June 29, 2007
New British Leader Appoints Critics of Iraq War to Cabinet
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
LONDON, June 28 (AP) — Gordon Brown, Britain’s new prime minister, on
Thursday appointed some critics of the Iraq war to his youthful circle
of senior cabinet ministers, underlining his ambition to heal rifts over
the conflict and to win back the support of the disenchanted.
Mr. Brown has said he would examine Britain’s role in Iraq — a subtle
shift in approach from his predecessor, Tony Blair, and perhaps his
first diplomatic challenge in his relationship with the Bush
administration, which considered Mr. Blair its closest ally.
David Miliband, who at times criticized Mr. Blair’s Middle East policy,
was named foreign secretary.
“The opportunities and challenges of the modern world requires, in my
view, a diplomacy that is patient as well as purposeful — which listens
as well as leads,” said Mr. Miliband, a rising star in the Labor Party.
At 41, he is the youngest British foreign secretary in three decades.
Both he and Jack Straw, who was appointed justice secretary and lord
chancellor, criticized Mr. Blair for not insisting on an immediate
cease-fire when Israel went to war last summer with the Islamic
militants of Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Mr. Miliband, the son of leftist Jewish academics who is married to an
American violinist, voted to support British participation in the Iraq
war, but he has voiced concerns about the conflict.
===
The Guardian (London) - Final Edition
February 28, 2004
SECTION: Guardian Weekend Pages, Pg. 14
Weekend: IN THE HOUSE OF THE RISING SONS: Ralph Miliband was one of the
most charismatic and influential socialists of his generation. His sons
David and Ed are stars of New Labour. Is theirs the story of the British
left? Andy Beckett reports
BYLINE: Andy Beckett
Near the centre of Hull, in a long, slightly gloomy house with not many
decorations other than books in double rows on metal shelves, there
lives a watchful old socialist called John Saville. He is 87. He has
been a member of the Communist party, a target for MI5, and a critic of
the Labour party for longer than Tony Blair has been alive.
Yet now and again, Saville receives an unlikely visitor. "David's
dropped in on his way to his constituency a couple of times," says
Saville casually, sitting in his study with a polemic, On The Mass
Bombing Of Iraq, resting against his chair. "David" is David Miliband:
Blair's head of policy from 1994 until 2001, now an MP, school standards
minister and, according to plenty of political forecasters, a possible
future prime minister.
Miliband is 38, almost half a century younger than Saville, and, on the
surface at least, a more orthodox New Labour figure would be hard to
imagine. For his increasingly frequent media appearances, Miliband
favours pinstriped suits, American-sized smiles and fluent Blairite
jargon. Saville wears cardigans. It is impossible not to wonder what
they talk about. "I do not, in fact, quiz David about his politics,"
says Saville. He gives an intriguing explanation for this unexpected
restraint towards a New Labour politician: he considers himself "a close
member of the Miliband family".
Behind this remark lies a whole lost continent of political history.
From the early 1960s until the early 90s, working from the same
overflowing study in which he sits now, Saville edited one of the
foremost English language journals of the international left, the
Socialist Register. His more famous fellow editor was David Miliband's
father.
Ralph Miliband died in 1994 as arguably Britain's most charismatic and
influential leftwing intellectual. His books about the unequal
relationship between business and politicians, and in particular about
the tendency of the Labour party, and parties like it, to overcompromise
with capitalism have been taught in universities in Britain and far
beyond since the 1960s. His teaching is vividly remembered by former
students. Outside academia, he also spent countless dogged hours as an
activist, trying to establish more genuinely socialist alternatives to
the Labour way of doing things. He did not soften with age. "The last
conversation I had with Ralph," says a close friend, "he was savage
about Blair."
It is occasionally noted as a minor political irony that a figure such
as Ralph Miliband should be the father of one of Blair's most valued
lieutenants - and also of one of Gordon Brown's: this month, David's
equally precocious brother Ed, who is 34, started work as chairman of
the Treasury's council of economic advisers. That the two brothers have
ended up on opposite sides of the Blair-Brown divide has also been of
intermittent interest to political diarists. But Ed and David,
practitioners of a more wary politics than their father, almost never
speak publicly about him. They declined to be quoted for this article.
Some friends of the family also required an unusual degree of
reassurance before agreeing to be interviewed. "Ralph" is still a large,
challenging presence in certain political circles, a symbol of how the
left used to be - and of what his sons and their New Labour colleagues
have reacted against.
