Tribune (magazine)

Tribune is a democratic socialist weekly, currently a magazine though in the past more often a newspaper, published in London.

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.

Related Topics:
Nazi-Soviet pact - Boardroom coup - Raymond Postgate - Betrayal of the Left

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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.

Related Topics:
Jon Kimche - Hitler - Churchill

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George Orwell was hired in 1943 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. He coined the term 'cold war' in a nuclear context within two months of atomic bombs first being used over Japan, in an article entitled "You and the Atomic Bomb" http://orwell.ru/library/articles/ABomb/english/e_abomb.html.

Related Topics:
George Orwell - Cold war - Japan

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Kimche left Tribune to join Reuters in 1944, his place being taken by Evelyn Anderson, and after the Labour landslide election victory of 1945, Bevan joined Clement Attlee's government and formally left the paper. 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 returned, persuaded Kimche to return as editor in 1946 and eventually became joint editor with Anderson in 1947 after Kimche was fired for disappearing from the office to negotiate the release of a Jewish refugee ship from Istanbul harbour.

Related Topics:
Evelyn Anderson - 1945 - Clement Attlee

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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 US and the Soviet Union, most coherently advanced in the pamphlet Keep Left (which was published by the rival New Statesman).

Related Topics:
Ernest Bevin - Keep Left - New Statesman

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In 1948, however, after the Soviet rejection of Marshall Aid and the communist takeover of 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."

Related Topics:
Marshall Aid - Czechoslovakia - NATO

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