A Tribune for the upper-middle classes

Tribune, long the publication of the Labour left, is launching its summer issue with a talk entitled, ‘What now for the left?’. Featuring Oliver Eagleton, Grace Blakeley, Barnaby Raine and Matt Kennard, the discussion line-up tells us almost everything we need to know before they’ve even opened their mouths. These are not people drawn from the ordinary working-class life that the left once claimed to represent. They are privileged, highly educated, well-connected, culturally confident and, in several cases, come from the protected world of the upper-middle-class left intelligentsia. What possible answer to the question of ‘What now for the left?’ can emerge from such a narrow and resource-rich corner of society? Champagne, caviar and ponies from Daddy, perhaps?

There has always been a bourgeois left in British politics. Tribune itself was founded in 1937 by wealthy Labour MPs Sir Stafford Cripps and George Strauss. And it has long been torn between the views of middle-class socialist intellectuals and the working-class people whose lives form the substance of socialist politics. Old Etonian George Orwell, the great class traitor in the best sense of the phrase, wrote for Tribune. He understood better than most how the English upper-middle class thought about the working class. In The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell was brutal about the comfortable socialist who liked the idea of the working class more than the reality of working-class people. His advice to the working class was that when the bourgeois communist asks the working class what he can do for it, the answer should be to commit suicide.

The bourgeois left always poses a threat to working-class movements. It doesn’t just join them – too often it takes them over. It arrives with an inherited confidence that comes from an expensive education, professional networks and the time to write, organise, speak and be heard. It then places itself at the front of the movement and slowly replaces class politics with single-issue campaigns, personal grievances and a moralistic, scolding vocabulary that makes the working class feel like an embarrassment in its own house. Why would a class built on undeserved privilege want a politics that exposes undeserved privilege? Better to talk endlessly about everything except class. Better to perform radicalism while leaving the social order intact.

This is a long way from the British left I knew and grew up with in Nottinghamshire. My mum was a trade-union representative in a factory. Her fellow workers’ struggle was also her own. And my dad was a striking miner who knew, instinctively, on day one of the 1984-85 miners’ strike, that the Welsh miners, their families and their communities were his people, too. That was class politics. Not a clever panel of the already connected claiming to speak for the left. Not a performance of outrage. It was a lived practice of solidarity.

We watched out for neighbours. We took bags of coal to elderly people on the estate when their bunkers had nothing but dust in them. We left children’s clothes anonymously on doorsteps so hard-up families were not embarrassed. Call it mutual aid, call it working-class solidarity, call it ordinary decency – it happened without fanfare, without a summer magazine issue launch. The left-wing politics of the working class did not come from philosophy seminars. It came from experience. That is the very thing the bourgeois left does not have and cannot fake.

The aims of the working-class left were simple and profound: emancipation from drudgery and poverty. It was concerned with housing, jobs, wages, healthcare, education and the cost of living – the material reality of people’s lives. Working-class politics is steeped in the history of class struggle and class consciousness. EP Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class remains one of the great accounts of how class is made through struggle, organisation and antagonism. If Thompson were looking at Tribune in 2026, perhaps he would be tempted to write a new chapter entitled, ‘The Exclusion of the English Working Class’.

The new ownership of Tribune sharpens the problem rather than resolves it. In June 2025, the magazine was acquired by E Media Group and placed under the newly formed Tribune Media Group. E Media Group operates Muslim-focussed and independent media brands, including the Islam Channel, an English-language television network launched in 2004 that serves Muslim audiences internationally. Critics have described the Islam Channel’s editorial and religious outlook as leaning toward conservative Islam. Some have accused it of giving prominence to a narrow Wahhabi-Salafi perspective, which leaves limited space for Shia, Sufi, Ahmadi, secular or liberal Muslim voices.

The symbolism of E Media Group’s takeover is difficult to ignore: a historic socialist publication rooted in labour-movement arguments about class now sits inside a media group whose best-known outlet is shaped by a very different set of priorities.

That context matters. The Islam Channel has faced regulatory action from Ofcom, including a £40,000 fine in 2023 after broadcasting The Andinia Plan, a documentary Ofcom found guilty of anti-Semitic hate speech. Earlier Ofcom rulings also criticised the channel for breaches relating to political impartiality and harmful or offensive social commentary.

This is not a small footnote when we are talking about a publication like Tribune. The question is not whether Muslims, religious broadcasters or minority media should own publications. Of course they should. The question is what happens when a magazine that once claimed to be part of a democratic socialist and class-based tradition is absorbed into a media environment where class politics appears, once again, to be pushed aside.

So let us not pretend that the Tribune panel is merely naïve, self-centred or trapped in a bubble of London bourgeois mediocrity, although all of that may be true. What it represents is more serious: it is another small victory for a class that has organised the institutions, language and capital of left politics around itself. The working class has been removed physically, culturally and intellectually from the places where left politics is now performed. Class politics has been displaced by single issues and identity grievances. Those most likely to challenge inherited authority are no longer in the room, and those who remain get to present their own class interests as the universal interests of the left.

What now for the left? Start by asking who is missing. Start with the people who clean, care, build, drive, stack, mine, serve and survive. Start with wages, rent, housing, food, work, heat and power. Start outside the launch party. The left will either return to class politics or become a lifestyle brand for the children of the professional managerial classes. That is the choice. And if Tribune really wants to know ‘what now for the left?’, it should begin not by looking at who is on the stage, but at who has been kept out of the room.

Lisa McKenzie is a working-class academic.