The Heartlands Tribune

Paul Knaggs writes:

We did not change our name because we changed our politics. We changed it because the name no longer tells the whole truth.

We have chosen this day deliberately. Midsummer is the old turning point, the longest day, the moment the year tips and the light begins its slow return journey toward winter. It is a day for letting go of what has run its course and turning to face what comes next. That is what we are doing.

Labour Heartlands was born in a very particular moment. It came out of the political wreckage after the EU referendum, when millions of working class people across the old industrial towns, mining communities, coastal seats and forgotten regions spoke clearly, only to be treated as fools, racists, dupes or embarrassments by many of the people who claimed to represent them.

That was the gap we stepped into. Labour Heartlands was never created as a house journal for the Labour Party. It was created because the people in the heartlands deserved to be heard in their own voice. Not filtered through Westminster. Not tidied up by think tanks. Not patronised by careerists who only discover the North when there is a by-election to fight.

The name made sense then. It said where we came from. It said whose side we were on. But ten years on, the political ground has shifted.

The Labour Party has not simply lost touch with its old heartlands. It has walked away from them. It has become a party of managers, donors, consultants, lobbyists and professional progressives, more comfortable with corporate boardrooms than working men’s clubs, more interested in policing language than rebuilding towns, more fluent in Davos than Doncaster. 

So keeping “Labour” in the masthead has become misleading. Not because we have abandoned the values that built Labour at its best, but because the party bearing that name has abandoned them.

We still stand for work, wages, industry, public ownership, democracy, civil liberties, peace, national sovereignty and the dignity of the common people. We still stand against the rule of money, the arrogance of Westminster, the hollowing out of our towns and the quiet contempt shown to those who build, care, serve, drive, clean, teach, nurse, fight and graft. That has not changed. What has changed is the banner.

From today, Labour Heartlands becomes The Heartlands Tribune. A tribune was never a courtier. A tribune was not there to flatter power. A tribune was there to speak for the people against power. That is the job, and that is why the name now fits better.

WHY WE ARE EVOLVING

This is not a retreat from our roots. It is a clearer statement of them. 

For ten years we held Labour to account, because Labour was where the betrayal of the working class was most visible and most personal. But the rot was never confined to one party. The hollowing out of the towns that once made things, the contempt for people too far from London to matter, the slow surrender of sovereignty to markets and machines: this is a settlement both main parties built and neither intends to tear up.

A name tied to one party cannot hold all of that to account. It invites the reader to file us under faction and move on, before a word has been read. To go after every centre of power without flinching, our journalism has to owe nothing to any party’s fortunes, least of all the one whose name we carried.

 “A tribune takes no patron. That was the point of the office. Now it is the point of ours.”

WHAT IS CHANGING

The name, chosen with care rather than grabbed off the shelf. Tribune is no neutral word on the British left. It was the title Aneurin Bevan helped give the paper he founded in 1937, the paper George Orwell served as literary editor. Older still, the tribune of the plebs was the office Rome built for one purpose: to stand between ordinary citizens and a patrician class that would otherwise have run the whole arrangement for itself. The man who held it could not lawfully be touched. That is the lineage we step into, and it describes the job.

With the name comes a new look and a wider editorial structure: dedicated room for regional politics, economic development and working class history, the threads that always ran through our work but rarely had a home of their own. You will see the new masthead first. The website address stays the same, and our social channels will follow shortly, so do not be alarmed to see both names in circulation for a while. We would rather get this right than get it fast.

WHAT IS STAYING THE SAME

The mission: holding power to account for people who are spoken for constantly and spoken to rarely. The commitment to writing about working class communities as adults, not as a problem to be managed or a vote to be harvested. None of that has moved an inch.

We are not becoming a different publication. We are taking our name back from a party that no longer deserves to lend it, and handing it to the people it was always about.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR YOU

More, not less. The same reporting you trust, with a wider field and nothing tying our hands behind it: deeper investigations, a broader range of targets held to the same standard, a platform that argues for the heartlands nationally instead of refighting one party’s quarrels.

We know a name change can feel like a loss, especially to readers in whom the old name struck something real. We will not pretend it on our side. There is sadness in setting it down, and underneath the sadness, if we are honest, something close to relief: relief at no longer carrying a word that has come to mean the opposite of what we built it to mean. We are not asking you to forget where we came from. We are asking you to see that the party broke faith with that name long before we did, and we are done lending it our credibility.

We are the Tribune of the heartlands. We answer to the people.