The New Statesman@NewStatesman
A CERTAIN IDEA OF ED MILIBAND by @Will___lloyd
The story of the post-Blair Labour party, if it can be contained in one individual, is the story of Ed Miliband. This is not a story about backstabbing brothers, back room deals with “union paymasters”, election promises printed on tomb stones, questionable slogans on mugs, bacon sandwiches, or double kitchens; nor anything as vulgar as retail policies aimed at marginal constituencies.
Miliband’s story is really about the exhilaration of ideas: where they come from, why some of us fall in love with them, and what propels those ideas from the fringes of the debate to the fulcrum of an era. This is not an argument about whether those ideas and the policies they eventually become are right or wrong. It’s a story about the long-term political power that commanding those ideas allows an individual to wield. It is about the years of Edward Samuel Miliband - and Milibandism - which might be seen as the latest, or perhaps even the last, attempt to restore a social democratic political economy in Britain.
Since July 2024, when Labour returned to government, it has been hard to work out precisely the point of this administration: to spend a bit more here and there, but leave an abject economic settlement largely intact; or to be much more than that, to fundamentally reshape Britain? For the last 20 months, Miliband has stood distinctly apart from those growing doubts. Even his enemies admit that the Minister for Energy Security and Net Zero knows what he is doing. That, in large part, is why he is so hated by his opponents. Miliband is getting social democratic things done at scale: during an era of uncontrollable global conflict, which began with the Ukraine war and is spiralling in Iran, when the direction of energy policy has become the most fiercely disputed issue in British politics.
Miliband and his ideas have become a lightning rod for opponents of this government. (“Eco-zealot”; “madman”; “hysterical eco-obsessive”; “muddled climate zealot”; “demented fantasies”; these are Fleet Street editorials’ relentless tribute to his perceived threat.) And yet, as one of those critics, a source who had worked with Miliband during his leadership of the Labour Party between 2010 and 2015, grudgingly admitted: “There is something about Ed that is significant. He is a symbolic figure… the last flickering of social democracy.”
Cover art by Mona Eing and Michael Meißner