Ralph Miliband was born Adolphe Miliband in Brussels in 1924. His
parents were Polish Jews who had migrated to Belgium. Ralph's father was
a leather worker. His mother had ambitions for her family to join the
middle class, but she had to supplement their income by selling hats at
markets. The Milibands quickly learned to navigate Belgian society, with
its old undertows of prejudice against Jews and eastern Europeans and,
by the 1930s, its upwelling of enthusiasm for fascism. At the age of 12,
on a family holiday in the country, Ralph found himself arguing with
local farmers who were supporters of the far right. He began to follow
politics. When a friend joined a leftwing Zionist group, Ralph followed.
At first, though, there was less urgency about his political commitment
than might be assumed in retrospect. Brussels was not Berlin, and Ralph
was doing distractingly well at school. "I discovered the Communist
Manifesto," his biography quotes him writing later, but "not in any
blindingly strong way."
Yet, in May 1940, the ominous world situation he enjoyed discussing with
his fellow teenage activists became an indisputable reality. On the
10th, the Germans invaded Belgium. By the 16th, they had almost reached
Brussels. The Milibands packed and hurried to one of the city's
stations, intending to get to Paris (most of France had not yet fallen)
and take refuge with relatives there. But the station was in chaos: the
Germans had cut off the Brussels-Paris railway line. After lingering at
the station into the evening, the Milibands gave up and went home. Back
in their flat, Ralph heard a radio announcement that all boys of his age
- he was now 16 - were to be conscripted into the Belgian army,
currently being shot to pieces a few miles away. This was not his idea
of useful political sacrifice; he decided he would walk to France. After
a frantic family debate, the plan was amended: Ralph and his father
would walk to the Channel instead, a distance of more than 60 miles,
while the rest of the family stayed in Brussels and looked for another
way out.
For the next two days and nights, Ralph and his father walked west
through the flat countryside. At Ostend, they talked their way on to the
last boat to England. Once they were at sea, they asked for refugee
status. It was granted. The ship docked at Dover. From there they
travelled to London.
They looked an odd pair: Ralph messy and gangling, towering over his
father, both of them with great swept-back waves of black hair. Ralph
had to change his name from the inadvertently provocative Adolphe.
London was full of similar exiles, and he and his father managed to
secure a living of sorts, clearing furniture from bombed houses. Driving
around the capital with other labourers, looking at everything with the
quick eyes of a new arrival, Ralph acquired a sense of England and its
underlying structures: "We found out about middle-class meanness and
snobbery . . . about the curious combination of kindness, cunning,
ignorance, feigned servility and actual contempt which the unskilled
worker class had for their masters." The poverty of the East End roused
him to fury - "It is the shame of their civilisation, the permanent
condemnation of their system" - while, in the West End after an air
raid, he wrote in his diary, "You feel in these ruins a wealth which
hasn't gone, which will begin again tomorrow, and for which this bombing
is not a major crisis."
One boiling afternoon during his first summer in London, he went to
Highgate cemetery, found Karl Marx's grave and, standing with his fist
clenched, swore "my own private oath that I would be faithful to the
workers' cause". Not that he intended to remain a worker himself: he
found clearing bombsites "an arduous business" and felt a distance from
his fellow labourers that was partly a matter of nationality but also a
matter of aspirations. He wanted to be an intellectual. In 1941, he
applied to study politics at the London School of Economics. He was
accepted.
The LSE had temporarily moved to Cambridge to escape the bombing. For
the next two years, Ralph relished the cloisters and the quiet, worked
closely with the local Communist party without actually joining, and
developed a distinctive arguing style - politically committed but
carefully factual. "A grand lad - one of the best I have had in years,"
wrote the famous socialist professor Harold Laski, who became a mentor.
From Laski, Miliband learned about the tensions between capitalism and
democracy, and that socialists should value civil liberties. His other,
later influence was the radical American sociologist C Wright Mills, who
passed on to him an interest in "the Power Elite", the small number of
interconnected individuals who tend to dominate capitalist democracies.
Miliband's thinking was also influenced by his family's continuing
dramas. In 1942, Ralph's mother was detained in Brussels by the Gestapo
and asked why her son and husband had fled to England and what they were
doing there. She bluffed and was released, only to receive an order to
report for deportation to the camps. She and the other Brussels
Milibands said good bye to their neighbours, closed up their flat and
disappeared into the countryside. They went to a village where they knew
people and hid there for the rest of the occupation.
