This blog wishes to congratulate Ed Miliband on his election as leader of the Labour Party. He is an intelligent and very able person, and will be no pushover for the Coalition. Although billed as “Red Ed”, it would be a big mistake for his opponents in the Coalition to be complacent in typecasting him as unelectable and leading Labour into a ghetto of opposition for a generation. One of our writers on this blog has both lived through and studied the period after Labour’s defeat in 1979, and he can confirm that the circumstances and facts are just very different to the factional infighting that occurred after Labour’s defeat in 1979. We have just witnessed an amazingly good willed leadership election, and there is every suggestion that the Labour Party has a self discipline and hunger for power that will make it avoid the fratricidal infighting of the 1980s.
We also wish to commiserate with David Miliband, whom one of our writers was a contemporary of at the same college at Oxford, and therefore can feel in some small way qualified to make some observations on this very talented individual. David Miliband would have also made a great leader of the Labour Party, and he will be very disappointed at losing the election. His closeness to Tony Blair did not help him, and this probably is the reason for his failure to be elected. Our writer on this blog who knew him as a student has commented that David Miliband was a very popular student in the college, he had a very engaging manner and smile, and lacked the self importance, arrogance, and boorishness of some other students of his generation who were at Oxford at the same time and are now in prominence in all the parties. He was very down to earth, and to our writer’s recollection was not active in the Labour Club but seemed to be content with his studies and being involved in the College, including being elected as Junior Common Room President. At least David Miliband did not take drugs, unlike some of the leading members of the Conservative Party in government at the moment, and he was not a member of the Bullingdon Club, and he did not in any way attempt to recreate Brideshead Revisited through foppish buffoonery or ostentious displays of wealth. Our writer remembers attending the interviews at Oxford with him, as they were both candidates on the Inner London Education Authority/PPE Scheme, whereby state school students were encouraged to apply to Oxford to study Philosophy, Politics and Economics. He was a charming and very likeable young man, and it came as no surprise to our writer that he should rise in the Labour Party to being in the Cabinet and to the position of being able to run for its leadership. The blog hopes that David Miliband will remain in active politics as his talents would be a great loss to the Labour Party if he decided to make a career outside of politics.
There is one other observation that can be made about David Miliband and that is concerning his father, the late distinguished Ralph Miliband, a renowned Marxist. It was quite clear, even at Oxford, that David was of a different outlook to his father concerning Marxism, and he appeared more mainstream and a realist in terms of Labour Party politics. It is wrong to tar either of the Miliband brothers with Marxism because of their father’s political beliefs and writings. Ralph Miliband has written some interesting books on Marxism and the relationship of the Labour Party to the state, but as a practical programme for the improvement of the poorer citizens of Britain, Ralph Miliband’s ideas were intellectually interesting but ultimately would lead any political movement of the Left to a dead end. It seems that his sons have appeared to understand this, and their politics have been concerned with making the Labour Party electable. Our writer nonetheless believes that as a writer of political ideas, Ralph Miliband is very interesting reading. On one occasion our writer had a telephone conversation with Ralph Miliband and found him very approachable and friendly, and the impression of our writer is that Ralph Miliband was the sort of intellectual who would brighten up an otherwise dull and boring politics seminar. Having imbibed politics since a very early age, growing up in a household where political ideas were much discussed, David and Ed will need to deploy every political skill they have learnt to take on the ConDem Coalition and provide effective Opposition.
Cllr Barry Phelps & His Emails 