Editor | Chris McLaughlin |
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Format | newspaper |
Website | www |
Tribune is a democratic socialist fortnightly newspaper, founded in 1937 and published in London. It has always been independent but has usually supported the Labour Party from the left. It appears fortnightly as a newspaper and daily online under Aneurin Bevan's motto, "This is my truth. Tell me yours."
Tribune was founded in early 1937 by two wealthy left-wing Labour Party Members of Parliament (MPs), 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 which involved Cripps's (Labour-affiliated) Socialist League, the Independent Labour Party and the Communist Party of Great Britain (CP).
The paper's first editor was William Mellor. The journalists included Michael Foot and Barbara Betts (later Barbara Castle). 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-ILPer H. N. Brailsford.
Mellor was fired in 1938 for refusing to adopt a new CP policy — which was 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 Communist Party, and 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.