Ralph and his father received only occasional news about this. The
British authorities were not particularly sympathetic and, after Belgium
was liberated in 1944, it took almost a year for the family to be
reunited. At one point in early 1945, Ralph, who had joined the Royal
Navy two years earlier and fought at D-day and in the Mediterranean, was
stationed off the Belgian coast but not allowed shore leave to join his
family. Once the war was over, his father was initially refused
permission to stay in Britain. Later, when Ralph wrote scathingly about
the British state, his criticisms had the bite of personal experience.
Ralph Miliband spent his late 20s and early 30s back in London, making
himself into a professional academic at the LSE. He temporarily put his
political faith in the left of the Labour party, joining in 1951 and
staying a member, as he later bashfully put it, "for a few years". But a
more radical political movement gradually drew him away. The British New
Left, like its counterparts in other wealthy democracies, was a loose
but ambitious grouping of former communists, socialist academics and
activists, who had turned against both the authoritarianism of the
Soviet Union and the caution of the Labour party in favour of a more
free-ranging leftwing politics, concerned not just with the usual causes
of class and poverty, but with nuclear weapons and popular culture and
anti-imperial struggles worldwide.
The people who wrote the movement's journals and controlled its meetings
were, or would soon become, formidable figures in modern British
thought: the historian EP Thompson, the critic Raymond Williams, the
sociologist Stuart Hall. Miliband's background made him slightly
different - "He had a voice that came from outside," says Hall - but he
was not intimidated. In fact, he was intimidating: "He had read all
these things you hadn't," says one of the early editors of New Left
Review. "You didn't want to have an argument with Ralph."
In 1957, Saville, who was editing the New Reasoner, another of the
movement's journals, wrote to Miliband and asked him to contribute. When
they met, Saville recalls, "I took to him straight away. He had this
ability to speak lucidly and straightforwardly, and he was a good
listener." In 1964, Saville and Miliband set up the Socialist Register.
It quickly became an institution. It was well written, relatively
undogmatic, and international in its interests, with ambivalent articles
about Chairman Mao and Colonel Nasser next to cool scrutiny of American
cold war propaganda. Prominent leftwing academics from around the world
agreed to contribute.
"In the early 1960s, Ralph was becoming increasingly confident," says
Saville. In 1961, Ralph had published his first book, Parliamentary
Socialism. Densely researched and elegantly written, in long, uncoiling
sentences that released sudden bolts of polemical venom, it was a
demolition of the record of the Labour party in government. "The
sickness of Labourism," Miliband wrote, in a phrase that would become as
well known as the book, was a readiness to strike deals with the British
establishment rather than reduce its powers or give serious
consideration to less privileged interest groups. Given this tendency,
he went on, "There is at least logic in the demands (of the Labour
right) for the party's retreat to a suitably contemporary version of
Liberalism." Three decades later, with Miliband's sons playing their
part, New Labour would make this insight more prophetic than he might
have wished.
A similar doomy fierceness made his lectures at the LSE during the 1960s
into word-of-mouth events. In 1967, Leo Panitch, who today edits the
Socialist Register, was a bored would-be lawyer from Canada with vague
leftwing sympathies. Then, he remembers, "Another Canadian student said,
'You must come and hear these lectures by this remarkable man Miliband.' "
In the LSE's scuffed and functional lecture halls, he stood very
straight on stage and spoke with booming conviction and a hint of a
Belgian accent. "There was an element of performance equivalent to
watching Tony Benn in the Commons," says Panitch. "My life was changed."
He became a PhD student of Miliband's and saw a different side to him.
"He was very loose and warm. I would go to his office and he would say,
'Let's get out of here' and we would go down to the Strand to a coffee
shop." To Panitch, who was also Jewish, Miliband exposed a part of
himself that he did not display to his usual, generally secular,
leftwing circle: they would sometimes chat in Yiddish.
In other ways, too, Miliband's life was less austere than his public
persona suggested. In 1961, he had married Marion Kozak, a woman in her
mid-20s with questioning eyes and disobedient hair who had been one of
his students years earlier. Her background and politics were similar to
his, and she had a comparable, though less high-profile, career as an
activist and academic. Yet she was more outgoing and had broader
interests. In 1965, they had a son and bought a house - in Primrose
Hill, north London, then a considerably less grand area than it is now.
