Ed Miliband Seeks a Global Economic Suicide Pact

Miliband is taking his green crusade global – just as the world starts to move on

On some accounts, the removal of Ed Miliband from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero to the Foreign Office allows the new Prime Minister to put a noisy and disruptive potential competitor, with his own agenda, out of his way by sending him overseas. There is much to this argument, and there have been some sighs of relief as the crazy zealot was replaced by a relative nobody, who will likely struggle to marshal such support in Cabinet and in the party. However, though you can take the climate brief away from the minister, you can’t take green ideology from his outlook. This week, Miliband has vowed to “take personal leadership of the UK’s work on development and climate” using the UK’s position at the World Bank to “ensure the UK plays a leading role” in sustaining both climate and development at the centre of foreign policy. But what if the world has other ideas?

Much is made about Miliband’s position of “UK governor” at the World Bank in a Guardian article following an announcement by the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO). “Miliband will play an active role in shaping the changes to the World Bank that developing countries have called for, and ensuring the climate remains a core focus for overseas aid”, explains Fiona Harvey. The problem, however, is that there are 189 such positions at the Bank – one for each member country of the intergovernmental agency. Miliband’s role is unexceptional, other than for the fact of the billions of pounds that he would like to make available to other members, to grease the green agenda’s passage through global political institutions.

But that’s not really news. Despite later complaints from green blobbers claiming that the Government had effectively nearly halved its commitments to International Climate Finance (ICF) to £2 billion a year, and despite the Government having to reduce its aid and development spending from 0.7% to 0.3% of GNI, “climate finance” remains a vast slush fund for a global political agenda, with no obvious ‘aid’ or ‘development’ deliverables visible from outside the green perspective. The only noteworthy thing about the story is that the role of UK governor to the World Bank typically falls to a junior minister, not to the Secretary of State. Miliband, who believes that abolishing cheap and plentiful energy is the key to dismantling the forces of inequality and to building in their place the institutions of global social democracy, has demoted himself in order to better push climate through global political architecture.

Yet perhaps the Guardian hack might be forgiven for having been misled by the FCDO’s excessive hyperbole, it claiming that: