Reading

Created
Tue, 09/05/2023 - 20:11

We mark the fifth anniversary of Tribune’s relaunch in 2023, a landmark we will celebrate at the annual rally this September. It has been a hard road   — when we inherited the magazine it had no subscriber list, no money, and no functioning website. Today, it is the largest socialist publication in Britain since the […]

Created
Tue, 09/05/2023 - 20:09

In the 1970s, there were more than fifty industrial correspondents reporting the day-to-day news of the trade union movement. The Financial Times alone employed six on its labour desk. The period marked the high-water mark of British trade unionism, with 13 million members. The decline of trade union membership in the wake of Thatcherism and […]

Created
Tue, 09/05/2023 - 20:00

Since their industrial dispute kicked off last year, posties have been on the picket line day after day. But the loss of wages amidst a cost-of-living crisis hasn’t been their only obstacle. Determined to break their union — the Communication Workers Union (CWU) — Royal Mail management has unleashed a months-long crackdown on their workforce. From sacking […]

Created
Tue, 09/05/2023 - 19:59

In 1970, the Conservative government led by Edward Heath launched the most significant attack on trade unions in a generation. The preceding decade had been one of prosperity for British workers, with rising living standards, growing wages, and historically low unemployment. It was also a period of industrial calm, with relatively few strikes. But towards […]

Created
Tue, 09/05/2023 - 19:56

Mass protests engulfed Israel after the new government announced its plans to reform the country’s independent judiciary. Every week since January hundreds of thousands of Israelis have marched through the streets of major cities or participated in acts of civil disobedience — blocking highways, engaging in mass ongoing general strikes — to show their opposition to the […]

Created
Tue, 09/05/2023 - 19:55

Since the 2019 general election, there have been three Conservative Party leaders and prime ministers. While each professed to represent a clean break from their predecessors — whether on the economy, defence, or crime — there has been one alarming consistency in the respective policy prescriptions: the assault on civil liberties. The proposed ‘Anti-Boycott Bill’ embodies precisely […]

Created
Tue, 09/05/2023 - 19:54

Every time there’s a recession, we’re told there might be an upside. An often-cited example is housing, one of the single largest sources of expenditure for any household. It tends to become less expensive — or at least stops getting more expensive — during economic downswings. This has more to do with the way housing is financed […]

Created
Tue, 09/05/2023 - 19:53

Tribune readers might know Kenan Malik best from his weekly Observer column discussing everything from migration to religion and technology. But his background lies far from the pages of the liberal media. Born in India and brought up in Manchester, Malik was intensely involved in the political campaigns of the 1980s. Whether it was fighting […]

Created
Tue, 09/05/2023 - 19:44

‘I know very well who I represent in the cabinet,’ Spain’s left-wing labour minister Yolanda Díaz insisted in February. ‘I take my seat not to represent the powerful but to give voice to the workers of this country… For the first time since the [1930s] Second Republic, the labour ministry is not simply an accessory […]

Created
Tue, 09/05/2023 - 19:43

Since the 1960s, the Australian historian Sheila Fitzpatrick has devoted her career to trying to understand the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics — what it was, how it worked, and what it meant. Her work, based always on close reading of the archives, was at the forefront of an unofficial ‘revisionist’ school of social historians. […]

Created
Tue, 09/05/2023 - 19:42

Last year marked the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution, Christopher Hill’s influential study of the Diggers, Levellers, Ranters and other radicals of the seventeenth century. The World Turned Upside Down, which was adapted for the stage by Keith Dewhurst and performed at the […]