David was only a few weeks old when they moved in, but Marion quickly
filled the house with visitors: relatives and fellow leftwing writers,
dissidents and academics from abroad, the occasional politician - all of
them arguing around the basement dining table or on the narrow stairs at
parties. As soon as David and Ed (who was born in 1969) were old enough,
they were encouraged to join in. "Sometimes they would just sit there
wide-eyed," says Panitch. "Sometimes they would say something funny, or
ask a probing question." There was no question of discussions being
watered down for the younger Milibands' benefit. "You couldn't not be
interested in politics in that household," says Panitch.
One afternoon while David was still a schoolboy, he was at home studying
when the doorbell rang. No one else was in, so he answered it, to find
Joe Slovo, head of the military wing of the African National Congress,
then engaged in armed actions against the South African government. For
the next 45 minutes, David sat nervously in the kitchen while Slovo
drank a glass of water, engaging him in conversation about how his work
was going.
In the less dramatic, more fragmented, world of British leftwing
politics, the Milibands' allegiances would not always be so simple and
instinctive. By the end of the 1960s, the New Left had splintered into
factions, partly under the pressure of events and partly because of its
failure to replace more mainstream ideologies. Meanwhile, a newer
politics had appeared that did not always fit with Ralph's
Marx-influenced, all-encompassing way of looking at the world.
At the LSE, when confrontation famously flared between student activists
and the university authorities, he was sympathetic to the former but
anxious. For all the excitement of the jostling and sit-ins in the LSE's
cramped hallways and courtyards, Panitch, who was "involved" on the
student side, noted that Miliband's supportive speeches "did not give
the impression that the class struggle was going to be resolved at the
university".
Among his family, Miliband had a reputation for being law-abiding, a
consequence of a childhood spent in fear of policemen. On a more
philosophical level, he was worried about what he saw as the
narrow-minded aspects of the new 1960s radicalism and by its lack, as he
wrote to a friend, of "any culture which is even approximately Marxist .
. . which no doubt sounds 'square', but is nevertheless the case.
Sit(-in) they can, but think is another matter."
Miliband was now in his mid-40s. He would write half a dozen more books
and hundreds more essays and articles. He would have many more crisply
expressed insights into the workings of power in Britain and the world.
He would edit the Socialist Register. He would remain an energising and
much-cited figure in the academic world. But the rest of his career
would, in some ways, be a rearguard action: against the more simplistic
kind of radicalism spawned by the 1960s, and against the rightwing
counter-revolution that followed.
In 1972, after the LSE authorities had heavy-handedly crushed the
student revolt, Ralph left in disgust, for a job at Leeds. But British
intellectual life outside London did not agree with him; after five
years he moved to a series of temporary academic posts in the US. For
long periods, Marion and the boys were left behind. Yet the family
thrived, separations being a way of life for the Milibands. Ralph loved
being a father. His fluid academic working hours meant that, when they
were on the same side of the Atlantic, he was often at home. He
accompanied his sons to muddy football games in the park. He stood
behind the posts in the rain while David kept goal. And during general
election campaigns, when a tribal loyalty to the left in general was
awakened in him, he took his sons canvassing for the party that he spent
the rest of the time deriding.
David was nine when he first went campaigning for Labour. By the time
they were teenagers, he and Ed were becoming as political as their
parents. In 1986, Ed chose to spend his summer holiday working in Tony
Benn's basement office: "Very helpful," wrote Benn in his diaries. "He
has just taken his O-levels and is at a loose end."
Both the young Milibands won places at Oxford from their north London
comprehensive. Ralph, who had inherited his mother's aspirational
streak, was particularly delighted. Ed and David cut distinctive figures
at university: both studied politics, philosophy and economics; both
were active in student politics; and both seemed simultaneously more and
less worldly than their peers.
"They were basically serious, political people," says someone who was at
the same college as David. "He always looked incredibly clean, in the
way that students don't. He could get on with everyone. He was not a
bragger, but he'd been out in the grown-up world." It was said that a
particularly impressive Walkman he owned was a present from Ken
Livingstone for doing some work before university for the Greater London
Council. On occasions, the dons who taught Ed and David treated the
Miliband dynasty with a certain reverence. Yet, as often with highly
ambitious young men, there remained something of the conscientious
schoolboy about them. When he had an essay to write, David would be seen
in his college bar holding a pint of orange juice and a Mars bar.
