July’s Tory defeat, following as it did years of cruelty and misrule, was richly deserved. For many Tribune readers it will have been a moment of relief, finally putting an end to the ruling party’s planned further assaults on trade unions, human rights, and material security. To call the feeling that night relief alone, however, would be too simplistic.

Tribune’s Winter 2023 issue, ‘The New New Labour’, looked ahead to now Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s promise to deliver a politics which ‘treads lightly on people’s lives’. Despite some appeal in the wake of Brexit, Covid, and the cost-of-living crisis, we argued that that promise demonstrated Labour’s failure to read the British public correctly. The country was unlikely to be rocked by a promise to tinker around with the status-quo.

The truth of that prediction is evident when one looks at the election results in any detail. Labour won a historic majority, but with fewer actual votes than it earned in either 2017 or 2019, a famously disastrous year. In the country’s most deprived communities it lost support. Turnout was down as a whole, and the two main parties won their lowest vote share in a century at just 59 percent.

Beneficiaries of the dissatisfaction on show that night included Reform, an arm of the establishment masquerading as insurgents, but also Jeremy Corbyn (who beat Labour after his expulsion on the basis of his pro-Palestine advocacy and socialist convictions), the Greens, and four Independent pro-Palestine MPs. These latter victories in particular speak to the same impulse that has driven hundreds of thousands of British people out onto the streets to protest Israel’s assault on Gaza since 7 October: the electorate wants real solutions to the problems it sees, not excuses, whether the problem is the cost of housing at home or the murders taking place thousands of miles away, in which Britain is complicit.

Gaza’s primacy in this election made clear something else Starmer’s Labour failed to account for, too, which is the tightening bond between domestic and international politics. That bond is a product of improved technology — technology which allows us to watch the events of a genocide in real time — but also of the escalating and interconnected threats of conflict, climate catastrophe, and material inequality, all of which prove, in their limited attention to national borders, the old socialist adage: ‘An injury to one is an injury to all.’

In 1959, when the African National Congress demanded a boycott of South African goods as part of the effort to bring down apartheid, Tribune was the first British publication to back the call. In 2024, in the context of this renewed internationalism in British politics, this issue of Tribune aims to continue that proud tradition by connecting struggles around the world. In its pages are stories about the new global threats we face, but also about brave people who have fought and continue to fight against injustice far from their homes, in some cases in the face of their own oppression. Dedicated to the people of Gaza, it is a testament to the fact that periods of global upheaval and uncertainty are also opportunities to change the way we relate to each other, to build new ties based on shared humanity.

Just like cruelty and exploitation, empathy and outrage have never stopped at the lines on the map. The Labour government would do well to remember it. As the new parliamentary term settles in, Tribune will keep working to remind them — to make sure their presumed period of political quiet is anything but.