Tribune – Comment, news and reviews from Britain's democratic left

Tribune’s editorials have been holding our party’s leadership to account since the paper was born in 1937, alongside news pages with stories that would otherwise go unreported by the mainstream press and, of course, a vibrant letters page that gives voice to individual party members and trade unionists. Many of us feared last month that [...]

Since the coalition set about dismantling the welfare state, a strange and unnatural consensus has formed. Frontbench politicians from the left as well as the right, together with a supine media that long ago stopped asking pertinent questions, preferring instead to reiterate David Cameron and George Osborne’s big lie, have convinced a nervous public that [...]

Having a baby should be a time of joy. Yet financial cutbacks and  shortages of midwives are filling mums-to-be with anxiety and alarm. Two weeks ago, a friend of mine gave birth to her first baby, after three days in labour and an emergency caesarean. Thankfully, both mother and baby are alive and well. But [...]

So much for David Cameron’s new entente cordiale with the north of England. Tyke Tory MPs turned out in force to humiliate him on Malice Monday at Westminster when more than half the Government’s back-benchers joined the anti-Europe rebellion. Support for the revolt from his long-time right-wing rival David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) was only [...]

I have strong personal as well as political reasons for being profoundly relieved that this may not be, after all, my last column for Tribune. It was Tribune, under its then editor Robert J Edwards, which gave me my start in journalism almost 60 years ago. I learned my trade from Bob, and from various [...]

Is the British Labour Party the only movement capable of organising a realistic cross-community official opposition in the Stormont Assembly to check the ever-growing advance of the reigning Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Fein-dominated Executive? With liberal politics the order of the day in Northern Ireland, the natural opposition should come from a coalition of [...]