He was tall, with a wide, even smile and a voice that was classless and
confident. Ed was more angular, with a long, bony face and more
indecision in his voice, but slightly warmer. They were too different
and too far apart in age to be rivals, but both of them had inherited
their father's thick dark hair and hungry intelligence. By Oxford,
however, it was obvious that they had not inherited all his politics.
This was the 1980s, and the dominance of Thatcherism and the
disintegration of the Soviet Union loomed larger for Ed and David than
the distant ideological battles that had formed Ralph. And, for all
their father's successes, they had also noticed his political
frustrations, the limits of his influence.
In 1987, Ralph and a coalition of other socialists organised a
conference in Benn's Chesterfield constituency, aiming to give the
British left new momentum after the general election defeat of Neil
Kinnock. "There is an alternative to Thatcherism," Ralph told the
gathering, "which is not Thatcherism with a compassionate face, but a
radical new deal. We cannot count on the Labour party leaders to do this
for us: we'll have to do it for ourselves." Yet the conference broke up
without changing the political weather; on the contrary, Labour's
rightward shift accelerated. As often in his career, Miliband the
pessimistic analyst proved more astute than Miliband the hopeful activist.
His sons joined the Labour party and moved quickly away from leftwingers
such as Benn and Livingstone into a more pragmatic milieu. Soon after
university, in 1987, David became the parliamentary lobbyist for a group
of charities opposed to the Conservatives' legislation against the
"promotion" of homosexuality. When the Conservatives prevailed, his
reaction was instructive: "We now have to learn to live with (the)
legislation," a pamphlet he co-wrote advised.
A year as a graduate student in America and four years at the Institute
for Public Policy Research, the thinktank closest to the Labour party's
"modernisers", further convinced him that the party had to accept a
changed world. "The role of politics is not to abolish markets, but to
organise and regulate them," he wrote in 1994 in the introduction to a
book he edited, confidently titled Reinventing The Left. With its knots
of thinktank jargon and thinness of historical reference, his writing
lacked Ralph's clarity and force. But David's certainty, his ability
quickly to absorb and synthesise and to present things palatably, were
valuable commodities to a party seeking office rather than ideological
originality. That year, Tony Blair, within days of being elected Labour
leader, asked David to become his head of policy. David was still in his
20s.
His younger brother's rise to membership of the British "Power Elite"
was, if anything, faster. After university, he briefly tried to become a
television current affairs journalist. "He was very eager," says a
former colleague. "You got a sense of the burden of history on his
shoulders. There was never any doubt that he was going to go on and run
the country in some way." Ed was likable - "quite goofy and disarming" -
if a little austere in his interests: "I don't remember ever talking to
him about films or novels or how he hung out."
He quickly realised he was too politically partisan for television, but
it gave him a vital step up. In 1993, he met Harriet Harman, then a
promising Labour shadow minister, when she came to do an interview. She
hired him as her speechwriter and researcher. By the following year, the
shadow chancellor, Gordon Brown, had noticed his work. "We needed a
number cruncher," says Brown's former spin doctor, Charlie Whelan. "We
burgled him off Harriet."
Ralph watched his sons' political careers with ambivalence. Part of him
was thrilled and proud. Part of him understood that their ambitions were
a consequence of their upbringing - not least of observing their
father's contempt for old Labour practice and thinking. And part of him
found their political differences bracing. In the acknowledgments for
his final, unrepentantly leftwing book, Socialism For A Sceptical Age,
Ralph thanked Ed and David for their "very helpful (and stringent)
criticisms". In a family in which everyone read and criticised what
everyone else was writing, and in which the lunchtime radio news was a
ritual moment for beginning discussions about current events, a great
deal of political friction could be happily absorbed.
But sometimes Ralph was left bemused. In 1993, Benn recorded in his
diary, "Ralph Miliband came for about an hour and a half today . . . He
was saying how his sons say to him, 'Oh, Dad, how would you do that?
Would it work? What are your positive proposals?' I said, 'Well, it's
the same with my sons.' He was very relieved to hear that. I think he
thought he was very out of date."
Miliband did not live to see his fears about the Labour party's
direction receive their final confirmation. In May 1994, after heart
problems and complications from an operation intended to cure them, he
died. He had only recently turned 70. Two months later, Blair became
Labour leader.
