Our new issue, #NHS75, is out this month! Celebrating 75 years of the National Health Service, those who work in it, and our own Nye Bevan’s role bringing it into being 🩺 Articles from Michael Rosen, Michael Marmot, @grace.blakeley, @taj.ali1, @keepournhspublic, @helenoconnornhs & more! For a limited time, get or gift a Tribune digital subscription for just £1! Link in bio 🏥

Join us ✨ TONIGHT ✨ at 7pm for a rally to mark 75 years of the NHS Link in bio! #NHS75

'Illness is neither an indulgence for which people have to pay, nor an offence for which they should be penalised, but a misfortune the cost of which should be shared by the community.' – Nye Bevan On this day in 1948, the NHS was born. In the years leading up to the creation of the National Health Service, its founder Aneurin Bevan edited this magazine. He used its pages to advocate for a healthcare revolution. 'The formation of the National Health Service (NHS), instituted by the post-war Labour government seventy-five years ago today, was characterised at the time by Tribune as a providential moment. "The Great Experiment" to which the publication’s 2 July 1948 headline referred, represented, for it, the culmination of a long socialist struggle for universal public healthcare, free at the point of use, as a social right. 'Aneurin Bevan MP, the socialist minister of health and principal architect of the NHS, had been closely involved with Tribune since the beginning, helping found the publication in 1937 and steering it through the war years as co-editor. Throughout his tenure, Tribune’s pages constituted an important intellectual seedbed for the radical vision of social reform that would enter government in 1945 — when Bevan departed for the Ministry of Health carrying the blueprints of the NHS with him. 'For the majority of people in Britain at the time of Tribune’s founding, access to decent, reliable healthcare was limited, if not wholly out of reach. With no integrated national health system, working people were forced to rely upon a regionally disparate archipelago of fee-charging doctors’ practices, municipal hospitals, and cash-strapped voluntary hospitals. In working-class areas, where preventable diseases claimed thousands of lives annually, families were subject to the whim of charity, means-testing interrogation from almoners, and the stretched capacity of "friendly societies".' To read the full article, tap the link in the bio.

NHS 75 💙

The French establishment has dismissed the riots as a purely criminal affair, refusing to accept its true cause: widespread anger at murderous policing, racial inequality, social deprivation, and a state in total crisis. To read the full article, tap the link in the bio.

Today, MPs will vote on a government bill to ban boycotts of Israel – authoritarian legislation that uses opposing anti-semitism as cover to attack Palestine solidarity and remove our political freedoms. To read the full article, tap the link in bio. (Getty Images)

Jeremy Corbyn: LGBT Rights Are Refugee Rights – Let’s Stand Up for Both 'Last month, Parliament held two debates in quick succession. The first was on Pride Month. For most MPs, it was a chance to celebrate the LGBT community, commemorate their struggle for equality, and expose the challenges that LGBT people continue to face. For the government, it was a chance to expose its shameless hypocrisy. '"Now, more than ever", the Minister for Equalities proclaimed, "we must continue to support human rights activists working to ensure that LGBT people are able to live free from violence and discrimination." Those of us who were sceptical of their sincerity would not have to wait very long for the government to prove us right. 'Fifteen minutes later, a different government minister shuffled into the chamber to take questions in the next debate. No sooner had the government proclaimed its support for LGBT people who suffer violence and discrimination, it was defending a policy that wilfully abandons them: the Illegal Migration Bill. 'LGBT people face persecution around the world. Uganda was one of the most recent countries to pass legislation making it illegal to identify as LGBT, joining sixty-eight other nations that criminalise homosexuality. In thirteen countries, transgender people live under specific legislation that targets their existence, but their de-facto criminalisation under broader LGBT laws is far more widespread. 'LGBT people flee persecution in the hope that they may find sanctuary in a new home, find time to recover from their trauma, and find a place where they are accepted for who they are. However, for those who are desperate enough to cross the English Channel, that hope is extinguished by the government’s Illegal Migration Bill.' To read the full article, tap the link in the bio. (Ian Forsyth/Getty Images)

