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Early 1941 Tribune flier
Orwell's most famous contributions to
Tribune
as a columnist include "You and the atom bomb", "Thesporting spirit", "Book v cigarettes", "Decline of the English murder" and "Some thoughts on the commontoad", all of which have appeared in dozens of anthologies.Kimche left
Tribune
to join Reuters in 1945, his place being taken byFrederic Mullally. After the Labour landslideelection victory of 1945, Bevan joinedClement Attlee's government and formally left the paper, leaving Mullally andEvelyn
Andersonas joint editors, with Foot playing Bevan's role of political director. Over the next five years,
Tribune
was critically involved inevery key political event in the life of the Labour government and reached its highest-ever circulation, of some 40,000. Foot persuadedKimche to return as joint editor in 1946 (after Mulally's departure to theSunday Pictorial) and eventually himself became joint editor with Anderson in 1948 after Kimche was fired for disappearing from the office to Istanbul to negotiate the safe passage of two Jewish refugeeships through the Bosporus and Dardanelles.In the first few years of the Attlee administration,
Tribune
became the focus for the Labour left's attempts to persuadeErnest Bevin, theForeign Secretary, to adopt a "third force" democratic socialist foreign policy, with Europe acting independently from the US and theSoviet 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 Aidand the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia,
Tribune
endorsed theNorth Atlantic Treaty Organizationand 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 Americanswho have imposed a blockade on Berlin. It is not the Americans who have used conspiratorial methods to destroy democratic socialistparties 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, whenBob Edwardstook over, but returned after losing his parliamentary seat in Plymouthin 1955. During the early 1950s,
Tribune
became the organ of theBevaniteleft opposition to theLabour Partyleadership, 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: it denounced Stalin on his death in 1953, and, in 1956, opposed the Soviet suppression of theHungarian Revolutionand the British government'sSuezadventure. 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 tocommit Labour to a non-nuclear defence policy, "the official weekly of theCampaign for Nuclear Disarmament" (CND) as the directactionists in the peace movement put it. CND's general secretary, Peggy Duff, had been Tribune general manager. Among journalists on
Tribune
in the 1950s wereRichard Clements,Ian AitkenandMervyn Jones, who related his experience on the paper in his autobiography
Chances
.
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 1960sand 1970s the paper faithfully expressed the ideas of the parliamentary Labour left and allied itself with the new generation of left-wingtrade 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 in1964 – "Tribune takes over from Eton in the cabinet", exclaimed a headline – the paper became rapidly disillusioned. It denounced theWilson government's timidity on nationalisation and devaluation, opposed its moves to join theEuropean Economic Community(EEC)and attacked it for failing to take a principled position against the Vietnam War. It also backed the unions' campaigns against thegovernment's prices-and-incomes policies 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 Heathwon the 1970 general election, opposing his Tory government's trade unionlegislation 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
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 centreof the campaign against the Vietnam War and the post-1968 student revolt, who found the paper's reformism and commitment to Labour tame and old-fashioned. Circulation, around 20,000 in 1960, declined to around 10,000 in 1980.
Supports Tony Benn for an instant
Clements resigned as editor in 1982 to become a political adviser to Foot (by now Labour leader), a role he continued under Foot'ssuccessor as Labour leader,Neil Kinnock. Clements was succeeded in the
Tribune
chair byChris Mullin, who steered the paper into thesupporting of Tony Benn(then just past the peak of his influence on the Labour left) and attempted to turn it into aworkers' co-operative,
much to the consternation of the old Bevanite shareholders, most prominent among themJohn SilkinandDonald Bruce, who dominated
the paper's board. A protracted dispute ensued that at one point seemed likely to close the paper.
Paper of the 'soft left'
Mullin left in 1984, with circulation at around 6,000 (at which level it roughly remained for the next 10 years). He was replaced by hisequally Bennite protegeNigel Williamson(editor 1984-87), who surprised everyone by arguing for a 'realignment of the left' and took thepaper into the 'soft left' camp, supporting Kinnock, a long-time
Tribune
contributor and onetime board member, as Labour leader againstthe Bennites. The next two editors,Phil Kelly(editor 1987-91), andPaul 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
supportedJohn Prescott's challenge toRoy Hattersleyas Labour Deputy 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 Serbianaggression in Croatia and Bosnia. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s,
Tribune
acted as a clearing house for arguments inside theLabour Party, with contributions from all major players.
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