In 1997, shortly after Labour returned to power, two fly-on-the-wall
documentaries were broadcast by ITV about the activities of Gordon Brown
and his advisers in the weeks either side of the general election. The
air of general cockiness the programmes uncovered was well conveyed by
the title of the second film, We Are The Treasury. In front of the
television crew, Brown's small gang could scarcely contain their
excitement at the prospect of running the economy: there were whispered
asides to the cameras, ostentatious phone calls, a great deal of
striding between meetings. Ed came across less gratingly than the
others. He was mostly in the background, bent over a keyboard, a skinny
young man with an office addict's pallor, who would briefly bob up from
behind his partition to deliver dry, but frank, advice or a telling
economic statistic. Occasionally, an expression of quiet delight or
satisfaction passed across his long features. Yet the sense that he was
inhabiting a different political universe from his father's was deafening.
"Ed came up with some stonking coups against the Tories," says Whelan.
"He was more than a number cruncher . . . It's about realising the
political significance of the numbers." Ed was attracted to Brown's idea
of using relatively small, highly technical but practical initiatives to
redistribute wealth and reform the economy. He suggested lines for
Brown's speeches, came up with micro-policies of his own, helped to
shepherd the changes past civil servants. His particular areas of
responsibility - low pay, working women, finding jobs for welfare
recipients - had a leftwing flavour, but the work was team-based,
concrete, incremental; the opposite, you could say, of standing on stage
at the LSE, or writing alone in a room, looking for the great socialist
breakthrough.
David took to the culture of New Labour equally easily. Indeed, as one
of Blair's main speechwriters, he helped to create it, even personify
it. He scrutinised the party's election manifestos for vulnerabilities.
He organised Downing Street dinners for sympathetic intellectuals. He
pushed his own policy interests in strengthening state education and
Britain's relationship with Europe. To meet him at a political event
during the 1990s - impossibly youthful-looking and impregnably well
briefed, never raising his voice or letting down his guard - was to feel
that the New Labour machine was unstoppable. Ed, meanwhile, often
attended the same parties in his chinos and shirtsleeves as a quieter
ambassador for Brown's version of the government's thinking.
Ed, people said, was the "nice" Miliband. But days before the 2001
general election, with significant ease, David was selected as the
Labour candidate for South Shields, the only British constituency that
has not elected a Conservative MP since the first parliamentary Reform
Act of 1832. The following year he became a minister, gaining what was
widely reported to be the fastest promotion to government office since
Harold Wilson in the late 1940s.
David's government career since has been showy and nimble. As school
standards minister, he has proposed that classroom timetables be
radically altered, crumbling Victorian compounds be rebuilt by famous
architects and American-style summer schools be introduced for state
pupils. Yet when crises have occurred, as they regularly do in the
education department, he has avoided damage: during much of the
controversy over A-level results, for example, he was unavailable for
comment, reportedly on a "fact-finding" mission in Scotland.
Last September, at the Labour party conference, David Miliband seemed to
exude certainty and promise. Taking part in a fringe debate one
lunchtime about testing in schools, he defended the government's focus
on targets, and talked ambitiously about "breaking the link between
socioeconomic class and educational achievement". Like Blair, he managed
to sound conciliatory - "Let's keep up the discussion" - and unyielding
- "but let's not turn the clock back" - in the same sentence.
The week before, by coincidence, there had been a reminder of the kind
of politics he and Ed had left behind. On a damp London evening, there
was a gathering to mark the publication of the 40th anniversary issue of
the Socialist Register. Saville could not make it, as he had had a minor
stroke a fortnight before. But Marion and about 100 other people -
graduate students and grey-haired men and women - half-filled a basement
lecture theatre to hear Panitch, Benn and a few others. Ralph was
respectfully mentioned by the speakers. Otherwise, their tone was
defiant but realistic. At one point, Benn said of the global situation,
"It's not universally bleak, but it's pretty bleak."
Yet, when the speeches finished, the air of resignation lifted. There
were delighted greetings, comradely handshakes, an explosion of chat in
different British and foreign accents - everyone here, you realised,
knew everyone else. Then the socialists walked briskly to the student
bar, pushed unselfconsciously through the Friday night crush and ordered
drinks.
Perhaps the younger Milibands have simply exchanged one left-of-centre
tribe for another. This transition can be overstated: as Panitch puts
it, "I know other Marxist professors whose kids have become
stockbrokers." But in politics, internal differences are often the
worst. And the sadness of some of Ralph's circle at Ed and David's
divergence from their father is considerable. "It's quite painful for
us," says someone who was close to Ralph for four decades. "None of us
likes it." In December 2000, Benn wrote in his diaries: "Went to Marion
Miliband's for dinner with David and Edward . . . I was keen not to be
provocative in any way, and it wouldn't have been possible anyway. The
boys live entirely in the world of the prime minister's advisers . . . I
was treated as a sort of kindly old gentleman."
