The Strange New Left-Wing Cult of Ed Miliband

The Mad One's talents have been greatly exaggerated: he is a symptom, not a cause

Over at the New Statesman, a long hagiography of Ed Miliband blows a great deal of smoke on behalf of the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero. According to Will Lloyd, to some acclaim from both sides of the climate policy debate, Miliband has become “the most powerful man in Government” and may even have been so during the 14 years of Conservative Party rule. Many words marshal some evidence towards Lloyd’s conclusion, but I believe that Lloyd makes far too much of Miliband’s meagre talents.

Miliband is at once both a product of the crony-ridden technocratic bureaucracies that bloomed under the dark of Blair’s term, but also seemingly an antidote to its excesses. In respect of the latter, some important coordinates are well-established in the article. Miliband was critical of Blair’s reckless foreign policy which started off as “humanitarian intervention” but which left hundreds of thousands of corpses amid entire cities reduced to rubble. And, it is claimed, Miliband is more committed to Labour’s radical principles of “social justice”. Miliband, it turns out, was a Jeremy Corbyn in waiting, “who wanted the working classes back in Labour”, but whose radical ambitions were muted for the sake of what seemed to be political pragmatism.

This has been a theme of Miliband’s reflections on his defeat at the 2015 General Election. “He wasn’t allowed to be the truest version of himself when he was leader,” explains one anonymous “former advisor”. “He is just really, really Left-wing.” Unfortunately, this claim can only be substantiated by a time machine and a mind probe. If the then Labour leader was sitting on more radical political principles than he let on, then the consequence of the claim is that the greater principle Miliband adheres to is deception.

At a speech at the Google Big Tent event in 2013, published by the Guardian, for example, Miliband set out what he believed (or claimed to believe) was “responsible capitalism”. The Labour Party believed “until 1995” in “socialism based on public ownership”, he explained. “Tony Blair got rid of it and rightly so, because nationalising the major industries is not the route to a fair society.” Accordingly, Miliband’s agenda was to rid the UK of “irresponsible capitalism”, in which there are “huge gaps between the richest and the poorest, power concentrated in a few hands, and people are just in it for the fast buck whatever the consequences”.