There was a time — in the 1970s and into the early 1980s — when there were as many as fifty industrial correspondents in the British media. Whether it was in print or on broadcast, you would struggle to tune in to the news without hearing about workers’ issues. Many of the country’s most prominent […]
Reading
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 […]
On this week’s Movies vs. Capitalism, Rivka and Frank discuss 2005’s subversive action-thriller V for Vendetta.
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 […]
A new account sheds light on the Ford administration's war against Sen. Frank Church and his landmark effort to rein in a lawless intelligence community.
The post How the Murder of a CIA Officer Was Used to Silence the Agency’s Greatest Critic appeared first on The Intercept.
- by Wing Hsieh
- by Elaine Schattner
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 […]
South Africa has gone to the polls in an election in which the vast majority of the nation’s citizens were not able to vote, to return a Government dedicated openly and unashamedly to the principle of racial discrimination. This was how Tribune reported on South Africa’s 1948 election, which saw Daniel Malan’s National Party elected […]
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 […]
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 […]
In the summer of 2020, the world was rocked by the execution of George Floyd by a police officer in the United States. The outpouring of collective grief and rage at the killing of yet another black man at the hands of the state reignited the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, which had begun to […]
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 […]
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 […]
The Tories won’t have to wait till the next general election for their due hammering at the polls. Rishi Sunak, the unelected prime minister rejected even by his own party members, faces his first electoral test in May’s local council elections. Voters will go to the polls across swathes of the Conservatives’ most vulnerable areas — […]
‘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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
Around five years ago, the Culture section of the relaunched Tribune began with an editorial, which included the line: ‘The Tribune Culture section aims to contribute to the development of a countercultural way of thinking and acting.’ That is what we’ve been trying to do in the back pages of this magazine ever since. Because […]
A lot of ink has been spilled in the trenches of nineties revisionism, not least on the Britpop front. Britpop’s status in ‘ninetiesology’ is based on its place alongside Blairism as an example of pop and politics in lockstep, both gaining mainstream approval but losing their residual and potential radicalism in the process. In this […]
Cornelius Cardew’s diary entry for 10 May 1974 read simply, ‘Leave Elm Grove Road. Scratch dissolved.’ Over the course of the previous ten years, he had gone from being Britain’s leading voice in the dissemination of modernist composition and one of its greatest virtuoso pianists to becoming a member of the pioneering free improvisation group […]
When Langston Hughes toured Soviet Central Asia in the early 1930s, he noted parallels between the Jim Crow–era American South and the Tsarist Uzbek ‘South’: both were cotton-producing regions and both were home to racially oppressed populations who laboured unfreely for their white masters. But this similarity, he claimed, lay in the past. The transformations […]
Excess savings created from past federal aid indicate consumption will likely remain high. This suggests inflationary pressures may persist despite the Fed’s tightening.
When ministers and police argue the ability to protest is based on ‘context’ like TV viewing figures at the King's coronation, it ceases to exist, says Josiah Mortimer
Good morning, children!