Perhaps none of this should come as a surprise. Ed and David's
upbringing was comfortable in a way Ralph's was not; perhaps they were
never going to be gut socialists like he was. After Oxford, they lived
for years in adjoining flats on a picturesque little square two minutes'
walk from Marion. Primrose Hill turned richer around them: Mercedes
became the local car of choice; the pub opposite the Milibands' house
became a wine bar serving four kinds of champagne. It is not hard to
imagine Ed and David, living against this backdrop, steadily adjusting
the way they looked at the world.
But now David spends some of his time somewhere very different. In South
Shields, where he has a house with his wife, Louise, who is not a fellow
political prodigy but a professional violinist, the shops are tellingly
cheap. Jobless young families linger in the streets; derelict docks
stick out into the Tyne like burned fingers. In his speeches these days,
Miliband talks a lot about his constituency and its social problems and
its old-fashioned virtues. Keen new MPs tend to, yet people who know
David say that South Shields' influence on him is tangible. And
throughout his career he has shown more interest in poverty and
inequality than might be expected of a conventional New Labour figure.
He was secretary of the party's commission on social justice in the
early 1990s. His speeches have never been afraid of mentioning class. In
private, if pressed, he will call himself a socialist.
This could be tactical. New Labour orthodoxy is not the electoral asset
it was. But David is young enough for his ideas not to be fixed yet. His
brother may also be doing some rethinking. He spent last year on leave
from the Treasury, in America, following the early stages of the
presidential election and teaching a course at Harvard with the title
What's Left? The Politics Of Social Justice.
Blair and Brown were on the reading list, but so were Naomi Klein and
other leftwing critics of the reverence such politicians have for
capitalism. The course attracted 10 times the number of students
expected. It was also an exercise in political self-examination. As
"issues to consider", the guide for students included: "What are the
different criticisms of New Labour? Do they seem valid to you? How has
the Left in Europe changed its character over the last century? How have
the issues that it is concerned with changed?" Behind it all was a sense
that Ed was searching for some perfect balance between idealism and
realism, for what it means these days to be on the left at all. He has
written enthusiastic newspaper and magazine articles about the vibrant
but doomed presidential campaign of the most radical Democratic
candidate, Howard Dean. Last year, he went to observe the annual
gathering of anti-globalisation activists at Porto Alegre, Brazil. "Ed's
got an inquiring mind," says a former colleague. "He's not insecure
about being challenged." Whelan sees something more definite going on:
"Ed was very proud of his father. He has more of his dad in him than David."
That may be so. Friends of the younger Milibands, and some friends of
Ralph's, insist that Ed and David still think they are on the same side
as their father. Exactly what the brothers believe in, besides being
reforming and vigorous, can sometimes be hard to discern, but there is,
this argument runs, an underlying philosophy that they share with their
father. Ed and David believe, as Ralph did, in the importance of
politics; in the left, as against the right; in the discussion of
policies rather than the game of personalities; in the need to change
Britain and the wider world; and in the suitability of the Milibands to
assist with that task.
The voices of those who perceive this happy unity in the family's
political story carry a hint of wishful thinking that prevents you from
completely believing them. In truth, the ideological differences between
the Miliband generations are probably too clear, the common ground too
vague. And to acknowledge this is to acknowledge something broader about
British politics. New Labour has moved a great distance away from
socialism and the left in the generally understood sense of those terms.
For all David's fondness for John Saville and Ralph's other old
comrades, last year he hired the notoriously accident-prone and
profitable rail maintenance firm Jarvis to assist troubled schools. For
all the political soul-searching Ed did in America, this month he has
gone back to working for Brown.
Given their political records so far, any Ralph-style initiatives by the
younger Milibands in years to come - like any substantial moves back
leftwards by Labour in general - do not feel that likely. Those on the
left uncomfortable with this situation, and uneasy, as Ralph was, with
simplistic alternatives to Labour, may have to take refuge, for now at
least, in memories of more promising times - although these can still
have a power to influence and inspire. Despite the success and promise
of the younger Milibands, when strangers come up to them to talk about
politics, they usually want to talk about Ralph's books
