The soft left, also historically known as the Tribunite left and more recently as the open left, is a faction within the British Labour Party. The term "soft left" was coined to distinguish the mainstream left of Michael Foot from the hard left of Tony Benn. People belonging to the soft left may be called soft leftists or Tribunites. History The distinction between hard and soft left became evident during the leadership of Michael Foot (1980–83), who, along with Tony Benn, was one of the two figureheads of the party left. Supporters of Foot (an anti-communist whose background was in the Tribune group) and Benn (originally on the party's right but by the end of the 1970s to Foot's left and a more uncompromising supporter of unilateral nuclear disarmament) became increasingly polarised. In the election for the deputy leadership of the Labour Party in 1981, left-wingers such as Neil Kinnock abstained from voting for Tony Benn, signaling the emergence of an independent soft left grouping in the party. The term came to be used in contrast to hard left, who were more explicitly socialist in rhetoric, remaining associated with Benn. In common with the party right, the soft left was suspicious of the hard left's alliance with Trotskyism (particularly its links with Militant), supported a parliamentary rather than extra-parliamentary road to socialism, retreated from a commitment to widening public ownership of the economy, and tended towards Atlanticist or Europeanist rather than anti-imperialist foreign policy. The parliamentary group which came to be associated with the soft left was the Tribune group. The Tribune group was formed around the newspaper of the same name and had represented the party left as a whole until Benn's allies formed the Socialist Campaign Group. The Labour Co-ordinating Committee grew to become the soft left's main factional organisation in the 1980s, despite having begun its life as a Bennite or "hard left" body. The soft left, influenced by the intellectual interventions of Mike Rustin, Geoff Hodgson and Peter Hain, increasingly rejected the socialism from above of Stalinism and social democracy and instead stressed pluralism, including a variety of forms of social ownership and widening Labour's electoral coalition. Figures identified with the soft left in the 1980s included David Blunkett, Robin Cook, Bryan Gould and Clare Short. While Kinnock initially emerged from the soft left, portraying himself as a "media friendly Michael Foot", he tacked to the