“The title is intended to signify,” began the editorial of the first copy of New Socialist’s original 1980s incarnation, “not a new brand of socialism but a new departure in the mainstream of socialist activity”.¹

The distinction was important. When James Curran, the journal’s first editor, persuaded the Labour NEC to put up a thousand pounds and a subsidised room at headquarters for a bimonthly magazine called New Socialist – rather than the Socialist Quarterly which they had envisaged when they appointed him – he had faced opposition from Dennis Skinner. What was wrong, Skinner asked, with the ‘old socialism’ which he had learned on his grandmother’s knee?²

It was not New Socialist’s socialism, however, which was especially new – at least insofar as socialism is seen as a theory and not a set of practices. What was new was its approach, its attempt “to provide a bridge between public intellectuals, the Labour movement and radical civil society” and “to renew democratic socialism through inputs from Euro-Keynesians, the peace movement, global social justice, industrial democracy, feminists, greens, and the radical local communitarian tradition.”³

Whilst Labour Weekly and Tribune had provided forums for internal party debate, it had been felt that there was a need for a more serious journal of socialist ideas along the lines of Marxism Today but shorn of its formal connection to the Communist Party.⁴ These ambitions were reflected in the journal’s first issue, which included contributions from Stuart Hall, Mary Kaldor, David Blunkett, Dick Hebdige, Noam Chomsky and (in a small piece in the ‘foreign file’ section) Mike Gapes.

The editors promised coverage ranging “from the tribespeople of Afghanistan to skinheads in Hoxton; from the politics of food in the Third World to the political aspects of new technology; from social relations between men and women to the work of union combine committees.”⁵ The issues which followed carried pieces from Raymond Williams (“Ideas and the labour movement”, later republished in Resources of Hope), Gareth Stedman-Jones, Bernard Crick and E.P. Thompson, interviewing Michael Foot on unilateral disarmament. The journalist Richard Gott even contributed a “socialist holiday guide”.

New Socialist adopted an open, imaginative politics of the left which drew together thinkers from a range of traditions, attempting to articulate a socialism fit for the times. Sometimes its generosity could be surprising. Chris Mullin recalls an article which he wrote on Roy Jenkins after the former Chancellor and Home Secretary defected to set up the Social Democratic Party. “I was expected to produce a knocking job,” Mullin remembers, “but the more I examined Roy Jenkins’ career the more I came to realise that he had been one of Labour’s most successful politicians.”⁶ In highlighting the significance of the abolition of the death penalty or the decriminalisation of homosexuality, for example, Mullin demonstrated New Socialist’s aversion to narrowly-conceived “class politics”, and its willingness to carry careful articles which could treat even enemies with kindness.

This pluralism was also reflected in the New Socialist editorial team and its wider advisory panel, made up of the left’s “great and good”.⁷ In addition to Curran as editor and Seyd as books editor, there was Geoffrey Sheridan as business manager whilst Ann Pettifor oversaw advertising. The advisory panel included such left-wing MPs as Frank Allaun, Judith Hart, Eric Heffer, Stuart Holland, Michael Meacher, Ian Mikardo, Chris Mullin and Audrey Wise. There was also trade union representation, including Jack Jones (retired general secretary of the TGWU), Alec Kitson (its deputy general secretary), Jim Mortimer (the Acas chairman and future Labour general secretary) and Roy Lockett (the deputy general secretary of BECTU). They were joined by activists and intellectuals from the broader left – Raymond Williams, Peter Townsend, Ben Pimlott, Geoffrey Goodman, Mary Kaldor, Ken Coates and Michael Barratt Brown. The advisory panel was a veritable who’s who of the labour movement and the post-1956 left.

That doesn’t mean that the right-wing of the Labour Party was excluded entirely. Dianne Hayter, whose Fightback! documents her faction’s resurgence across the 1980s, was also a member – so too was Patricia Hewitt, initially a left-winger but later a key ally to Neil Kinnock, who Seyd recalls trying to dominate meetings (and being given short shrift by Jack Jones in the chair).⁸ There was also Baroness Barbara Wootton, by that point in her mid-eighties. Different panellists had different expectations for New Socialist: whereas Curran and Seyd spoke favourably of Marxism Today and the intellectual ferment in Europe, Tessa Blackstone described the journal as necessary because of the then-weakness of the New Statesman and hoped it would appeal to “left-of-centre people”.⁹