It also backed the unions' campaigns against the prices and incomes policy 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 then played a central part in the "no" campaign in the 1975 referendum on British EEC membership.
But 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 Tribune's reformism and commitment to Labour tame and old-fashioned. Circulation, around 20,000 in 1960, declined to around 10,000 in 1980.
Paper of the 'soft left'
Clements resigned as editor in 1982 to become a political adviser to Foot (by now Labour leader), a role he continued under Foot's successor as Labour leader, Neil Kinnock. Clements was succeded in the Tribune chair by Chris Mullin, who steered the paper into the supporting Tony Benn (then just past the peak of his influence on the Labour left) and attempted to turn it into a workers' co-operative much to the consternation of the old Bevanite shareholders, most prominent among them John Silkin and Donald Bruce, who dominated the paper's board. A protracted dispute ensued that at one point seemed likely to close the paper.
Mullin left in 1984, with circulation at around 6,000, to be replaced by his equally Bennite protege Nigel Williamson (editor 1984-87), who surprised everyone by arguing for a 'realignment of the left' and took the the paper into the 'soft-left' camp, suporting Kinnock, a long-time Tribune contributor and onetime board member, as Labour leader against the Bennites. The next two editors, Phil Kelly (editor 1987-91), and Paul Anderson (editor 1991-93), took much the same line though both clashed with Kinnock, particularly over his decision to abandon Labour's non-nuclear defence policy.
Under Kelly, Tribune supported John Prescott's challenge to Roy Hattersley as Labour leader in 1988 and came close to going bust a fate averted by an emergency appeal launched by a front page exclaiming "Don't let this be the last issue of Tribune". Under Anderson, the paper took a strongly pro-European stance, supported electoral reform and argued for military intervention against Serbian aggression in Croatia and Bosnia. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, Tribune acted as a clearing house for arguments inside the Labour Party, with contributions from all major players. Regular columnists and contributors included Gordon Brown, Jack Straw, David Blunkett, Peter Hain, Robin Cook, Margaret Hodge, Clare Short, Denis MacShane, Bryan Gould, Ken Livingstone, Bill Morris and John Edmonds.
Back to basics
From 1993, Mark Seddon (editor 1993-2004) reverted to a hard-left oppositionist stance to the Labour leadership after Tony Blair became Labour leader in 1994. Seddon, who has been elected several times to the Labour Party national executive committee, resigned as Tribune editor in summer 2004. His successor as editor is Chris McLaughlin.
The Tribune Group
The Tribune Group of Labour MPs was formed as a support group for the newspaper in 1964. During the 1960s and 1970s it was the main forum for the left in the Parliamentary Labour Party, but it split over Tony Benn's bid for the deputy leadership of the party in 1981, with Benn's supporters forming the Socialist Campaign Group. During the 1980s, the Tribune Group was the Labour soft left's political caucus, but its closeness to the leadership of Neil Kinnock and subsequently Gordon Brown and Tony Blair meant that it had lost any real raison d'etre by the early 1990s.
References
- Thomas, Elizabeth (ed). Tribune 21. MacGibbon and Kee. 1958.
- Hill, Douglas (ed). Tribune 40: the first forty years of a socialist newspaper. Quartet. 1977. ISBN 0704331241
