H. N. Brailsford and the New Leader

During the four years of Henry Noel Brailsford's editorship of the New Leader, this weekly newspaper of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) acquired a singular international reputation. Otto Bauer, the Viennese socialist leader, was not alone in hailing it as 'the best Socialist publication in the world'.1 Kingsley Martin remarked more recently that the New Leader 'had more to do with creating serious Socialists under [Brailsford's] editorship than any other influence of the twenties'.2 It is therefore of interest to ask why, despite his editorial achievement and the growing esteem with which he was commonly regarded, Brailsford was dismissed by the ILP after only four years in the editor's chair. Between 1922 and 1926 the New Leader set a literary standard which no socialist paper in England has been able to match. In contrast to the parochial and provincial journals so common to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century labour movement, it couched its appeal in the broadest terms, refusing to restrict its audience to the factory and the trade union branch. Instead of the usual amalgam of local politics, sentimental fiction, and labour hagiography, it sought to extend the intellectual horizons of its readers by providing a periodical which balanced politics with the arts, the class struggle with cultural enrichment. Its exhaustive analyses of world affairs and economic problems reflected a determination to subordinate entertainment to education

Appeal · Economic history · Entertainment · Newspaper · Political science · Politics · Reputation · Sociology · The arts · Australian History and Society · History · Irish and British Studies · Law · Political and Economic history of UK and US

• A paper not so much for the armchair but for the factory and the street

  Hazel Kent•Labour History Review•2010

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