Tribune – Issue 18

“The cause of labour is the hope of the world”
– Walter Crane, 1894

Tribune was established in 1937 as a socialist magazine that would give voice to the popular front campaigns against the rising tide of fascism in Europe. For eighty years it has been at the heart of left-wing politics in Britain, counting giants of the labour movement like Aneurin Bevan and Michael Foot among its former editors.

Over the decades Tribune has campaigned for socialist ideals inside and outside parliament. It championed the cause of the Spanish Republic abroad and the National Health Service at home. Tribunite Jennie Lee wrote in its pages about the need to democratise culture, before going on to found the Open University as a pioneering Minister for the Arts.

Barbara Castle was a columnist for many years, arguing for legal recognition of women’s equality before introducing the Equal Pay Act in 1970. Tribune also contributed to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, offering its pages to Albert Luthuli of the ANC as early as 1961, and to the fight against colonialism, with Jawaharlal Nehru making the case for Indian independence as far back as 1938.

In culture, too, Tribune blazed a trail, with George Orwell spending many years as literary editor, and writers from Upton Sinclair to HG Wells, Doris Lessing, George Bernard Shaw, and Seán O’Casey finding a home in its pages.

Tribune was relaunched as a print magazine and website with the support of Jacobin in 2018, and its new team is committed to reviving this great tradition on the British left. Our mission remains, as Michael Foot wrote on the magazine’s 21st birthday, “to sustain the old cause with the old weapons.”