Tribune (magazine)

• 1. Introduction

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  Tribune magazine was founded in early 1937 by two wealthy left-wing Labour MPs, Sir Stafford Cripps and George Strauss, with a specific political mission: to build an anti-fascist united front against appeasement. What they created would outlast the crisis that prompted it by nearly nine decades. The paper that started as a vehicle for a single political campaign would go on to be edited by some of the most consequential figures in British political and literary life, from the architect of the National Health Service to the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four. It would nearly collapse more times than most publications survive once. And it would, after decades of dwindling circulation and a bankruptcy that finally killed it off in early 2018, be purchased by an American socialist magazine and relaunched with more paying subscribers than it had seen in generations. How does a niche political magazine survive nearly ninety years? The answer involves personality clashes, Soviet espionage, a famous literary editor who wrote his columns under the title "As I Please", and a rescue deal sealed for one pound.

• 2. The Unity Campaign

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  Cripps and Strauss launched Tribune to back something called the Unity Campaign, an attempt to pull together the Labour Party and socialist groups further to the left into a single anti-fascist bloc. Those groups included Cripps's own Socialist League, the Independent Labour Party, and the Communist Party of Great Britain. The first editor was William Mellor, and among the paper's early journalists were Michael Foot and Barbara Betts, who later became Barbara Castle. The board included Aneurin Bevan, Ellen Wilkinson, the veteran left-wing journalist H. N. Brailsford, and Harold Laski of the Left Book Club. The alliance held until the Communist Party shifted position, calling for a broader popular front that would include non-socialist parties. Mellor refused to adopt the new line and was fired in 1938. Foot resigned in solidarity. Mellor's replacement was H. J. Hartshorn, who turned out to be a secret member of the Communist Party, and for roughly a year Tribune became, in effect, a mouthpiece for the Left Book Club's uncritical stance toward the Popular Front and the Soviet Union. Victor Gollancz, the Left Book Club's publisher, joined the board of directors during this period, deepening that alignment.

• 3. Bevan's Paper

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  The Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 and the outbreak of the Second World War exposed the contradictions in Tribune's Communist-aligned editorial line. The paper initially echoed the Communist Party's position that the British and French declarations of war were imperialist. After the Soviet invasion of Finland, with Cripps away on a world tour, Bevan and Strauss grew frustrated with Hartshorn's unrelenting Stalinism. Strauss fired Hartshorn in February 1940 and brought in Raymond Postgate as editor. Postgate purged the Soviet fellow travellers, describing those who remained briefly as having "left soon after in dislike of me". Tribune became the voice of the pro-war democratic left. Bevan then ousted Postgate in 1941 after a series of personality clashes, taking the editorial chair himself, with Jon Kimche running the day-to-day operations. Under Bevan's direction, Tribune campaigned vigorously for the opening of a second front against Germany, subjected the Churchill government to sustained criticism, and argued that only a democratic socialist post-war settlement could hold. The paper reached its highest-ever circulation after the Labour landslide of 1945 brought Bevan into Clement Attlee's government. With Bevan formally gone, the paper hit a circulation of around 40,000. Foot persuaded Kimche to return as joint editor in 1946, and then in 1948 Kimche was fired for the extraordinary reason of disappearing from the office to travel to Istanbul and negotiate safe passage for two Jewish refugee ships through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles.

• 4. Orwell at Tribune

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  George Orwell was hired as literary editor in 1943, and what he produced in that role became some of the most celebrated journalism in the English language. He commissioned and wrote reviews, but his enduring legacy was a column, most of it published under the title "As I Please", which became what the source describes as touchstones of the opinion journalist's craft. Orwell left the Tribune staff in early 1945 to become a war correspondent for The Observer, and his friend Tosco Fyvel took over as literary editor. Orwell remained a regular contributor until March 1947. Among his most famous Tribune columns are "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 them have since appeared in dozens of anthologies. Other writers contributing to Tribune in the 1940s included Naomi Mitchison, Stevie Smith, Alex Comfort, Arthur Calder-Marshall, Julian Symons, Elizabeth Taylor, and Phyllis Shand Allfrey, giving the paper a literary range that went well beyond its political core.