Sunak vs Starmer Is a Return to the Broken Status Quo The political demise of Johnson, Corbyn and Sturgeon represents the restoration of the British establishment after years of populist challenge – but the crises that created them are as urgent as ever. 'The eclipse of Boris Johnson and Nicola Sturgeon, following Jeremy Corbyn, represents a successful restoration for the British establishment after years of populist challenge. This observation has, in the hands of the British press, quickly acquired the force of banality. 'The Economist welcomes a ‘great moderation’. Andrew Marr is even more emphatic: ‘Parliamentary democracy is redeeming itself’. At the same time as ‘a rule-breaking populism has been expelled’ from Westminster, Holyrood ‘is being purged by law’. This muscular re-assertion of British liberal democracy is ‘the system… pushing back’. 'This establishment narrative of recent events contains two interlocking conceits, repeated over and again in the press and official politics. Threats to democracy come from the populist extremes of left and right, and the answer to them is a self-righting system of parliamentary government, which is in the process of regeneration. 'In response, socialists must assert the reality: the democratic system, such as it was, rotted from its core. Because the governing liberal centre is the source of this corruption, it cannot end the malaise. Any stabilisation of British politics is bound to unwind. To understand why turmoil has become endemic, it helps to examine developments in the British party system.' To read the full article, tap the link in the bio. (Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images)

The Boycott Ban Is a Threat to Democracy The government’s anti-boycott bill is an attack on our political freedoms – and while it currently targets solidarity with Palestine, its ramifications apply to every social justice campaign. '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 ‘Anti-Boycott Bill’ introduced to parliament yesterday embodies precisely that. It aims to ban public bodies from partaking in boycotts or divesting from companies or countries that are committing human rights abuses. 'Despite global events — from the Covid-19 outbreak to the Russian invasion of Ukraine — disrupting the legislative timetable and delaying its introduction, the Conservative commitment to the policy remains firm. 'Peter Leary, campaigns director at the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), says the bill amounts to a violation of fundamental civil rights: "It will severely limit the ability of local authorities, universities, and public sector pension funds to make financial decisions that reflect voters' and members’ concerns over illegal and unethical practices, including those that support the rights of Palestinians."' To read the full article, tap the link in bio. (Chris J Ratcliffe/Getty Images)

Labour’s Love Affair with Private Healthcare From the embrace of private hospitals to shady donations from private health interests, there is little to suggest that today’s Labour leadership intends to defend Aneurin Bevan’s vision of a truly public NHS. To read the article, tap the link in bio. (Leon Neal/Getty Images)

Britain’s Socialist Cinema Master For over six decades, Ken Loach – who turns 87 today – has made powerful, committed work that unmasks exploitation and highlights ordinary peoples’ struggles against injustice. ‘What else is there to be said about Ken Loach? Plenty, it turns out. As British Cinema’s go-to socialist turns 87, having recently announced that his latest film, The Old Oak, is likely to be his last, Loach’s filmography is a gift that continues to give. Six decades deep, his has been a career of permutations and variations, a persistent and valiant long-term project defiantly committed to validating certain voices and viewpoints within a system equally dedicated to marginalising if not outright eradicating them. ‘If Loach’s vision takes the form of riffs on a theme, the theme is—indelibly, inescapably—capitalism, and its effects on ordinary people. By virtue of his own longevity, Loach has captured the slow-burn violence of capital (and the revolutionary moments that have ruptured it), its tedious powers of disguise and self-reinvention, its constant and inevitable propulsion towards xenophobia, racism and fascism. Just as global capitalism has compelled the British state to continually outdo itself when it comes to trialling ever-new means of mass immiseration and stretching to increasingly comical lengths to normalise broadscale misery, Loach and his collaborators have personified a certain kind of double-down doggedness, a kind of multi-pronged, rinse-and-repeat mode of survival and confrontation.’ To read more, tap the link in bio. (Carlos Alvarez/Getty Images)

'The life of a single human being is worth a million times more than all the property of the richest man on earth.' Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara was born on this day in 1928. An icon of Cuba's liberation, he committed his life to the cause of the oppressed – and in the process, became one of the twentieth century's most influential figures. (Hulton Archive / Getty Images)