Senior MPS architects of the workers’ welfare rebellion are reviving a strong caucus of the soft left of the party to influence the budget and more, in a move that is unlikely to sustain the already unnerved yet unnerved less than 10.
Former Cabinet minister Louise Louighso and Vicky Foxcroft, a former whip who voted against welfare cuts with the aim of giving an organization to their wing of the Covenant.
Key figures in the group, which hopes it can persuade more than 100 MPs to change caucus, were key players in Lucy Powell’s successful leadership campaign.
They also include former minister Justin Madders, Sarah Owen, the chair of the women and equals Committee and Debbie Agaams, the chair of the work and computer pensions and pensions select Committee. Two other new MPS also have group managers – Yuan Yang and Beccy Cooper.
The leading figures of the group pushed for work to take a bolder and more open progressive approach to take both reform and the resurgent green party.
Powell, described as a “natural ally” of the group, praised the newly elected New York Zohran Mamdani with a warm message on Wednesday morning, that his style of communication is a lesson to the Party.
“His victory shows that the courage and story of economic change in the interest of the majority is not a few, defeating the politics of division and despair,” he Tweet.
Tribune – a group which dates back to the 60s – was re-formed by the Labor MP Clive Efford in 2017 under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, when members included Yvette Cooper and the former Labor leadership challenger Owen Smith. But this has had limited success in the Corbyn era and will effectively moribund under the starmer.
The MP said that Efford was attracted to the grant to revive the new MPs and make it a better organizing force to organize the end of the upcoming budget.
“Clive has done a good job of weighing in the last eight years and there are new intakes that are united in the issues of debating the same issues.
One MP said the group would now go for a more “muscular” approach, saying it was “more firmly rooted in the centre-left, organizing the PLP [the parliamentary Labour party]. They said they expected the Tribune to represent the interests of “a significant minority, if not a majority of the PLP”.
The group is likely to attract far more MPs from the 2024 intake than the traditional Left Party – whose members include those close to Corbyn’s leadership such as John McDonnell and Diane Abbott.
The original Tribune group of Labor MPS was formed as a support group for the Tribe newspaper in 1964, although it is no longer associated with it. But it split with Tony Benn’s bid for the Party’s Deputy Leadership in 1981, when Benn’s researches formed the campaign team.
A separate new group on the left that was launched in the summer will see a more obvious change in leadership – the main Manchester, including MPSEL’s Maskell and Rive Lewis and Clive Lewis.
But many MPS were turned off by the group’s aggressive communication approach and focus on electoral reform and believed the Tribune would have more success within the Party.