• 5. From Bevanism to Soft Left

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  Foot remained editor until 1952, then returned after losing his parliamentary seat in Plymouth in 1955. During the early 1950s, Tribune became the main organ of the Bevanite left, opposing American policy in Korea, resisting West German rearmament, and campaigning against nuclear weapons. Tribune denounced Stalin on his death in 1953 and opposed the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, maintaining a line that was left-wing but not Stalinist. CND's general secretary Peggy Duff had been Tribune's general manager, and the direct actionists in the peace movement called Tribune "the official weekly of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament". After Foot won election in 1960 for Bevan's old Ebbw Vale seat, Richard Clements became editor and held the chair until 1982. Circulation, which stood at around 20,000 in 1960, had by 1980 fallen to around 10,000, though the source notes it was in fact much less. When Chris Mullin took over in 1982, he backed Tony Benn and tried to convert Tribune into a friendly society by inviting readers to buy shares. Long-time Bevanite shareholders including John Silkin and Donald Bruce fought back in a dispute that at one point threatened to shut the paper entirely. Mullin left in 1984 with circulation around 6,000, and his successor Nigel Williamson surprised observers by breaking with Benn and steering Tribune into the soft left camp, backing Neil Kinnock as Labour leader.

• 6. Near-Collapse and Rescue

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  Phil Kelly's tenure as editor saw Tribune come close to going bust entirely, a fate averted by an emergency front-page appeal that exclaimed "Don't let this be the last issue of Tribune". The magazine changed format from newspaper to magazine in April 2001 under Mark Seddon, who had shifted Tribune back toward the left from 1993 onward, opposing Blair's abandonment of Clause IV and the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In 2002, the magazine nearly folded again. Seddon and Labour MP Peter Kilfoyle then organised a rescue package in early 2004 with a consortium of trade unions including Unison, Amicus, Aslef, the Communication Workers Union, Community, and the T&GWU, who became majority shareholders. By September 2008, trade union funding problems put the magazine's future in doubt once more, and on the 9th of October it was announced that Tribune would close on the 31st of October if no buyer could be found. A 51% stake was eventually sold to an unnamed Labour Party activist for one pound, with an undertaking to support the magazine for £40,000 per year and with debts written off. Full ownership passed to Kevin McGrath in March 2009. In the autumn of 2016, the businessman Owen Oyston acquired Tribune's parent company, London Publications Ltd. Oyston filed for bankruptcy and ceased publishing Tribune in January 2018, ending what appeared to be the magazine's run.

• 7. Jacobin and the Relaunch

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  In May 2018, it was announced that Tribune's intellectual property had been sold to Jacobin, the American socialist magazine. Jacobin publisher Bhaskar Sunkara confirmed the purchase in August 2018, stating he intended to relaunch the magazine ahead of the Labour Party Conference in September. At that official relaunch, Tribune was announced as a bimonthly magazine focused on longer-form political analysis and industrial coverage, explicitly positioned differently from UK leftist outlets such as Novara Media and the Morning Star. Tribune had 2,000 subscribers at the relaunch, with a stated aim of reaching 10,000 within a year. In December 2020, the editor announced the magazine had passed 15,000 subscribers. High-profile contributors have included former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, Pablo Iglesias as Deputy Prime Minister of Spain, and former Bolivian President Evo Morales. In January 2020, Tribune was the platform Rebecca Long-Bailey chose to launch her Labour leadership campaign. In February 2021, editor Ronan Burtenshaw announced the magazine was fighting a libel case, stating publicly: "It is not a case that has any substance, we are going to fight it and I think we are going to win it." In 2025, Mohamed Ali Harrath, owner of the Islam Channel, purchased Tribune, bringing the magazine under new ownership once again.